How to Promote Your Business on Twitter: 5 Tips

Using Twitter to promote your business in a way that’s acceptable is kind of like treading a tightrope. The opportunity is there for you to spam the socks off people that are following you or that you find doing searches on topics important to your business. You could inundate them with tweets about your business and products – but, that’s not a smart way to go about it.

Here are some smart ways to go about using Twitter…

1. Listen a lot – listen much more than you tweet about yourself or your business.

Beginners especially should pay close attention to this rule. Being on Twitter at first is like being at a party full of strangers. The first thing to do is to find out who they are and what they’re talking about. That’s the only way you can figure out how you might fit into what’s going on and make your own contribution.

So the first step in learning how to use Twitter is to choose people to follow and read their tweets. Use Twitter Search to see what people are saying (tweeting) about particular topics that interest you.

2. With every tweet – help others. This like the golden rule of using Twitter. If the goal of every message you put across is to help other people learn something that can help them get along a little bit easier – that’s as much as you can do. People will love you for it.

Information, novel information, timely information, entertainment – all of these topics have value. Use them when you got them!

3. Your personal life probably isn’t interesting at all. Don’t tweet about what you’re watching on TV, or that you just returned from work. These kinds of tweets are useless and go to show the person has nothing going on and isn’t worth following. Do YOU want to read everytime someone goes for lunch or answers a phone? No… so, don’t let us all know either! Help people – that’s it. Step 2!

4. Respond to others. If you’re just waiting for someone to take part in your conversation you might have a lot of time on your hands. Instead, actively reply to others and get conversations going about topics that are parallel to ones you want to talk about or learn about. Ask questions to prompt responses. I get more responses to questions than anything else.

5. Don’t just tweet text… tweet photos (Twitpic.com), videos, links to other sites, links to your articles, links to entertaining things on YouTube, anything but plain old text all the time.

Twitter can be an excellent online marketing tool for your business. You can be sure that there are unlimited opportunities out there waiting for you to find them.

Spamming others on Twitter by talking too much about yourself will lead to a drop in the number of people following you. It may lead to administrative action. Twitter is trying to avoid spam in whatever form it can control. Don’t be part of the problem! By sticking to these tips you’ll create a Twitter presence that benefits your business – not harms it.

Good luck!