With over one hundred and forty million users, Twitter is now well poised to become one of the most popular social media network. This apart, Twitter is now widely recognized as a powerful marketing tool by business enterprises. Twitter, if utilized properly, can prove to be an effective way to promote your business.
But the unfortunate aspect is many businesses that are using Twitter are making simple mistakes and not deriving the full benefits they could get from tweeting to their customers and prospects.
It may be worthwhile to note the five most common mistakes business houses commit on Twitter:
- Most businesses on Twitter do not have an effective and result-oriented strategy. Please know that Twitter marketing should integrate seamlessly with your overall marketing plan. Tweeting can be tedious and time consuming and you need to clearly set your goals. Simply sending out the occasional tweets with no definitive strategy will be unproductive.
- Excessive and frequent tweeting with uninspiring sales messages can never be a meaningful way to build followers. Try to establish yourself as an expert and a source of relevant and worthwhile information. The odd direct promotion is fine, but you must judiciously balance it with more interesting content. If you appear to be too blatant with your sales messages, you will not be received well by your followers.
- Again, many people are blissfully unaware that tweeting far too infrequently can be a costly mistake. Not tweeting regularly means you will never build up a large audience. Make it a point to tweet at least two or three times a week. But remember that you should have a constant source of fresh information and useful ideas to share. Having a wide selection of diverse tweets will motivate your followers to tweet more frequently.
- People forget that Twitter is a two way communication and you need to follow other businesses and people to develop a fan following. Be discerning and actively search for, properly identify, and follow people in your industry and/or market. It is very likely that quite a few people will follow you in return–helping you to build your audience. In fact, following relevant Twitters may be a useful method to pick up ideas for your own tweets.
- It is a pity many do not understand the potential of photo sharing. Please know that photo sharing is not difficult. Photo sharing apps such as TwitPic makes including pictures in your tweets simple and easy. It is common knowledge that sending out an inspiring and engaging message within the limited characters of a tweet can be intimidating. Instead, including a photograph can work wonders and can say a lot more than mere text.
Successful Tweets will have a punch and only relevant information. Using diverse keywords that could appear in Twitter searches is a compelling need. The diversity of keywords will appeal to different target audiences.
Twitter is witnessing phenomenal growth and businesses that fail to evolve a proper Twitter marketing strategy and use Twitter profitably to promote their products/services will be losing a great opportunity to enlarge their customer base and boost sales.