12 Ways to Use Twitter for Social Media Marketing By Ron Knight

12 Ways to Use Twitter for Social Media Marketing
By Ron Knight (c) 2009

Twitter is a wildly popular microblogging service. It involves
writing Tweets, which are short updates of a maximum of 140
characters that tell your followers what you are up to. Although
your Tweets are technically supposed to answer the question,
"What are you doing?" Twitter has moved far beyond that. Tweets
are used to share stories, link to photos, promote content,
break news, and a whole lot more. Twitter has also become an
incredibly important tool for social media marketing
(http://www.empoweredseo.com/) professionals. Here are 12 ways
in which Twitter can be used in your social media marketing
campaign.

Copyright � 2009 Jayde Online, Inc. All Rights Reserved

1. Sharing Links to Items of Interest

As soon as you read something online that you think is
interesting, it is easy to share it on Twitter with all of your
followers. Twitter is highly effective in this manner because it
is such a quick way to be able to reach a large group of people.
You can also get a lot of great ideas for blog posts from
Twitter since many new ideas and stories are floating around
that haven�t even made it to the blogosphere and definitely not
to mainstream media.

2. Building Your Network

Using Twitter is a great way to build your network because it
allows you to find and follow people with similar interests. You
can use Steeple to find people who live in your geographical
area. You can also use other tools that help you find new people
to follow based upon who your Twitter friends follow.

3. Build Relationships within Your Current Network

People in different networks often use Twitter to connect with
their contacts instantly rather than using instant messaging for
that purpose. Furthermore, many people use Twitter to connect
with their network during events like conferences.

4. Re-Distributing Content from Your Blog or Website

Twitter can be used to redistribute content from your blog or
website. However, you should take care to do this thoughtfully
since many of your Twitter followers may already read your blog.
For that reason, you may want to avoid using a blog plug-in that
automatically Tweets your posts. Your best bet is to Tweet your
content manually and customize each Tweet so it doesn't get
old.

5. Get Involved in Live Tweeting Events

Twitter launched at SXSW last year, catapulting microblogging
conferences to fame. Live Tweeting events are great because they
are a form of citizen journalism that allow you to connect with
several new people in your niche while making active and
valuable contributions to current discussions in your
community.

6. Pitching Stories to Journalists on Twitter

You can send a direct message to a journalist who is following
you on Twitter to pitch a story idea.

7. Communicating with Your Team

You can use Twitter as a company intranet that connects all of
your employees. Twitter can be particularly useful in this
regard if you have a virtual business with employees in
different geographical locations. You can set your updates to
private for security reasons. Anytime you are working on group
projects, you can stay in touch with your team members using
Twitter.

8. Brand Monitoring

Stay up to date with any mentions of your business on Twitter.
If there is anything negative, you will be able to counter it
quickly. You can also use Twitter as a way to receive feedback
from your customers and improve your business. Just ask your
followers to give their opinion on something. For example, if
you designed a new website, ask your followers what they think
about it and get their constructive criticisms so you can make
your site design even better.

9. Acquire More Votes on Social Media Websites

If you have submitted a story to Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, or
any other social voting website, tweet a link to that submission
to try to score more votes from your followers. If your
followers like what they see, they are sure to vote for your
content.

10. Hiring People

Looking for a programmer, designer, or writer? Whatever type of
professional you seek, try finding them on Twitter. Simply send
your followers a tweet telling them you are looking for someone
for a job. They can either recommend someone to you or offer
themselves for the job. Using Twitter in this way is ideal for
finding qualified freelancers. It is much more convenient than
putting out a classified ad.

11. Build Your Personal Brand

When you use Twitter to talk about things as mundane as what you
ate for breakfast or how you are going to sleep early tonight,
you make your followers feel like you are casual and
approachable. Even those running a company that has a cold,
corporate brand image could create more appeal and build a
unique personal brand using Twitter.

12. Streamline Electronic Communications

When you use Twitter, you�re likely to find yourself using IM,
email, and other electronic communication methods less. Twitter
not only provides public chatting through Tweets, it also allows
you to send direct messages. Twitter will help you streamline
your electronic communications, allowing you to scale back
online.