June 20, 2009

Twitter Marketing Tips: 6 Steps to Make your Brand on Twitter

Building your brand on Twitter is an important part of your success on Twitter. It is imperative that you not only build a targeted following, but more importantly that you create a conversation with or at a minimum provide your followers with useful information.

In this post, I am not going to go over the basics such as filling out your Twitter profile and uploading an avatar. Instead lets focus on you and your twitter brand to succeed.

Be Proactive
Many tweeps commonly have questions or problems they need help with. This is your opportunity to step in and come to the rescue by answering their question or atleast referring them to a source that may help them. By helping them, you not only solve their issue, you help establish credibility and identity among the Twitter community.

It is an even better opportunity to help someone out by offering your product or service to resolve their problem. Not only can this produce a targeted lead, but it can result in a sale.If you are not proactive in your niche or area of business, chances are someone else will come along and be proactive. They will establish the credibility among the community, build the dedicated following, while you are trying to play catch up. You don’t want that, do you?

Share What’s Happening/Be Newsworthy
If you are typically digging up the newest social media marketing trends or other industry topics, why not share them with your followers? This sort of falls into the proactive step listed above. However, providing your followers with newsworthy information, you will establish credibility of being “in the know”.

Make sure what you are sharing is important and interesting. If you are trying to share something lame, chances are no one will care and you will probably lose some credibility among your followers. If you don’t have anything unique to share, this is a great opportunity to retweet something that was tweeted to you and will strengthen your relationship of whom you retweeted.

Create a Targeted Following
What good is it to have a bunch of followers if they are not interested in what you have to say? Not much. This is why it is imperative to build a targeted following with people interested in your business or service. Chances are it will be easier to be proactive and newsworthy with them. I've found the twitter advanced search feature very useful especially for local business. http://search.twitter.com/advanced

Engage Your Followers
Not only should you be proactive and newsworthy with your followers, you need to engage with them on a more personal level. By this I mean you should take the time to respond to DM’s and @replies when you can. While it can be somewhat time consuming, ignoring followers trying to interact with you is not a great idea. Isn’t your goal to build a brand and relationship with your followers? I suggest you build relationships with those followers who ARE interested in what you have to say.

Brand Your Twitter Page
Pimping out your Twitter page is a good idea. A tricked out page not only is eye catching, but it helps to set you apart from everyone else. It shows you are actually real (not a bot) as well as an opportunity to provide your Twitter visitors with more information about you or your business.

Monitor Your Brand
Now that you are on your way to taking over the world with your brand, it is important to monitor it. Twitter makes this easy via the Twitter Search. Simply type in your business or username, then add the RSS feed to your favorite reader.(I use tweetdeck for this) Should your name get discussed (both positively and negatively) you will be aware of the conversations taking place. You can then step in to participate, both for damage control or to thank someone for their positive remarks. I would not advise ignoring negative feedback, it could severely damage your reputation if left un-attended.

In a Nutshell
So here is the quick checklist:

Be Proactive
Be Newsworthy
Create a Targeted Following
Engage Your Followers
Brand Your Twitter Page
Monitor Your Brand

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