Tweeting for Results: 3 Tips for Using Twitter Effectively for Your Small Business by Megan Totka

Social media marketing can be a powerful tool, or a waste of your time. It all depends on how you use it. Twitter is one of the fastest moving and most influential social media platforms out there—but unfortunately, it’s also misunderstood by many businesses.

Neither occasional, random tweeting nor a constant barrage of promotional messages is an effective use of Twitter. You need to find a middle ground that mixes business with social interaction, yet doesn’t force you to spend hours combing feeds for relevant information or reply to tweets nonstop. While this may seem like a headache, your twitter strategy is actually easier than you think.

Here are three tips to help you make the most of this popular platform.

Give Them Something to Tweet About

Twitter is all about sharing. Mention something that is cool, different, brand-new, entertaining, or engaging, and people will be interested enough to follow you. Since you only get 140 characters to grab attention, you should be tweeting more links than straight messages.

However, make sure the links aren’t all about your business. It’s great to tweet a link to your latest blog post—but if that’s all you ever talk about, people are going to unfollow you pretty fast. Share relevant content from a variety of sources—and, of course, make sure to credit the source. If your credit includes a Twitter handle, the source will probably see your tweet and follow you to reciprocate for the mention.

If You Follow, They Will Tweet

Getting a wide distribution on the Twitter network isn’t so much about tweeting, as it is about retweeting. A retweet, or RT, sends your message to a whole list of people who wouldn’t otherwise see it. And if they like what they see, they’ll probably follow you.

How can you get more RTs? To better your chances of a RT, increase the number of people you follow. Of course, it’s important to follow customers and potential customers—but you should also follow industry leaders, many of whom have large followings of their own. When you start joining in their conversations and retweeting their messages, they’ll likely reciprocate with RTs for you.

Tweet Smarter, Not Harder

It’s important to make sure you’re working smarter in digital marketing. You can do this on Twitter by automating some (but not all) of your tweets, and organizing your conversations.

If you use an automated tweet service like Tweetdeck or the Tweet Old Post plugin for WordPress-based sites, make sure you’re scheduling them sparsely, and tweeting live in between. It’s easy for experienced Twitter users to spot an account that is entirely automated, and one of the fastest ways to lose followers.

An effective Twitter account follows a lot of people. However, this makes it hard to keep up with your home feed, as tweets can amass by the second. To make sure you’re not missing important tweets, create lists within your Twitter account and sort people into them as you follow them. For example, you might make lists for Customers, Prospects, Industry Leaders, Competitors, and Media Sources. Concentrate on scanning one list every time you log into Twitter, and respond to the most relevant tweets.

Follow these tips, and you’ll be tweeting like a pro in no time.

Interested in learning more? Register to receive a free copy of my new special report, “Digital Hotel Marketing in a Multiscreen World,” produced in conjunction with Vizergy, here. While it’s targeted to the hospitality industry specifically, most of the lessons apply across verticals. And, if that’s not enough, you might also enjoy some of our past coverage of the social, local, mobile web, including:

• Subdomains vs. Subdirectories and SEO
• A Final Thought on Subdirectories and SEO
• Subdomains and Subdirectories for Branding
• 5 Questions About Landing Page URL’s
• Facebook and Google+ Are Not Blogs
• How to Build Your Small Business Blog