Esteban Panzera

Twitter is a great place for your business to be at, as if you combine it with some great ideas you can get lots of traffic and increase the brand awareness of your business. But there lots of reasons a business should use Twitter, I made a list:

1. Open company: if a blog makes the company “open”, a twitter account will make it look like a more “open” company as you would be telling the world what you are doing in each moment.
2. Get Clients: many potential clients may have a Twitter account, so if you get them to see you, they might get to trust you just because you are on Twitter and will hire you. People love the companies that are always using the latest technology tools.
3. Communicate with Clients: if one of your clients already has a Twitter account, you could tell him that your company now uses Twitter, you could also tell all your customers about Twitter and make them sign up. This way you will have like a live support via Twitter, something your clients will be happy about.
4. Watch your Clients: by following your clients and watching what they do day by day, you could get to understand them better and be able to offer your services in a better way.
5. Increase Brand Awareness: if you use your company’s name as your twitter account and also use your logo as background, you will be branding your company’s name to all the twitter users that follow you.
6. Promote Blog Posts: if your company has also got a blog, you could post a link to your updates on Twitter, getting more people to read what you wrote. You will also give the chance to other Twitter users to talk with you and other people about what you wrote.
7. Networking: Twitter can also be used to get to know new people that may help you in your future duties or be your new friends.
8. New Offers or Products: you can also update your Twitter account whenever you launch a new product/service or when a new offer is made available at your website, getting to spread the word faster.
9. Get to know your competitors: if your competitors have got a Twitter account, you could follow them, get to know more about them, their strategies and their clients.
10. Reputation Management: if you use your company name as your twitter account name, it will probably get a good position at Google when searching for your company brand, what would help managing the online reputation of your company.

You still not sure about creating a Twitter account? This might help:

From Twits to Tweeple, Why I Embraced Twitter and You Should Too
26 Reasons Why I Love Twitter - Plus 27 More just in Case

Twitter is a great tool for marketing as you can show a message of 140 characters to all the people you want, the only problem is that you have to get them to follow you. That is exactly what you are going to read here, how to make people follow you by using different techniques.

First of all I will cover some basic things you definitely have to do:

- On the settings, as your username write your brand’s name.
- As URL put your company’s website URL (or the viral idea you are promoting).
- As online bio make a brief description of what you offer.
- As picture (avatar) use your logo.
- Be sure to modify the design so that it uses the colours of your company and include your logo or something that will complement the design as image background.

After you have done that we can move on to the different twitter marketing ideas you can use. Each of them would have to be applied in a different way depending on the niche you are on and the one you are targeting. Don’t forget that twitter can also be a great tool to promote your viral marketing campaign (this tends to have great acceptance by twitter users).

1.- The simple twitter marketing idea: as its name says this one is the simplest of all of them, it consists on creating a new account, filling it with some stupid twits and following as many people as you can. This way all the people that have the option of receiving email alerts when someone starts following them will receive an email telling them about you, and they will probably visit your twitter account to learn a bit more about you and click on the URL of the account (to your website). But the problems of this technique is that it looks a bit like spammy, can make people take a bad idea about your brand, and will probably generate one-time visitors.

2.- News feed twitter marketing idea: this idea is pretty useful if you run a blog or a news system with rss feed, what you have to do is use the website twitterfeed.com so that all the things you write on your blog/news-system gets written on your twitter account.
You would be offering twitterers the opportunity of receiving the latest news of their niche via their twitter account. You can promote this twitter account via your website or by combining it with the simple twitter marketing idea.

3.- Your day twitter marketing idea: this one is pretty nice and will get a great response from twitter users if done correctly. You would have to think of an idea to write about on your twitter account that is related to your niche. This idea has to be of interest for the ones that you want to be followed by. What you need is to write what you do in a dailly basis. For example if I wanted to get all the web marketing people to follow me I could create a new twitter account and write day to day what I am exactly doing to promote my site, how I am using SMM, where I am getting a link to get better positions, etc. If I get people to love what I write I would get them to spread it, creating a really nice viral effect. Using this viral marketing idea would help me create a lot of brand awareness and get more visits to my site.

4.- The Q&A twitter marketing idea: to succeed using this tactic you need to know a lot about your niche, you need to be a real expert. Basically people would be able to ask you questions via twitter using the @ command and you would have to answer them (questions would be obviously related to your niche). Other twitter users that want to gain more knowledge in this niche would follow you to read all the questions and answers and would also be able to ask you questions at the same time.
All the people who get here would see your brand and probably your website, increasing your brand awareness.

5.- The informative twitter marketing idea: in this tactic you use your twitter account as a blog, you write informative 140 characters twits about your niche, people would subscribe for the same reasons they subscribe to a blog. Making a few people follow you on Twitter will  give more opportunities for others to access your twitter account. Why? Because you would appear on their list of people they are following!

There are many ways you can use twitter to promote your site and increase brand awareness, you just have to be creative, the possibilities are infinite.