Marketing Using Twitter

Here are just a few of the ways Twitter can help to benefit your online business ...

Building up excitement for a product launch. Just like with an email list, Twitter can be used to build up excitement about an upcoming product launch. It can start with occasional Tweets about your “new project”, and by keeping your followers up to date and offering freebies and cool stuff that they'll appreciate, you'll build trust and anticipation. When your product launches, a well-timed Tweet may likely be just as effective as a blast to your email list.

Driving traffic to your website. Wouldn't it be great if you could instantly notify hundreds or thousands of people every time you update your blog? Twitter makes this possible. It essentially acts as an RSS feed. By building a sizable list of followers, you pretty much have access to an instant source of traffic to your website or blog.

People who would otherwise not be aware of updates and new content will be notified, giving them a chance to check it out. If your blog is high-quality, people will keep an eye out for more of your Tweets.

Building relationships with business contacts. Twitter makes it easy to keep in touch with business partners and contacts. Traditional instant messaging is on its way out, and you'll find that most savvy internet marketers use Twitter as their primary social networking tool. So take advantage of this fact! Hook up with your contacts so you can work on building a closer relationship.

Crowd-sourcing. Crowd-sourcing is a unique form of outsourcing. It works by calling on your friends, fans, followers, email subscribers, etc. to contribute ideas and solutions. Basically, it is a form of “group intelligence”. By listening to the crowd, marketers and business owners can figure out the exact thoughts, needs, and wants of their customer base. In this way, innovative new ideas and strategies are born that are guaranteed to fall in line with the desires of the consumer.

By directly asking your followers what type of new software they'd like to see developed, or what their biggest setbacks are, or what they liked/disliked most about your last ebook, you can gain an incredibly amount of insight about your business! Twitter provides a perfect platform for crowd-sourcing.

Going viral. Social networking sites give us a great opportunity to 'go viral'. This means that you Tweet about something that really catches people's attention. Your followers are impressed, so they re-Tweet it. In turn, each of their followers re-Tweet it, and so on and so on, and soon your little Tweet spreads like wildfire, snowballing into a huge storm of clicks and traffic.

Of course, TRYING to make something go viral probably won't work. It tends to just happen on its own. Tweeting “Hey guys buy my new ebook click here” will never go viral, obviously. But if you find something really interesting, little-known, valuable, funny, etc., you might have a chance. Very often, Tweets go viral without anyone really expecting or planning on it. This is just one of the many amazing benefits of social networking.