social marketing strategy

There are a lot of ways to use or customize Twitter that the average user doesn’t even know exists. This quick article is for business owners who don’t have time to discover all the techniques and social marketing strategies possible with Twitter but are fully aware that they ‘need’ to start using it. These are all are easy to implement without getting lost in a sea of geek terms and instructions.

The tips below are for automating your tweets so you don’t have to be a slave to the machine, whether you’re tweeting from a browser or your mobile phone. You’ll find more fast tips for Twitter in other posts – what to Tweet about, tones of your Tweets, special business promotions, and advanced Twitter features are all to follow.

For complete Newbies to Twitter I’d suggest reading all the tips in this series until you land on one that is relevant to your target market and then put it into practice. Once you’re comfortable with the Twitter interface and application, move onto a new tip to integrate into your business marketing.

To get right to my top tool for Twitter automation (there are others and other methods, but that one is my favorite. Below are ways to put the tool to best use and the reasons why.

1. Once you’re tweeting and have followers, do not stop abruptly or you’ll lose your market share and the attention of your peers, your customers and network. Remember that a vital facet of marketing – online or off – is getting yourself in the way of the customer once they’re ready to commit. If you aren’t already a household name or on the tip of everyone’s tongue, you’d better keep tweeting on a regular basis. If your lifestyle is changing and you can’t tweet three times a day anymore, wean your contacts over two weeks to only hearing from you once every few days. If regular tweets are too much to manage right now, sign up for an automation service and load up your tweet sequence to manage your marketing until you can get back to a regularly scheduled program.

2. Automated Tweet services help you prioritize your own marketing tasks as well as keep up to date on messages from your competitors. You can sign up for alerts on topics, search terms, or keywords for notification, so that the topics important to you will be delivered daily.
3. Automating your Twitter posts is not evil and it reaps sweet benefits. These tools are no different than a marketing auto-responder that allow you to type tweets in advance. Plan ahead, select the dates and times, and they will post to your account on schedule. A fantastic time saver!
4. Use automated tweets to supplement your own hands-on messages. Fill up your future tweets with a different message each day that filters user traffic to existing articles on your website, incredible free offers, or anything else you find appropriate to promote. Automation is a great way to increase awareness of your brand, your beliefs, your knowledge and offerings – that they might not know about previously.
5. If they weren’t interested in what you had to say, they wouldn’t have added you, so don’t be shy. You should be updating your followers on a regular basis – be a good leader, but don’t posture or flaunt. This is all about the ‘connection’ between you and your target market.
6. Help people stay updated through a Twitter ‘feed’ that runs on your website or WordPress blog via a widget. This style of automation is ‘hands off’, a set it and forget it, allowing new Twitter posts each time you publish an article and/or your Twitter posts to show up in your blog’s sidebar.

Intermediate, Site Specific Trainingautomation, business, twitter.com, wordpress