Use Twitter for Marketing 1) Use Twitter to drive people to your company’s website. Tweet
about interesting resources your employees have posted on
your blog or website. Have you recently published a white paper
that people can download for free? Tweet about it, linking back to
the download page on your website. If the content on your site is
truly remarkable, people may start tweeting about it on their own!
They can share your resource to their friends on Twitter.
2) Monitor your brand on Twitter. Using the aforementioned
Twitter Search tool (
http://search.twitter.com), you can search
and track what people are saying about your company, products,
competitors or any other hot words in your industry. Set up an
RSS feed to receive all search results in Google Reader. If you
find someone tweeting about your products or a person who is
looking for a solution that your product provides, let them know!
3) Use the Twitter “Favorites” feature as a list of company
testimonials. To the left of each tweet in your Twitter stream,
there is a little star. When you click the little star, that tweet gets
added to your Favorites Tab. As you track what people are
saying about your company in Twitter Search, favorite all of the
positive tweets. Third party testimonials are valuable by showing
the public what other people think of your company.
The next time someone asks about your company, send them
the link to your Favorites page. The URL for this page will be
http://twitter.com/USERNAME/favorites.
4) Use Twitter to promote events. Tweetups are a great way to get
to know your Twitter community offline. The next time your
company holds an event, fundraiser or open house, tweet about
it! Best practice is to send people directly to an event signup
page.
Think of a hashtag for your event before you start tweeting about
it. Selecting a hashtag for your own event will be beneficial in a
few ways:
a) During the event, people often use the hashtag while live-tweeting, or tweeting what they see/hear in realtime. The hashtag
will aggregate the event tweets, building an online conversation
around the event.
b)People who are not at the event will see your hashtag and
perhaps use it too. A popular #hashtag often sparks curiosity,
and people will go to
http://search.twitter.com to follow the
conversation around the event.
5) Use Twitter to promote new tools. Twitter users love new toys,
especially if they create some sort of outcome, grade or analysis
of the person using the tool. Make the results of your tool/grader
as easy to Tweet as possible. Perhaps you could add a “Tweet
this grade” function. Make sure your tool is as easy to share as
possible!
6) Establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry. By
tweeting about useful resources and
thoughtful tips, you and
your company will eventually develop thought leadership, and
people will consider you an expert in that particular subject. Be
sure to link to your own resources as well as others.