There is a very thin line between marketing and spamming. What some may consider as marketing may appear as spamming to others. Twitter marketing has some best and some worst practices. I will be concentrating on the best practices for now.
Businesses and internet marketers are always looking for strategies to make it big at twitter, but what they fail to understand is that twitter marketing is a simple concept. Twitter marketing success will not come in a instant, it may take a few months to build credibility in twitterville but there are some best practices that you should be aware of:
1. Engagement
Twitter started with the purpose of engagement and it will remain like that for at least 1-2 years. Engagement is a prerequisite for any business which is trying to market it’s twitter page. Engagement doesn’t imply that you have to waste hours trying to reply and retweet each follower’s tweets. You can save time and engage in a few minutes each day if you try the 4 simple ways to engage with your followers.
2. Repeating tweets
Repeating tweets may seem as spamming but it is a marketing technique used by many twitter honchos. Your followers usually are from various different parts of the globe. When you tweet something, some of these followers will be awake, while others will be asleep. So, there will be followers who will be missing your tweet. Repeating tweets ensures that people across the globe are able to see your tweets. In other words repeating tweets helps in increasing the visibility of the tweet. A repetition of 2-4 tweets a day is usually recommended.
3. Showing others love
A celebrity can afford to be aloof, as people will still be retweeting him or her. But, normal twitter user like me and you, we have to build relationships and that can be built only if we thank people for their support. Once they see that their support is being appreciated, they might try to retweet your tweets again. By this method your increasing your influence (slowly but steadily).
4. Playing with tweets
This is the most fun and fruitful twitter marketing technique that I have tried and has worked for me. This technique requires a little application of mind and a lot of creativity. Instead of using the same boring tweets, we can play with the tweet and re-frame the words or add a question to it in a way that attracts more eyeballs and hence brings tremendous amounts of traffic.
Let me take a small example,
I had posted an article on 11 types of bloggers (I had categorized bloggers into 11 different categories)
Instead of using
11 type of bloggers http://bit.ly/aKbuNk
I used this
11 types of bloggers http://bit.ly/aKbuNk , which one are you?
I had added a simple question which brought the article 260 retweets and more than 60 comments of people categorizing themselves into one or more than one of these 11 categories.
5. DMs
Many twitter users don’t know the power of DM. It is a great tool for marketing your tweets. After you have made many friends on twitter, you can DM your friends with your tweet requests. Your friends will be more than happy to retweet your tweet. Hence, by using DMs, you will increase the number of retweets and you will also bring massive amounts of traffic to your website.
6. Ghost Tweeting
Running a business is not a piece of cake and to handle a twitter account along with it can be an arduous task. To prevent this hassle, certain business owners appoint ghost tweeters or twitter account managers that tweet on behalf of the company and provide twitter support to their customers. Business owners can start ghost tweeting on their accounts by either buying Twitter business accounts or using apps like hootsuite which provide a easy interface for multiple user twitter account management
These are some of the best practices that have caught my attention. What according to you are the best twitter marketing practices?
