by Lou Belcher

Created on: March 19, 2010

Marketing for your business has changed with the addition of Twitter to the social media. Twitter is technically classified as mini-blogging. One of the chief uses for it in business is to send traffic to the website or blog of the business.  Here is how to Twitter for business:

1. Develop your blog or website first. Decide what you want to sell. It could be a product or service. Twitter is conducive to enhancing the business prospects of both.

2. Once you have developed your blog or website, put content on it that will be of interest to potential customers or clients. Remember that you can't just post to your blog or website once. To keep the interest of the public, you must post to it frequently and keep it looking fresh and updated.

3. Show your products or services to best advantage on your blog or website and make it easy for your clients to purchase your products or sign up for your services.

4. Once your blog or website is fully functional, sign up with Twitter. The best way to make Twitter work for your business is to name it the same as your business for easy identification. If you name it something completely different, people will have trouble finding your Twitter site through the search engines. Also, make the Twitter site look like your blog or website by adding a custom background to it that complements your blog or website.

5.  Be sure to include your web address on the Profile page of your Twitter site, so people will be able to go to your blog or website easily.

6. Once your Twitter site is set up and you have tweeted a few times, begin to look for followers who will be potential customers or clients. Follow folks who are interesting to you, so that you'll have an easier time engaging them in a Twitter conversation.

7. Once you start tweeting, be sure to make the tweets interesting and valuable to potential customers. The hard sell does not work on Twitter.  If you are constantly putting out tweets telling your followers to buy your product or to become a client, they will soon lose interest in you. Instead, make your tweets informative, ask questions, be helpful to other tweeters when they ask for information, send out links to interesting websites, just chat and be generous by re-tweeting the tweets of others when they might be of interest to your followers. Then, about 10% of the time, sent out a tweet with the link to your blog or website when you have posted new information on it or when you have something special going on. If you take this softer approach, people will visit your blog or website due to your interesting tweets rather than running from you due to the hard sell.

Learn more about this author, Lou Belcher.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.