Use twitter for a glorious purpose: marketing your company or services! Some guidelines and best practices.

I love Twitter.

I cannot say that I am one of the early adopters, having viewed “microblogging” with skeptical eyes when I first heard about it many months ago.

These days I’m an avid Twitter user and the more I use it the more I feel like this is the best thing that has happened to me in quite some time.

Twitter can be a lot of things to lot of people – depending on how you see life. For me it is more of a place to keep telling the world what I’m doing. For others, it is a place where they fix up meetings, parties or just hang around trying to post microcontent which they clearly think is cool.

There is another section of people who use Twitter for a glorious purpose: building their businesses.

Yes, Twitter dear is one of the emerging tools for marketing, along with blogging and social media marketing. Being a Twitter user now, when I first heard there was profit potential in using Twitter for marketing I was not surprised.

You see, Twitter is not just a piece of real estate where people indulge in “just got my plane”, “having a cup of coffee” and “the sun is shining brightly today”. Twitter is a channel for direct, one on one conversation with your target audience.

It's a Conversation and It's 2-Way

Depending on how you see it, you can have friends and followers on twitter like the ones who you sit and have a coffee or a beer with or you can have friends and followers with you sit around in your cabin closing lucrative deals.

Either way, the key, as you can guess from the paragraph above, is conversation. Listening is as important on twitter as much as speaking.

And anyone with true salesman’s blood in his veins will be ready to scream his lungs at you that the key to a successful sale is your ability to listen and respond to what you have heard.

Twitter is no different and hence if you choose to use Twitter for your marketing purposes then you have a great chance of closing many deals and making good money.

Is it Time to Use Twitter for your Business?

So is Twitter recommended for you?

All you need to do to answer that crucial question is first answer these questions:

1. Is Google (or any othert search engine) your primary source for generating eyeballs
2. Once they come to your site, how many are impressed enough to send you an email or call regarding an enquiry
3. How many of the above feel a connect with your business

The point of the above exercise is to make you realise that your website, as persuasive and informative it might be, will not be able to connect with your target audience at a higher level. You are getting some leads but that's it.

This is where Twitter comes into picture. By offering to provide a personality to your business and resulting in enhanced connect with your company. If you strive for this then do not waste any more time in integrating Twitter into your marketing mix.

Tips for Sweeter Tweet Experience

• Remember, Twitter is not a place where you sell directly. It is a social atmosphere and you would be violating the social experience rule by selling directly
• Take heed of the 'conversation' part of the situation. Don’t expect people to listen to you unless you are ready to listen to them. Build trust with your current and future followers. Brand is not dependant on you, but your customers and stakeholders so listen to what they are saying
• Take a close look at what you are speaking. Remember, everyone can hear you. If you are talking only about your products and services without providing any value to your audience, then you are doomed for failure. That is the worst instances of one-way communication. Your audience does not need you on Twitter for that – they can just pick your brochure or visit your website
• Do not (please!) lie about yourself or your company and try to misrepresent yourself. This is a sin and you will rot in the deepest, darkest circle of hell if you lie to your customers / target audience
• Balance your follower to following ratio. If you follow 1000 people but only 20 are following you then you can come across as a spammer
• Provide your audience short tips, suggestions, motivating thoughts, useful links and any other tool or channel that can help them make their life better
• Reply to your followers once in a while to provide a human face to your account
• Speak properly and relevantly what you are speaking. If what you have to say is important to them, and you say it clearly, it will jump out to their eyes. And then the buzz will catch on as many of your followers will be retweeting your tweets and spreading the word for you
• Avoid coming across as phony - this is very important as incidents of fake accounts keep popping up everyday. For instance, the account that people presumed and believed to be HH Dalai Lama turned out to be an imposter (the account was deactivated after the fraud was discovered). Do everything in your power to come across as the real you and not an imposter you

Finally, remember you will not earn fame and fortune overnight but Twitter is one of those rare places on the net where you can see your ROI much quickly.

Bless you, Twitter!

Contact Vishal Nayak to discuss your copywriting and marketing needs!