Twitter is an excellent resource when it comes to marketing a small business. With the ability to reach thousands of consumers in a matter of seconds, Twitter is unlike any other online marketing tool. However, in order to get the most out of your Twitter marketing, you need to have a strategy in place to determine exactly how you will use it. With a plan in mind, you will be able to fully leverage all of the benefits associated with marketing your small business via Twitter.

Network to Gain Followers
Obviously, the goal of Twitter is to gain as many followers that you can in order to reach a large audience. When your account has a large number of followers, you will see a better response to your online marketing efforts. Taking the time to network with other Twitter users is a great way to gain additional followers for your account. Answering questions, entering into conversations taking place on Twitter and retweeting interesting content that you find are all great ways to network with other Twitter users to help grow your following.

Hashtags
Using hashtags is an excellent way to let people find your content on Twitter. By placing a hashtag that contains a keyword related to your business and content within each of your tweets, you will be able to get your content in front of people searching for those terms. Hashtags can also help raise your company’s brand awareness as you can include your company name or slogan in all of your Tweets.

Quality Content
The most important tip you can remember when using Twitter to market your small business is to always provide high quality content to your followers. Whenever you send out a tweet, you want to make sure it provides some type of value. This will ensure that people keep following your account because they will not view it as a waste of time to read your tweets. Also, consistently producing quality content for your Twitter followers will increase your chances of having your content retweeted, which can help you gain additional followers and exposure on the social media website.

Third Party Software
One reason why some companies are failing when it comes to their Twitter marketing is that they find it too time consuming and not worth their effort. Using third party software to help you manage your Twitter marketing can greatly reduce the amount of work required on a daily basis to manage your social media marketing campaign while also helping you remain focused on the task at hand. Many third party Twitter applications will allow you to schedule tweets in advance, allowing you to get all of your messages for a week lined up at once without having to do it on a daily basis. This can really help you effectively manage your Twitter marketing campaign by never missing an update.

Social media is becoming an increasingly effective way to market a small business. Of all of the social media websites one could use to market their business, Twitter is among the best as it allows you to reach a large number of consumers in a very short period of time. Running an efficient Twitter marketing campaign can have a significant impact on your business, which is why you need to focus some of your online marketing efforts to this social media website.

Images by: Shawn Campbell – CC BY 2.0