Twitter is an excellent way to promote yourself and your business as well as a place to share ideas and discuss your industry. However, there is a good way to do this and a bad way. Hint: The bad way includes spamming your website link over and over and over again.
- For more on the wrong way see this previous post: Ten Ways to Avoid Being Annoying Or Looking like A Spammer On Twitter
When using Twitter to promote yourself or your business, you have to consider your audience first. Remember that most people are not on Twitter to see ads or to have people try and sell them things. Most people are on Twitter to share ideas, thoughts and articles they’ve read online. They are on Twitter to discuss issues, current trends and to find out what’s happening nearby and around the world.
As you can see from the image above, the Twitter homepage encourages you to “Follow Your Interests.” Always keep that in mind when posting on Twitter.
If you’re using Twitter to promote yourself or your business, you’ll want to start by doing exactly what Twitter wants you to do: Follow your interests. Search through Twitter and follow those who are similar to you and who you find interesting. For example, if you’re a writer, you may want to follow other writers on Twitter to see what they’re talking about and sharing. You can follow some blogs and websites that interest you and your field as well. Following a good mixture of people will give you interesting information, insight and entertainment.
But how do you use that information to promote yourself?
If you’re following the right people, you’ll probably see that they’re sharing things that are interesting to you and your industry. As they do, you may want to retweet those messages or comment on them by replying. By doing so, you’ll eventually start to build relationships with some of the people you’re following and you’ll also make your own Twitter feed more interesting. This will make more people want to follow you and, in turn, those people will be more likely to retweet your posts in order to share them with their followers.
The more interesting, informative and entertaining you are, the more often your posts will be shared and the bigger audience you will build. This will likely mean that more people will visit your website since you (hopefully) placed it on your profile page.
In addition, you’ll likely want to share some of your own work on Twitter. Obviously you won’t want to spam out your link over and over. You don’t event want to send out just your homepage link. Remember why you’re on Twitter, to share your interests. The best way to share a link to your website is to write a blog post or an article on your site that you think may be interesting to your followers. Then you can share that link and people who follow you will actually want to read it and forward it on to others. This won’t just help you get traffic to your website, but you’ll also establish yourself as an interesting person and an expert in your field.
Another way to use Twitter to grow your business is to respond to questions that your followers may have. You may also want to use Twitter’s search function to find people who are talking about your products or services and take a moment to respond to them directly. This sort of proactive approach will yet people know that you care and that you’re informative. You may even learn something that can help you improve your company.
If you put effort into building relationships on Twitter and sharing and forwarding ideas and links, you’ll soon see a huge benefit for your business.
If you want to follow me on Twitter, you can reach me at @rmoldovanyi
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