Top 5 Ways to Build Your Business with Twitter
Here are my tops five strategies for building your business with Twitter.
(5) Manage Your Brand. Use a service like EasyTweets.com to monitor people who mention your brand – Easy Tweets will send you an e-mail when someone on Twitter mentions your brand. Similarly, you can use the service to monitor any keywords that you’d like. 
(4) Better Serve Your Customers. Twitter is real-time and so should your customer service – leverage Twitter to address customer concerns and answer questions in real-time.
(3) Develop Edge. Twitter is the hottest new social network in the world. Every one and their sister are talking about Twitter. Incorporate Twitter into your marketing and sales strategy; include a “Follow us on Twitter” icon on your homepage and your visitors will think your totally cool. Edgy / cool companies don’t have to spend as much money on advertising because others do it for them through word of mouth and viral buzz. Get it and excel.
(2) Follow People with Similar Interests. You are a business – you want to sell people your stuff. Leverage Twitter by following every one who has ever Tweeted about anything remotely similar to your line of products or services. Once you’ve built your following it’s up to you to keep things interesting and build credibility and interest. Leave your sales hat at the door, seriously.
(1) Join the conversation. Use Twitter Search (www.search.twitter.com) to find people talking about topics related to your business. For instance, if you sell gourmet foods you should use Twitter Search to find people Tweeting about different kinds of gourmet foods. Once you locate the conversations make sure to follow the people involved and add something of substance to the dialogue. Don’t be stiff; instead, be friendly.
Have fun!!!
Twitter is FREE. JOIN HERE. Follow me @pepperjamceo.
June 22nd, 2009 at 1:36 pm
Great suggestions, but the thing that seems to be missing from most discussions of using Twitter is leveraging your existing users’ relationships.
Make it easy for your visitors to recommend your articles/posts to their followers. A recommendation from a friend will always outweigh one from anyone else.
That’s also the big flaw with most existing Twitter tools that are hosted on blogs, they force users to leave the site and make them jump through hoops to tweet a link. Users are lazy, asking them to do anything beyond clicking a button will greatly reduce the odds of them tweeing your item.
June 23rd, 2009 at 2:22 pm
Joel: I agree with you. I often want to tweet (or Digg, or …), but I don’t want to “leave the page” and “jump through hoops” to do it.
Would be nice to be able to Digg in one click! Or stay on the site to tweet.
Maybe there’s a tool that we can offer visitors, that would allow them to just do that.
June 23rd, 2009 at 8:49 pm
I love using the twitter search. I use it not only for conversations but I follow those individuals who talk about subjects or keywords that are related to my website.
Cleona.
June 25th, 2009 at 9:46 am
Christine,
I don’t know if this post will be moderated out as it could be construed as self-promotion but Twittley (www.twittley.com) (Full disclosure: I am associated with Twittley and part-owner of said company) allows you to do just that.
Tweet without ever leaving the page and other functions to make it more valuable for webmasters.
July 2nd, 2009 at 3:34 am
Tweets are the newish big thing yes, but for how long? With news that Myspace is vanishing, i think it shows the fickleness many people.