10 Twitter Marketing Tips for Small Businesses

Many businesses have favored marketing on Facebook rather than Twitter, but Twitter can be an incredible tool. If you’re willing to learn your way around the hashtags and shorthand which defines this popular micro-blogging site, you might be surprised at the boost it lends your customer base. Here are ten Twitter tips to get you started.

1. Identify Your Target

Until you decide what audience you’re targeting, Twitter marketing benefits will remain elusive. Once you have a demographic in mind, pursue them. Find out what appeals to them and adjust your methods accordingly.

2. Network Proactively

Well-known brands have no trouble gaining fans on Twitter, but newcomers and small businesses may have more challenges building up a following, and the goal of Twitter is to gain followers. One way to do this is by being proactive. Follow other, similar businesses and leaders in your speciality to find likely followers for your own organization.

3. Provide Quality Content

Tweets must be limited to 140 characters, and you don’t want to waste a single one of them! Post meaningful content through your tweets and you’ll extend your reach, resulting in an increase in the number of people who engage you and follow your links.

4. Use Hashtags

Hashtags are the way Twitter followers can quickly access information which is relevant to them. If you add hashtags to your tweets, anyone who is searching for that hashtag will find yours. It doesn’t get much easier to reach your target audience than that.

5. Deliver Incentives

Twitter marketing provides the perfect platform to deliver incentives such as coupons, sales, and targeted offers. Imagine a coffee shop that tweets out a half-off coupon for anyone who mentions the tweet. Are customers more likely to visit your business in order to cash in on that offer? Absolutely!

6. Customized Landing Pages

Landing pages can be customized to correspond with your targeted tweets. Send out an offer aimed at a specific target audience, with the right hashtag to help them find it, and provide a landing page which is geared to appeal to exactly that audience.

7. Run Contests

What’s more fun than a little competition among your followers? Whether playing a trivia game via Twitter or hosting a giveaway, a competition is a call to action which will engage and entertain your followers.

8. Be Responsive

Good manners never go out of style, and part of the Twitter code includes a particular etiquette: Try to thank new followers, reply to any direct tweets, and treat every interaction with the same courtesy as you would a live customer.

9. Use Tools

There are plenty of add-ons you can use to make Twitter marketing even easier, such as Hootsuite or BufferApp. Find them, learn them, love them. Setting up automated tweets if you’re going to be out of town or synching up your tweets with Facebook are just two examples of how external software can improve the Twitter experience.

10. Don’t Oversell

Finally, although you can use Twitter as a very effective marketing tool, that’s not all you should use it for. Businesses which offer nothing but blatant self-promotion will not have much of a following for very long. Provide engaging content and a positive experience as part of your Twitter marketing campaign, and your followers will be much more willing to become loyal customers.

Written by David Kaufer

David Kaufer is Founding Partner and Chief Dynamic Office in Kaufer DMC. He’s also a huge Oregon Ducks & Microbrew nut, Dad of awesome 8 year-old twin boys, husband, and big Sustainability and Autism advocate.