Online Marketing Solutions

1. Get a Twitter Account. If you don’t have one already, visit Twitter.com and sign up for a free account. Think carefully about what your twitter account will be called as you can’t change it later and it should clearly represent your company or brand.

2. Create a Twitter Marketing Strategy.  While most people just start randomly posting whatever comes to mind, you’ll be much more successful if you first sit down and write out your Twitter marketing plan including what types of things you’ll try to post about, how often you’ll post, how many followers you’ll try to reach, how your twittering will help you achieve your marketing goals, how your twittering fits into and compliments your overall offline and online marketing strategy, who you can get to help write/submit posts, etc.  Once you’ve got your Twitter marketing strategy nailed down then start posting to your twitter account. If you’re not sure where to start then consider hiring a Twitter Marketing Agency to help you create and /or implement your Twitter strategy.

3. Automate Blog Posting to Twitter. There are many great apps out there that enable you to automatically post your blog posts to your twitter account – so if you’re a blogger, consider feeding your Twitter account directly from your blog so you can hit two birds with one stone every time you create a new blog post. Your Twitter posts in this instance would then just link back to your full blog post, driving your followers into your blog, which is a good thing.  If you don’t have a blog, get one. If you don’t know where to start, consider creating your blog with  Wordpress, as there are many great free Twitter Wordpress plugins.

4. Make & Follow Twitter Friends. Don’t  only broadcast about yourself or your company, but take the social aspect of social media to heart and engage with others.  In your travels on the web you’ll find interesting websites that have links to personal or company twitter accounts. If you like what you see, follow them on twitter. To do this, visit a Twitter profile page then click the “follow” button.  Follow  influential bloggers and media and other noteworthy individuals in your industry. Often they’ll follow you back and you’ll have more success communicating with them via twitter than phone or email.

5. Get your CEO Twittering.  Twitter offers CEO’s a great way to manage connections, share industry insights and network. Since Twitter posts are limited to 140 characters even busy CEOs can find time to post to their Twitter account from their iPhone or Blackberry while waiting at the airport.

6. Offer Twitter Discounts. Consider broadcasting specials on your products or services to your Twitter followers. Take advantage of the viral nature of Twitter where valuable posts often become retweeted many times by many different users. Consider using a Twitter coupon service.

7. Provide Live Event Updates. If you’re holding a conference or seminar or any kind of event, Twitter live about it to generate interest, to post any last minute updates, etc.

8. Get Involved and be a Contributor. Retweet  (repost) relevant posts made by those you’re following. Post links to great articles you or others have written.  Sometimes people will  follow you in return. To get started you can follow us on Twitter.

9. Use URL shorteners. Twitter limits posts to 140 characters, so using a url shortener like bit.ly ortinyurl.com or others will enable you to write more in each post and have fewer characters used up by any URLs you link to in your post. Consider using a short URL service such as bit.ly that includes statistics tracking if you’re interested in seeing how many people click on the links you post.  Also consider using Hootsuite, an online Twitter Marketing software that enables you to post to multiple twitter accounts at once while also tracking your stats using their in-house short url ow.ly.

 photo: abooth202