Social media networks are undoubtedly the next big boon to online advertisers. They serve as an individualized filters. Twitter in particular is personalized specifically to each and every one of its 200,000,000 different users. Smart marketers are developing strong social content strategies and implementing them across all different social media outlets.

It's one of the most unique and relevant marketing tools around. Short 140 character messages can be used for everything from product launches to customer feedback. It’s a powerful device that today’s business owners need to understand. So to keep you in the know, we’ve put together some social media guidelines to help you traverse the treacherous Twitter waters.  

Goal Setting

Before becoming an expert Twitter fiend with thousands of followers and wielding vast amounts of internet influence, it’s important to set some reasonable and measurable goals for yourself. By reasonable, I mean realistic. Your brand won’t start off at the top of the heap and hit the ground running with a million twitter followers. Not unless you’re the lucky fella who gets to promote Taylor Swift’s Lonely Hearts Dating Service.

Yeah, that’s totally a real thing. Go ahead look it up.

Now that you’re done being gullible, and I’m finished being mean, let’s talk about some examples of measurable goals you can set for your social media strategy.

Follower growth- You can try to increase your influence here. It’s akin to building brand awareness. This is an extremely easy metric to measure as your followers are prominently featured at the top of the Twitter dashboard.

Follower Engagement- This is the amount of interactivity between you and your followers. Aim to increase this statistic to foster a friendship with your followers. That way you can quickly turn a follower to a lead, and a lead to a conversion.


Site Traffic- Social media networks can be a significant source of traffic for your website. And through that you can actually attribute increased conversions to Twitter as well. So treat your Twitter account like the highly targeted sales funnel that it is.
These are just a few of the "Twitter for business" metrics you can keep up with, and these three are actually very easy to track with Google Analytics. There are plenty more goals you can set that are more specified or ones that are only traceable using special software tools. Here is a link to Twitter’s official advice page on tracking different metrics.

How to Market on Twitter

Now that you’ve got some goals and you know how to track them, it’s time to learn how to use twitter for business advertising efforts. If you’re looking to increase conversion, (as you certainly should be) there are a few twitter marketing caveats that you’ll need to follow.

Build Brand Awareness

Twitter is an excellent method of bringing more attention to your company’s product or service. There are a few ways of going about this. There are some very simple starting points you can begin with, like adding a “Follow” button to your website or promoting your twitter account via your newsletter or a landing page.

You can also embed a retweet button in all of the content you post on Twitter. Retweeting is immensely popular, and of the average 400,000,000 tweets that users make per day, a significant portion of them are retweets. Facilitate this process for your loyal users with an embedded retweet button in all of your content. It’s also a good idea to integrate similar functionality across all your social media platforms, e.g. post on Facebook, Tumblir, etc. In this way, you increase the chances of your content going viral. 

Another reason to build brand awareness is so that you can add the social media data you gather on your customers to your database. The more you can learn about your customers, the easier you’ll find it to meet their needs with your products and services. Databases are a huge part of marketing a successful online business, and each of your Twitter followers is a potential lead.

Create Community

This goal sort of flows from building awareness naturally. It’s a very organic process. After building some buzz around your company and establishing an audience, it’s a good idea to actually interact with them. That means engaging individuals in conversations and interacting with them on a consistent basis.

As your company grows, this can become a full time job in itself, but when you’re just starting out, you can set aside an hour or two each day to connect with your audience. Introverts need not apply.

However, this attempt at online friendship begs a simple question: What should I tweet? The answer is plural and multifaceted. The simple response is: a lot. And often.

But there are certain types of interactions you should aspire to create, and others that you should avoid. Here are some examples:

Helpful content is better content. This can be applied in a variety of ways. Just like in our earlier post about targeted email campaigns, useful or informative industry related content is always a clear winner. So endeavor to find useful or interesting articles, infographics, videos, or educational materials and work on posting those.

You can also be helpful in an active attempt to build a network of contacts that can all support one another. Look for other similar businesses in your niche, follow them and retweet there promotions. At the risk of sounding kinda new age-y, it’s just good karma.

Within the Twittersphere, you’ll notice that spending your efforts on good will makes your company, (both personal and proprietary) an enviable commodity. You’ll build a network that runs on positive vibes and receive back many times over the helping hands that you’ve extended out over time.

This might seem somewhat counter-intuitive according to traditional competitive strategy. However, that old-school way of thinking is quickly becoming obsolete. Instead of a rabid cutthroat economy crowded with marketers vying for the same piece of pie, we have a global network with no shortage of buyers for virtually any product or service. There’s enough pie for everyone. So pull up a chair and dig in, and don’t be afraid to invite anyone else to the table.

Exclusive content is another good direction to walk in. You reward your Twitter followers by blasting out prizes, discounts, special offers, amazing deals, and what have you. Anything that adds value to being one of your followers. People love getting something for free, and ironically it makes them more willing to buy from you.

The idea with this and every other tweeting strategy is to have good intentions guiding your actions. Come at your Twitter marketing efforts with the idea of actually being caring and you’ll see that the higher profits will flow out of being a helpful, educational, and entertaining resource for your Twitter followers.

Inversely, if you spam them with disposable advertisements, and only talk about your business, (re: self-absorbed) you’ll be marked as uncaring and won’t be cared for in turn. To avoid this persona is as simple as practicing good business ethics.