5 Tips For Growing Your Business With Twitter

Image via CrunchBase

Guest post by Lee. Using Twitter can be a great way to grow your business but you have to use it the right way in order to get good results. What most people don’t “get” about twitter is that it is a social networking tool, not a sales tool, and needs to be utilized as such.
Blasting out a flurry of tweets listing your products for sale isn’t going to do much to grow your business but if you implement the 5 tips below, I think you will soon see an increase in followers, customers and sales.

1. Work At Building Relationships

Perhaps the smartest thing you can do with Twitter is using it to build relationships of people in your niche. You want to build relationships with people that are leaders in your industry as well as people that could be your potential customers. Paying attention to the tweets from the leaders in your industry will give you great insight as to the latest news and may also give you some good ideas of things to implement in your own business.
Taking the time to build relationships with your followers, can add a personal touch that your customers or potential customers will really appreciate. This is important in the online world because you often don’t have face-to-face contact with your customers especially if you don’t have a brick-and-mortar store that they can come to in person.
You’ve probably heard that people buy from those whom they like, know and trust and taking the time to build a relationship is the 1st step in getting people to like, know and trust you.

2. Spend Time Each Day Managing Your Twitter Activity

It’s important to set aside time every day for managing your Twitter activity. You want to be finding good things to tweet about as well as watching your twitter feed to see what the people you are following are tweeting about. You also want to spend this time building relationships by retweeting other interesting tweets and having “conversations” with other people on twitter by using the @reply feature.
The key is that you need to be present on twitter and active in the community in order for people to remain interested in following you. You also want to be thoughtful about how you do this, don’t just blast out a bunch of tweets just to say you did. Take the time to tweet and retweet quality content and join in on conversations that are relevant to your niche and knowledge.

3. Send The Right Kinds Of Tweets

What you tweet is crucial to keeping your followers interested and engaged. You want to be sure to tweet stuff that is relevant to your niche with maybe a few personal things thrown in. Don’t go overboard and tweet about what you are doing every hour but if something interesting happens during the day in your personal life it can be good to tweet this as it lets your followers get to know you. That being said, you don’t want to make personal tweets the focus of your twitter campaign.
Some things you might consider tweeting about include industry news, milestones that you’ve met in your business, links to your latest informative blog posts, other blog posts and articles that you’ve stumbled across that you think your followers might benefit from, quotes, funny and entertaining things you found during your travels through the web.

4. Have A “Twitter Mindset”

When you first start using Twitter, you might be hard-pressed to find things to tweet about but if you develop what I call a “Twitter mindset” you will soon have more than enough content for your tweets.
What is a twitter mindset?
It simply means, thinking about twitter as you go about your daily business. You probably read a lot of articles and visit a lot of websites during your workday and if you simply evaluating each of these to see if it is something worth tweeting, you will have more than enough interesting and informative links to tweet about. It takes a little bit of practice, but after a while you find that you are automatically thinking “Oh, I should tweet this” when you come across content that you find is interesting and useful.

5. Think Less About Selling and More About Socializing

A lot of people look at their web activities to figure out how they can leverage the activity to sell more stuff. But with Twitter, this is totally the wrong mindset to have. Twitter is a social networking platform and you must use it socially in order for it to be effective. When you are on Twitter, think more about how you can connect with more people and what you can do to help them instead of how it can benefit you financially and you will get a lot better results.
Twitter can be a great platform to grow your business and increase your bottom line, but you do need to use it in the proper way. You want to treat twitter the same as you might treat a networking or social meeting in real life and use it for the contacts and relationships that you can build. If you do this the right way, the money will follow.

Related articles

• 10 ways to be grateful on Twitter (creativeramblings.com)
• A Starter's Guide to Increasing Brand Visibility on Twitter (hubspot.com)
• Getting the Most Out of Twitter Content (compukol.com)