WHAT CAN TWITTER DO FOR YOUR BUSINESS?

Online marketing is a fantastic way to build a business. You can do it from your own home, at your own pace, according to your own schedule and sometimes even without startup costs. Providing advice and promoting products across the Web can help you build a successful seven-figure company. It can start in your bedroom and even since take you on speaking tours across the country and around the world. But creating an Internet business—even a small one—does require work, and part of that work involves staying up to date with the newest tools and the latest online innovations.

That's not as easy as it sounds. Not every “next big thing” turns out be a giant. The Web is littered with links leading to services that promised a great deal, delivered little, and faded away. Part of building a successful online business means knowing which tools are likely to be useful revenue-generators and which are going to be major time-wasters. Sometimes, that's obvious. It was pretty clear when Facebook and MySpace came along that they were going to be both powerful and useful.

The ability to renew old friendships and maintain current ones with very little effort—and for no cost—was always going to attract large numbers of people. And the ease with which entrepreneurs could use those sites to build networks and keep their market interested and engaged meant that an understanding of social media has become hugely important for online marketers. The value of Twitter was far less obvious. The system really couldn't be any simpler. It lets anyone send a message no longer than 140 characters that answers the question “What are you doing now?”

You can send that message at any time, from your computer or from your mobile phone, and it can be seen by anyone who has chosen to follow those messages. That's really all there is to it.

I told you it was simple. It doesn't sound like much, and for Internet entrepreneurs used to writing 300- to 500-word blog posts several times a week, it also sounds painfully restrictive.What on Earth can you put in 140 characters that could possibly be worth reading?

Surely you can‘t promote products, build a brand, generate interest in your company, and keep people reading with such small amounts of content? The answers, it turns out, are “a lot” and “yes, you really can!” Twitter has proven itself to be incredibly addictive and, for business owners, very valuable too. Ever since I stumbled onto Twitter, I've spent many hours thumb-typing messages. I do it frequently and I love it. It's fantastic fun, like writing a personal blog but without the effort. 

The pleasure alone would be enough reason for me to recommend Twitter, but Twitter isn't just good fun. It's also proven to be a very important and easy way of finding new users and customers, a powerful networking tool, and an excellent way of picking up useful information. It's helped you to build deeper relationships with your partners, clients, and other entrepreneurs. It's can extended the reach of your brand, making the name of your business known to people who might never otherwise have heard of it. As for me, it has brought me advice and suggestions from experts I couldn't have reached any other way. It brings me a steady stream of additional Web site users and provides a channel for me to alert people who have visited my sites when I've uploaded new content. 

And it's brought me some fascinating reading and a bunch of wonderful new friends, too. In this article, I'm going to explain what you can do to get the most out of Twitter and make microblogging—the sending of tiny messages—work for your business. I'll start with a quick introduction to social media. Twitter grew out of the online networking craze that had given sites like MySpace and Facebook such giant valuations. Although Twitter can work wonders when used alone, it's at its most powerful when combined with other social media tools. This article will focus on Twitter, but I'll begin with an overview of social media sites so that you'll find it easy to connect your microblogging with other forms of online networking. 

I'll then describe Twitter. I'll explain how it works, what the service can do, and exactly why it's so powerful. The site might look small, but it packs a surprising punch. I'll explain the reason behind Twitter's super powers.Twitter also lets its members create profiles to introduce themselves to other users. The profiles are pretty basic. You won't find any of the fancy bells and whistles that you can expect to see on other social networking sites. But that doesn't mean you should stick to the fundamentals. 

Your profile is an important marketing page. With a little thought and just a touch of creativity, it can function as a useful entry point to your commercial site and help raise the profile of your business. I'll discuss what to include, how to design it, and how to make the page pay. I'll then talk about the most important thing you'll need to know on Twitter: how to build a following. That's vital. Although every message—or “tweet,” as they're called on Twitter—is public, if no one knows you're there, no one will know to read them.

There's a huge list of different strategies that Twitterers are using to build up followers, make new contacts, and keep in touch. Some of them are very simple. Others are a little more complex and require a bit of thought—and sometimes even a little expense, too. I'll talk you through some of the most effective ways that I've discovered to build up followers.

Finding followers isn't difficult. Much harder is keeping them. That's only going to happen if you create the sort of content that people actually want to read. There's nothing new about that. Anyone who has ever tried to generate revenue with a Web site knows that content is king. When you can write articles and posts of any length you want, upload videos, and show off your images, there are plenty of options and lots of flexibility. When you‘re restricted to a message of no more than 140 characters, though, creating interesting content sounds much more challenging. 

It is more challenging, but it's also a lot more fun. You can do it quickly, without making great demands on your audience and—once you get used to it—without a great deal of thought. I'll explain what makes good Twitter content and talk you through some of the sorts of messages that successful Twitterers are sending.

Tweets, though, are just a means to an end. The goal of using Twitter is to build relationships—especially relationships that can benefit your company.I discuss connecting with customers on Twitter by problem-solving, winning referrals, and supplying support; and I talk about using Twitter to communicate with team members, especially when they're scattered in different places. 

Once you've built up your following and are enjoying using Twitter, you can start to make all that effort pay off. There are a number of ways to do that, and I'll talk about them in detail as well. The first is brand extension. Twitter can be a very effective branding tool for any business, and it's been used by some of the world's largest companies to drum up publicity for their products. I'll discuss ways you can use your tweets and your followers to extend the power of your company's name, as well as the rules for effective brand-building with Twitter. 

Blog posts can also be promoted using Twitter—an important way to turn your followers not just into visitors but also into cash—and so can stores and other retail outlets. Although Twitter is not strictly a commercial area, with carefully written content, it is possible to directly increase your conversions and make extra sales. And like Facebook, Twitter has also created a network of add-ons and applications that help its users get even more out of the service. I'll introduce you to some of the most useful and, in my subsequent post; I will explain how to add powerful solutions to the Twitter platform. 

Finally, later in my post I'll provide a day step-by-step plan for dominating Twitter that will take you from a Twitter Johnny-No-Friends to a powerful social networking force in just one month. Twitter is very restrictive. It doesn't allow users to make videos, upload rich media content, or do any of the fancy things you might have become accustomed to on other sites. Nor is it a sales arena. Although businesses are using Twitter to increase their revenues and make money, thinking of the site as a low-cost—even free—way to advertise is not going to bring results. 

In fact, that's just going to cost you time you could have spent doing something far more rewarding. At its most basic, Twitter is a communication tool. It's a channel that lets you speak to lots of people and enlighten them about your life and your work. You can think of it as a giant virtual water cooler. It's a place where people come to get to know each other, to make friends, to network, and, most importantly, to converse. It's not a place where people come to sell—and pushing sales hard on Twitter just isn't going to work.

On the other hand, if you do manage to build up friends on Twitter, you should find that those friends see you as the first stop for the products or services they need. People always prefer to do business with people they know, and they get to know them by talking to them and swapping ideas with them. On the Internet, people are doing that on Twitter.