Twitter is one of the biggest and most successful social networking sites on the internet today. But as well as a fun way to connect with friends and family, many individuals, businesses, groups and organizations have realized that they can get their message out in to a wide but targeted audience by using Twitter as a marketing tool. Whether they are marketing a product, person, brand, event, organization, or company, they gain from Twitter marketing. Here are my Top 10 Good Reasons for using Twitter as a Marketing Tool.
1. It is free. There are no start up costs, rental costs, or maintenance costs. Of course, using Twitter as a Marketing tool will use up some of your time, especially when you are getting it going, but once set up, Twitter marketing can require only short bursts of work (10 or fifteen minutes per day) to keep everything flowing smoothly.
2. Twitter marketing is versatile, you can use it to promote a product, blog, website, person, event, group… pretty much anything really, although it generally works best if you stick to one niche, person, product, subject or thing for each Twitter account.
3. Twitter accounts are easy to set up and maintain, so you can have multiple accounts to reflect different blogs, businesses and websites etc. For instance, if you have more than one blog or business, you can run a Twitter account for each blog or business that you have. That way you can keep both your Twitter marketing focused and your Twitter followers effectively targeted.
4. Twitter is fashionable with a huge following from young people especially. By using Twitter as a marketing tool you can reach lots of groups, such as young people, who might be difficult or expensive to reach by more traditional marketing methods. Twitter marketing also shows that your company, or organization is up to date and has a modern outlook when it comes to marketing methods and approach.
5. By using Twitter as a marketing tool, you can also forge and keep direct contacts with your customers and readers, providing you with precious feedback that can help you identify areas where you are lacking and help to define where you might want to take yourself or your organization in the future. Customers might suggest new products that you might want to stock, for instance, or topics that you might want to cover, if you are a blog or a news site.
6. With such a limited amount of characters available for use in a tweet, the idea of using Twitter as a marketing tool can appear to be crazy to someone not used to tweeting. But in terms of Twitter marketing, the tweet itself is usually just a way of enticing people to click on a link and the beauty of Twitter is that you link to just about anything. Though usually you are going to take them to website which is promoting something that you want to market.
7. Twitter is great for networking too. If you are a marketing a blog, then you can meet people who will feature the blog in an online magazine. If you are marketing a product, then you may meet retailers who want to sell your product, or buy your product in bulk. If you are a musician, then marketing yourself on Twitter can lead to you forging contacts with record labels and agents who can arrange gigs for you.
8. Twitter is great for integrating with other social networking sites and also your own websites. It is easy to integrate with Facebook, for example, so that you can synchronize both accounts and post to both sites at the same time, which will save yourself time and potentially, money. The Twitter follow button can be added to your websites, if visitors to your website click on the button (and many will do!), it means that you will be able to keep contact with them and inform them of any updates, new products etc. that you bring out.
9. There are free programs available that allow you to automate many of the processes involved in Twitter marketing. For instance, if you go away, you can set software to automatically tweet your products for you while you are gone.
10. Twitter marketing can form an integral part of a wider and integrated marketing strategy. You can use it to promote a competition, for example, which is in turn part of a launch for a new brand or product. Twitter can give your brand character and body and make it real to the people that you are promoting to. Sign up on twitter now