21 Ways to Market Your Business on Twitter

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For many businesses, social media is a scary place, and Twitter is no exception. But consumers are increasingly tired of corporate messaging, and they want to find companies with real people that they can relate to. Twitter is an excellent tool for that. In my initial consultations, I find myself constantly faced with the question, ” What is Twitter exactly, or Why do I need this?”  Take a look at some of the tips below and see how Twitter may work for you.

Here are 21 ways to market your business on Twitter.

1. Craft an appropriate Twitter Policy, and encourage your employees to sign up for accounts on Twitter.
2. As the owner of your business, register your @companyname and use it for all your tweets.
3. Use Twitter Search to find and respond to tweets about your products or your brand.
4. Ask for feedback on your products and then follow up with the responses you get.
5. Go to any nearby tweetups you can find.
6. Upload your company logo as your Twitter icon.
7. Identify a challenge that your business faces internally, and ask people on Twitter for their suggestions. You will earn mindshare.
8. Create a Twitter Bot for a topic related to your business. Use a name that includes your brand.
9. Install Twitter Tools on your WordPress blog so that you automatically tweet when you make a new blog post.
10. If you create a company-branded Twitter account in addition to simply having employees on Twitter, make sure there is a real human behind it having real conversations with other people on Twitter.
11. Understand the Twitter Myths and avoid falling into their traps (don’t be boring!).
12. List your Twitter accounts on your company web site. You will get a boost from association, and the more people you connect with on Twitter, the more good your outreach does.
13. Get into the Twitter API and build something cool for people to use. Brand that tool with your company name.
14. Use Twitter to give away prizes, like Scoble recently did for Seagate.
15. Create a character. I know that character blogs are an incredibly bad idea, but so far characters on Twitter seem to be doing OK.
16. Advertise on Twitterific via The Deck – it’s still just advertising, but you’ll get the Twitter, early-adopter, tech-mac-geek demographic for sure.
17. Link (worthwhile) news first on Twitter, do the press release second. Give people an extra reason to follow your tweets.
18. Direct message everyone who follows you and thank them for doing so.
19. Make your Twitter colors your company colors.
20. Use your background image to promote your business contact information.
21. Set up a special URL to use in your Twitter profile, so that people who follow the link land on a special page designed for them.

And a few random bonus ideas:

• Create special, short URLs for pages on your web site that you want to tweet. Avoid masking links with is.gd or tinyurl.
• Be random. Nobody wants to follow a constant stream of work Tweets.
• Register your cell phone with Twitter and get mobile updates on selected influencers. Respond whenever appropriate for high-visibility conversations.

That’s it for now! I’m sure there are plenty of uses for Twitter that haven’t even been discovered yet.