Using Twitter for marketing

Twitter can be a powerful marketing tool, or a complete waste of time. If you want to be able to use Twitter to market, you have to learn the way to do it properly.
1. Do not do too much self-promoting. No one is going to follow you, or pay attention to what you tweet if you are constantly self-promoting. You have to earn that right. You should only promote one time for every fifty valuable tweets. People get sick of hearing you tweet their own horn, so make sure you earn that right by providing value first, and promotion second.

2. Provide value and quality. If you want to use Twitter as a powerful marketing tool, you need to provide value for your followers. The content you provide should be helpful, informative, and interesting. In other words, you have to make sure you are worth following. So, provide tips, give advice, add humor, or something fun and controversial for readers to look at. If you do not add value to your followers' lives, they will stop following you.

3. Follow others so they will follow you. One of the ways to successfully market on Twitter is to get a lot of followers, and one of the best ways to do this is by following other people. Generally if you follow someone, they will return the favor, and follow you as well. While followers are not the only thing that matters, it certainly doesn't hurt to have a large number of followers.

4. Keep your tweets short enough they can be retweeted. Twitter limits you to 140 characters for your posts, which is already short, but the fact is, if you want to be retweeted, you need to go even shorter. Why? Because when someone retweets you, your username has to go in front of your post. This means that unless they edit your post, which most people will not take the time to do, they can't retweet it. So, if you want greater exposure, make it easy for people to retweet you.

5. Don't get personal. The fact is, no one wants to know what you had for breakfast, or how your outfit looks, or what your big plans for the weekend are, and if you engage in sharing personal info on Twitter, you lose your ability to market. No one is going to take you seriously, or wade through the personal junk to find tweets of value. This means that your efforts are wasted. So, if you need to, create a personal Twitter to put all of those silly little tidbits on, and another for your business so that you do not have a mix of business and personal information.

If you can follow these five tips, you will find that Twitter is an inexpensive way to market your products, and get your name out there.