4 rules for how to use Twitter to market your product

Social media is a vital tool in today’s business landscape.

Those businesses that avoid products like Twitter risk falling behind the competition to a drastic degree. There are right and wrong ways to use Twitter to its full potential though. Not every tweet will have the same impact.

Here are some basic rules for organizations looking to use Twitter:

1. Tweet often.

Someone new to Twitter might think that tweeting the same thing repeatedly is obnoxious.

However, think of it another way. If the average person follows a couple hundred accounts, how often do they see one specific tweet from one specific handle when browsing? It is rare.

Therefore, the best way to catch eyeballs is to send out tweets often.

There are programs that can automate your tweets. These are useful tools that will help you grab the largest possible audience without spending copious amounts of time on a menial task.

The software can send out a specific tweet every three hours for four days, for example. This schedule catches people at different times of the day and for more than one day.

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2. Use relevant hashtags.

It is important to make each tweet as useful as you can by finding relevant hashtags.

Every field or content area has tags related to it and many large companies do as well. By adding tags to a tweet, anyone who searches for that term or tag will see your tweet, not just your followers. This vastly increases your coverage with minimal extra effort.

Relevant hashtags can sometimes be tricky to identify.

The practice is different than finding trending topics. Each field has terms that those within the field (or at the company) know and use. McDonald’s will use the tag #McCafe. ASEA from Twitter has its own #ASEAlife tag. These examples exist across all businesses.

A good hashtag is a unique identifier, but uses common sense so that a person attempting to search for your product will be able to guess the correct keywords to use. A good practice is to imagine yourself as a customer looking for information and position your hashtags to answer the questions you would have as a consumer.

3. Follow your followers.

For growing businesses and new accounts, Twitter is a great place to grow a following. The easiest way to do this at first is by following loads of active people.

Many people will follow back, increasing your reach. If they don’t follow back, it is easy enough to unfollow and try again with someone else.

More importantly, find other users within the same or similar field to follow. This creates a sense of community, and the same thing can exist on a larger scale with businesses. In addition, tweeting at popular people within a specific field could make you visible to those who also follow that popular person and can be a stepping stone to attracting followers.

4. Re-post your content with appropriate tags.

Keeping tweeting. Send out a link to a specific product with one set of hashtags, then send out the same link with a different set of tags. Do so again with a different title and a third set of tags.

Each step interacts with a different subset of the populace. After your first batch, do all three of your steps again three hours later to catch everyone who missed your first set. Without management software, this can be chore, but legwork gets results.

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