How To Use Twitter For Internet Marketing

Twitter stands out from the crowd because of the fact that its so different from anything else out there. Twitter has seen massive growth and continues to grow, even with the constraints of 140 characters of text for the user! Don't be fooled though, its these very constraints that make it such an effective and 'real time' communication platform.

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MARKETERS BEWARE
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We're talking alot about what Twitter is and I think that you should be VERY aware of what it isn't. Twitter is not a big marketplace where people come to buy and sell things. It's at this point that most marketers get up and walk away - afterall, what marketers want to spend their time and effort somewhere where they are unable to promote their offers? That's mistake number 1!

Although its not a marketers dream, it does give you the perfect place to do what you should already be doing - building relationships!
Remember the golden rule of marketing? People buy from people and Twitter gives marketers a perfect platform to practice this from.

Ask yourself if you are more likely to buy something on a friends recommendation or from a large corporate advertisment? More of us are going to put our trust in our friends before we believe a large faceless corporation.

This is why Twitter is so powerful and why you as a marketer cannot afford to overlook it.

If you feel that it all sounds a little too much like hard work, you should close down this lens now and think about a career change. Marketing is all about putting the effort in now to reap the rewards later. Marketers who ignore Twitter are making a big mistake - in fact, most of the marketers that I see using Twitter are making mistakes too!

Unlike most other marketing platforms, Twitter will help you develop your skills as a marketer. In order to bring in the big paydays using Twitter, you MUST know your target audience inside and out - no guessing, no giving it a go and seeing what happens, this is serious marketing and should be treated so.

In just about every survey ever done, word of mouth advertising is the best kind you can get and the type that is most likely to turn visitors into shoppers. Get it right and you can be using Twitter as your very own cash machine!

Blasting out offers day after day just isn't going to cut it anymore and as the market develops, you have to accept and develop with it. But rush in without an understanding of the platform or without a clear plan of action and you are making a mistake that could cost you time and money.

The first thing that you MUST do when you want to start marketing on Twitter is to learn everything you can about your target market. You need to know this for any marketing campaign so feeling that you can just skip this step will lead you straight down that path of failure again. Remember, we are building a plan of action at this point, not getting on there and sending off 140 character offers.

Understand who you need to find on Twitter, who is your product or offer most suited to? If you are selling make up then targeting male builders all day long is going to waste your time and theirs.

Trying to locate the people interested in your offer is not as hard as it might look at first. There are plenty of third party platforms that allow you to locate the people you are looking for - twellow.com is just one of them. Once you have this first piece of information it becomes much easier for you to find out what your market is looking for and why they would want what you are offering. What do they hold dear - time, money, health? What are they looking for and what do they fear? All these questions are things that you should know about your market before you even think of sending a Tweet.

Get this part right and your offers will be attracting buyers like a magnet!

Every successful marketer knows their whole industry inside out and so should you. Knowing how your competition are marketing and the approach they take could give you valuable information. Using one of the tools such as twellow.com to find people working in your niche you can then follow them and watch their whole marketing campaign on Twitter.

Remember that you most profitable partners will more than likely come from the same niche as yourself so joining forces and working respectfully together will have far more benefits for you. Watch them, learn from them and improve on their efforts. Using tools such as twittergrader.com will give you a whole heap of information that you can use to quite literally pull your competition apart with. When you know what they are doing it becomes much easier to do it better than they can!

Once you know your market like the back of your hand its time to get started on following people and building up your contacts from within your niche. This will snowball and you can quickly build yourself a good base to start from.

When it comes to 'Tweeting' I always work by the 10% rule - less than 10% of my tweets will be commercial. This means that I will only send one in ten tweets an offer or service. The rest of them will be designed to build a relationship from. It could be that I offer a free report, update my followers with some of the latest news within that niche or industry etc. I hardly ever start tweeting about my personal life and what I am eating for my lunch. Of course it is important to balance it right so that people begin to know you so a few 'life' tweets should be placed in but not about your girlfriend dumping you etc :-)

After a while it will become easier for you to see which of your tweets work best and you can get a feel for your market and their wants and needs.

Earlier we spoke about adding people to your Twitter account and the effects would just snowball for you. Sometimes there can be factors that stop that from happening and you will want to increase your following in order to see the best results from your efforts. One thing that you should remember is that quality will always outweight quantity!

If you really are providing top notch content for your readers and followers, the one's you do get will be loyal and interested. There are lots of ways to get followers by using some of the tools listed below - give them a try!