12 Quick Twitter Marketing Tips to Help Your Business Grow

Contrary to what some business owners and executives think, Twitter can be a great tool for attracting new customers and developing relationships with them – provided that you use it in the right way. That means it’s important to keep a few ground rules in mind, and then to keep at it until you start to see the right results (success on Twitter is rarely ever instant).
In fact, there is an art and science to building your Internet marketing profile 140 characters at a time, and it amounts to more than just getting lots of followers. To help you out, here are a dozen of our top Twitter marketing tips that you can use right away:
1. Choose the right username. Yours should be easy to understand and remember, without a lot of numbers or strange spellings. Beyond that, you get big points for creativity.
2. Always “follow up.” If you have a colleague or contact with a much stronger following, it’s a good idea to follow them and see if they’ll do the same. It’s an old tactic, but a great way to build your list of followers quickly.
3. Say it with pictures. The most popular tweets usually aren’t text or characters at all; post an interesting or thought-provoking picture if you want to spur a discussion.
4. Treat links carefully. It’s okay to occasionally link back to an item on your site, but if you do nothing but send followers to your product pages, it won’t be long before they’ll stop following your links altogether.
5. Limit the sales talk. In the same way, it’s important that you don’t focus only on marketing messages. People don’t go onto Twitter to be sold, and they’ll tune you out if your tweets are uninteresting.
6. Embrace controversy. Challenging the conventional wisdom is always a good way to get people talking and thinking, so don’t be afraid to embrace a viewpoint that isn’t conventional.
7. Avoid insensitivity. Don’t be rude or willfully insensitive just to attract attention. It might work in the short term, but it probably won’t lead to any new sales.
8. Be mindful of privacy. As many businesses and celebrities have learned, you have to be careful about what you tweet, even to another person, because it could easily become public information.
9. Stay on message. It’s easy to tweet about the first thing that comes to mind, but smart marketers stay on task, and on message.
10. Leave room for re-tweets. Although 140 characters isn’t a lot of room to start with, try to save a few of them so there will be room if one of your contacts wants to re-tweet your message.
11. Watch the trends. One of the best ways to attract attention and followers is by commenting on popular news and events, so watch the trends.
12. Use popular hashtags. In the same way, your customers may pay attention to certain hashtags and subjects, so use those as a starting point for your content.
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