Thread: Twitter Marketing Basics

Twitter can be a formidable online marketing tool that will get you noticed in a very short period of time... if you start with a good strategy and use it to its potential. Here are a few common but helpful hints regarding Twitter Marketing techniques that can help boost your online visibility and start gaining new followers:

1. Post tweets that are relevant to your target audience.
2. When trying to direct the focus of your tweet toward a certain audience, make sure to use hash tags to identify your targeted keywords - this helps Twitter index the key terms more easily, increasing the probability of other 'tweeters' locating your tweets by search.
3. Maintain communication with your groups - both followers and people you're following.
4. Keep your tweet contents short and sweet - 140 characters is the limit per tweet, but the more concise you can be, the better; tweets are supposed to be bite-sized information chunks. Also, use URL shorteners for links, like tiny.ly or bit.ly
5. Contribute from a community standpoint rather than direct marketing; don't try to aggressively sell your product or service - you want people to follow you based on organic interest in you, not how good of a sales pitch you conjure up.

These are just a small handful of Twitter techniques that work for many people. Your Twitter following may not explode overnight, but if you incorporate the right strategies, you'll have a multitude of followers in no time.

Hi Dave, great advice. When I first started out on twitter I didn't fully understand what to do, I was over selling, tweeting links to my site. Little did i know that I was completely missing the point! Twitter is all about engaging with your followers and participating in conversation! :-) I would also recommend using HootSuite, it's excellent and managing tweets - particularly for VA's offering social media as you can manage serveral twitter accounts from one platform.