Thread: Twitter Marketing: 12 Ways to Use Twitter to Grow Your Business

Monitor Your Name, Brand and Keywords
Use the search feature to find out who’s talking about your and your products.


Re-Tweet
Re-tweeting is the equivalent of email forwarding. When someone tweets about something you find interesting, re-tweet it so your followers can benefit from it too. Plus, when you re-tweet other people’s content, they notice you and want to learn who you are.


Grow Your Network
These are my three favorite ways to grow a Twitter followers base:

Follow people talking about a keyword related to your market. They’ll follow you back. Un-follow those who don’t. I use FlashTweet for this.
Find the authorities in your market and follow the people following them. They’ll follow you back. Un-follow those who don’t. Again, I use FlashTweet for this.
Use Twitter directories such as Twellow and WeFollow to find people in your market.

But remember, it’s about quality, not quantity. I’d rather have 500 great followers than 5,000 good ones.

Respond to Messages
Click on your Twitter ID to see who’s talking to or about you.


Avoid Direct Messages
It’s OK to send some DMs once in a while, but a lot of spammers DM people all the time, so use these with caution.


Tweet Often (But Not Too Often)
If you don’t tweet often, you won’t get any visibility. But, if you tweet every 5 minutes, people will get annoyed. I found that 1-10 times per day is optimal for most people. Monitor your followers and if you notice too many people are leaving you, you’re probably tweeting too much (or your tweets are boring or not interesting).

Invite People to Follow You
Add a link to “Follow Me on Twitter” to your blog, website, business cards and email signature.


Contests, Content, Events and Specials
My four favorite kinds of content to tweet about are contests, events, content (article, videos, resources) and specials.

Share Other People’s Content
Most people tweet about their own content. This is not a good idea. When you find stuff you like, tweet it.

Balance Following/Followers
If you follow a lot people and very few people follow you, you’ll be seen as a spammer. If a lot of people follow you and you don’t follow them back, it’s not very nice of you. Use FlashTweet or FriendOrFollow to balance your ratio.

Help Others
See what your followers need and try to give it to them. A lot of people use Twitter to ask questions; answer them.

Use Hash Tags with Caution
A hash tag is a keyword preceded by the pound sign. Used right, hash tags can be very beneficial, but if you use them to stuff your tweets with keywords, people won’t like it.

Thanks for this information, i am only use promotion for my site posts. Now I see that there are still many things that can be done via Twitter.

Thank you for sharing, I would suggest the same on Facebook, Orkut, Hi5 and Digg as it really helped few of my projects.

I would like to add an addition on how people should tweet, hashtags and follow people.
In case of tweeting, tweet relevant and informative tweets. If people want to gain more followers, then people should find the page helpful and up-to-date. Meaning, for someone using tweeter, they must know the trends and take advantage of the hashtag that they are able to use for the betterment of business. Moreover, in the 'follow' process, it is good to follow pages related to the business.

Anyway, good piece of information you got there.