How Twitter Can Benefit Your Business

Twitter can be used to target potential clients but the success rate of a direct approach via this medium is very VERY low. Better to use Twitter to build a reputation, either within your local business community or your industry. Doing this properly will help you spread the word about your work.

Promote your products or services by the simple strategy of connecting with your existing and potential clients. If you tweet well, you could be promoting your products or services to the whole world every time you tweet.

• follow people in the same industry or geographic location to get relevant info or inspiration ... and reciprocal followers
• use relevant keywords in your tweets to attract followers
• provide your followers with links to your blog or website

Twitter can get your blog or website promoted exponentially!

Often, those you follow will reciprocate so keep them interested with a selection of quality tweets. Comment on your industry or locality, refer followers to interesting news or blogs (your own or others) using concise descriptions, recommend good services or products, let followers know of upcoming events of interest and inform them first when you offer a new service or product discounts or announce a competition.

Using the tweets you follow as a guide:

• decide your minimum and maximum frequency of tweets
• allow no more than one sales tweet for every informative tweet
• don't forget to link to relevant pages of your website or blog
• limit the number of @user conversations as these exclude your other followers
• don't retweet more often than you tweet

If you are posting tweets as yourself, you can be less formal and have opinions that, as a company, you may not want to air. For example, Joe Bloggs may support England against Scotland but his company would not wish to alienate any prospective Scottish clients. In this case, you may need to consider managing two Twitter accounts (that may, occasionally, retweet each other).

Finally, if you are too busy to blog or don't have the time or inclination to manage your online marketing well ... that's the time to contact The BPc! (SEO & website design also a speciality.)