Twitter is an amazing place to market yourself online. The thing is, you just can’t give a hard sell and expect the positive results you were hoping for. Twitter is a place where you have to socialize before doing business. Think of it as going on a golf outing. You greet the ones you know, introduce yourself to those you don’t, then exchange pleasantries before getting down to business. Next, listen to others speak, ask questions about them and their business, then talk about yourself and your business, and finally hand out a business card (online it’s your link) to those you have just met. Business is always saved for the end. For many, this comes more naturally in person, but how do you finesse this on online? How do you effectively market yourself on Twitter? Here are 12 tips to make it easier to use Twitter as a marketing tool.

1. Build Relationships – Start by greeting your Twitter followers using your personality. Some write Happy Monday (or whatever day of the week it is),  Hello Twitterworld, or a simple Good Morning/Afternoon/Evening to get started. This could lead to a response and be the beginning of a conversation. If not, watch your stream until a quote, original thought or link you like comes your way. Retweet it, and add a comment if you’d like. This could also lead to a response. If these two subtle ways don’t generate feedback, don’t be shy, just send a reply to someone who’s tweeting about something you like. The chances are higher you’ll hear back from them. If you find this person interesting or a potential customer, continue to engage them daily. You can eventually lead them to your Facebook Fan Page, blog or website where a soft or even hard sell is more appropriate. Keep in mind that followers would also appreciate you visiting their page, blog or site. You can form a marketing alliance and retweet each other’s links.

2. Add Value – The Twitter community loves to share information. The best way to be noticed is to add value by sharing your knowledge and wisdom with the community. As amazing as it would be to just post 5 tweets with links to your site(s), articles about you, and retweet praises about you, it’s too narcissistic for Twitter. A good way of adding value is to share a link to an article in your field that you’ve just read online, write an inspirational original thought or share a quote, retweet giveaways, contests and coupons, and then post links to your site/new blog post/Facebook update, etc. This strategy might also lead to more retweets. This helps a lot with your branding, but every tweet and retweet is getting your name out there, which helps in marketing yourself.

3. Self-promotion – Concentrate on engaging your followers, who are your potential customers/clients. Provide value by sharing information without giving away your secrets. Keep your links to no more than 25% of your total tweets. Marketing on Twitter is a balancing act, and should be more subtle than on other social networking sites or in the media. Remember, to successfully use Twitter as a marketing tool you need to engage, build relationships, and add value.

4. Hashtags – This symbol # is a hashtag, and it’s followed by a keyword. They help people more easily follow topics. Create your own hashtag using your company name, a word, or your catch phrase. This helps with branding, and keeping track of whenever anyone uses your #hashtag without retweeting you. Monitor how often it’s used, and what they’re saying about you with a search column in a Twitter client like HootSuite or TweetDeck.

5. Avatar – Your avatar helps brand you. It can be your personal portrait or a logo. Once you have decided what it’ll be, do NOT change it as I have seen a few people doing. It confuses people and weakens your brand.

6. Ask questions – This could lead to replies, that could prompt a multi-follower conversation. It could also be great market research tool used to poll your followers, in addition to offering customer service. You can ask opinions of new products or services. This could have a link to photo, video, or blog post where they can leave comments, which generates traffic to your site.

7. Contests – Have a contest giving away a product. A fantastic way to market a (new) product or service. It must be substantial enough to give value to community. The larger the value, the more buzz you’ll get. Followers could retweet your link for a week using a designated hashtag, and whoever retweets it most, wins. Traffic to your site should dramatically increase, making the prize will be worth it.

8. Auto DMs – Do NOT use automated delivery of direct messages as a marketing tool. Most consider it spam and might unfollow you, or even block you and report you as spam. This is a hard sell and is NOT desirable. Also, do not send a cold reply to a new follower with your link. This is just as bad. Always engage your followers before sharing your link.

9. Peak Hours – Like prime time television, Twitter has hours when more people are active. It’s best to time tweets to get the most views.  Ideal times, considering various times zones are 9 AM, 12 noon, 3 PM, 6 PM and 9 PM and midnight EST. Any time between half an hour plus and minus the times listed are also good times to tweet, and get your message out there. Also, consider sharing your tweets more than once a day, because often different people are on at different times. You will increase the number of people seeing your link.

10. Last tweets – Your last 3-4 tweets should be a mix of things like retweets, a motivational quote, an original thought, a reply and ending with a self-promoting link. They will be the FIRST tweets people see at the top of your profile page. Some may determine whether or not they’ll follow you based on these tweets. You don’t want to have negative tweets, bad language, or a string of self-promoting links as your last tweets if you don’t update often. Having your on link on top might prompt people to click on it to visit your site/blog/article, etc.

11. Lists – These can prove to be very beneficial for marketing purposes and don’t have to be public. You can list local people, those in your industry, potential customers, potential employees, etc. which makes it easier to know how to engage these groups.

12. Tweet Consistently – Now you know what to tweet about, and when to send them, but you have to do this regularly. If you tweet sporadically, you won’t make a large impact, especially if you have few followers (for a list of potential followers, see this post). If you tweet a lot but only twice a week, it’s only slightly effective. It’s best to tweet at least five days a week, including at least one weekend day, for at least 10 minutes. Think of it like watching a television commercial. If you see it once, you notice it, but if you see it consistently, you’ll remember it. In order for your marketing strategy to be successful, you need to be memorable.

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Twitter - Facebook

Alternativas para insertar botones de Twitter

Como les adelantó Federico, Twitter lanzó sus botones oficiales para tuitear, que pueden ver en acción al pie de este artículo. Para los usuarios, es una manera veloz de compartir contenidos que hasta incluye su propio acortador de enlaces, mientras que los desarrolladores cuentan con una herramienta para crearlos y obtener el HTML correspondiente.

Pese a su simplicidad, el hecho de estar basado en Javascript nos dificulta su implementación en newsletters, foros y ciertas plataformas que bloquean scripts. Pero eso nunca nos detiene, por lo cual les contaré algunas alternativas para lograr ese cometido:

Hay que crear un enlace a la ventana de publicación, cuya URL es similar a la que utiliza Facebook pero con más parámetros de personalización. El formato es:

<a href="http://twitter.com/share?url=URL&text=TEXTO&via=BLOG&related=AUTOR">Twittear</a>

Deben reemplazar URL y TEXTO, por la dirección a compartir y la leyenda por defecto para el tweet, respectivamente. Previamente, es necesario codificarlas para que se muestren correctamente, algo que pueden hacer fácilmente con un conversor en línea. Por otra parte, BLOG y AUTOR son las cuentas en Twitter a recomendar tras la publicación, sin la @ habitual. En caso de no contar con una específica para el blog, pueden ingresar la del autor del post.

De esta manera, el siguiente código:

<a href="http://twitter.com/share?url=http://www.bitelia.com/&text=Leyendo%20Bitelia&via=bitelia&related=hptxt">Twittear</a>

Genera este vínculo:

Twittear

Si les resulta poco atractivo, siempre pueden reemplazar Twittear por otros términos o una imagen. Eso sí, no hay forma de mostrar el contador de publicaciones.

Quienes utilizan WordPress cuentan con un código especial para incluir en el archivo single.php, donde solamente tendrán que reemplazar los nombres de usuario:

<a href="http://twitter.com/share?url=<?php echo urlencode(the_permalink()); ?>&text=<?php echo urlencode(the_title()); ?>&via=BLOG&related=AUTOR">Twittear</a>

Lo mismo aplica para quienes poseen una bitácora en Blogger, que deberán buscar la clase post-footer en la plantilla y copiar allí lo siguiente:

<a expr:href='"http://twitter.com/share?text=" + data:post.title + "&url=" + data:post.url + "&via=BLOG&related=AUTOR"'>Twittear</a>

¿Conocen otras opciones? Los invitamos a compartirlas en los comentarios.

Vía: Digital Inspiration

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Twitter - Facebook