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Twitter: A Marketer’s Step by Step Guide to Doing it RighT

From Marketing Loudly

I’m sure many of you have been considering (or are in the process of) marketing your brand/product/widget on Twitter. And why not? With its massive, established Internet reach, you’d be crazy not to at least test the waters on Twitter – or you risk leaving a massive amount of free traffic on the table.

So, how do you market on Twitter correctly?

Here is my time-tested Twitter marketing guide..

1. Register a username that reflects your brand as best you can. You only have 15 characters, so make ‘em count. If you have a long brand name, you will have to make some sacrifices here, but its worth it. Google has already started indexing Tweets, and it’s only a matter of time until they start offering real-time search.

Either way, you want to make sure your user name reflects your brand as much as possible, so when you show up in the search results for your Tweets, you show up as a meaningful URL like this: www.twitter.com/yourbrandname and not this www.twitter.com/h82tellyoun00b

2. Don’t spam. Don’t sell. Don’t talk about yourself. Ha! Here is where most of you are blowing it. Tweeple (yes, we finally have a made up Internet term worse than ‘webinar’) will not respect or follow you if all you do is post ‘hey we’re great, stop by our website’.

So, how do you ‘market’ to the Twitter masses?

Be smart. Be an authority on a subject. Give them free information on topic(s) you are an expert on. Post links to interesting, usable and related news stories, blog posts, and articles. The goal is to build yourself up as the expert on subject XYZ.

As word gets around, you will gain more and more followers. And these followers will turn into visitors to your website. And eventually a percentage of them will turn into customers as well.

3. Find interesting things to tweet about. Simple. Find interesting articles related to your brand or service, and then post links to those articles along with your own thoughts.

I personally use StufftoTweet, AllTop and Google Alerts to find daily stories that are both 1. informational/interesting/funny/etc and 2. related to my brand somehow. Then, it’s as simple as reading the articles to make sure they are actually what they appear to be, posting the URLs and a few quick thoughts to my Twitter accounts and pressing ‘Update’.

4. Post daily. I have found that if I can take 15-20 minutes every weekday (and sometimes on the weekends) to post something interesting to my account, I continue to grow my follower counts. To see the greatest benefit from Twitter marketing, you need to be committed for the long haul. Make sure you or a staff member can regularly post to the account at least 3-4 days a week.

5. Find folks with common interests. Again.. easy. Use the ‘Find People’ search to search for folks interested in the same topic(s) you are interested in discussing (i.e. topics related to your brand). Follow a bunch of these nice folks, and they will reciprocate and follow you back. However, some won’t, so see #8 below to deal with them.

6. Don’t use any of the ‘You can get 16,348 followers in 30 days’ scams. These are pointless. At best, they cheapen your brand. At worst, they may open your to a password breach and a hacked account. Just say no.

7. Give-aways are gold. If you have a free report/ebook/video/review/etc posted to your site, then feel free to tweet about it and let your followers know. As long as it has some informational basis to it – and isn’t a straight sales pitch – they will check it out. Of course, the better the freebie, the better the response. For a prefect example of how to do a Twitter giveaway, see Moonfruit’s hyper-sucessful Macbook giveaway a few weeks back.

8. Dump the dead weight. You want to have a 1: 1.5 ratio of followers to following. So, for every 100 people you follow on Twitter, you want to have 150 following you. If you see that this ratio is out of whack,  Twitter Karma has a nifty little tool that lets you bulk remove all of the folks you are following, but who are not following you back. I trim the dead weight off of my lists every week or so.