5 Tips on using Twitter for sales

Social media is a great way to open your business up to new clients. Way back in the olden days — pre-Internet — many businesses were limited by geography and collecting information on a customer base was a time-consuming and expensive process.

Today you can use platforms such as Twitter to not only advertise to potential buyers, but also target and research them. Those 140 characters can be an amazingly effective sales tool if wielded correctly.

Let’s take a look at what it takes to sell well on Twitter and maybe get a glimpse of how not to try generating sales.

1. Target Companies and Titles

One of the first rules of Twitter marketing is be selective. Use search functions to discover companies and people to contact directly instead of spamming all of your followers with tweets that may not be that relevant to them. Start by doing basic searches on Twitter using industry keywords. Let’s say you're interested in social media. Use Twitter’s search function to look for “Technorati social media.” The results will show you who’s writing about it, who’s researching it, and related tweets.

When you want to look for individuals in a specific position — say finance bloggers — try Google’s Twitter search. Just type in “finance blogger” and voila. Google will give you the results of everyone with “finance blogger” in their profile or updates.

With that kind of information at your fingertips you can choose who to reach out to, ensuring that your message has the best possible chance of being received well.

2. Giveaways and Coupons

Twitter giveaways are a worthwhile way to use social media to attract new customers and so easy to do, too. Say you’re a furniture store and you are doing to do a coffee table giveaway for the holidays. Have your followers retweet your giveaway message to be entered for a chance to win and create a giveaway-specific hashtag for them to use like #freecoffeetable.

Every time one of your followers retweets the giveaway message, all of their followers will see it. It’s a great way to build a following. Just be sure you make following your Twitter account a requirement for entering the giveaway. Coupons are similar. Just tweet the coupon code with a link to your site. Make the coupon code you use on Twitter unique so you can measure how many Twitter followers took you up on your coupon offer

If you’re looking to jumpstart your business’s presence on Twitter, you might want to considerpromoted tweets. These are tweets that are basically paid advertisements that will appear on targeted Twitter user timelines.

Marketers can target users by: 1) Keywords, 2) Interest, 3) Geography, and 4) Gender. Many businesses have reported seeing positive results from their promoted tweet campaigns.

4. Conversation Starter

One of the best things about social media for business is it opens up a conversation with your followers. You aren’t just mailing out direct mail postcards to a list of strangers, which usually gets pitched anyway.

You have the opportunity to actually talk to potential customers. Opening that dialogue is a great step toward building brand loyalty and earning new sales. Once you’ve started the conversation, don’t ignore it and let it fall into an awkward silence. Be responsive to your followers. Answer their questions, handle their complaints, and show them you care about meeting their needs.

5. Don’t Oversell Yourself

This is a hard one for some entrepreneurial spirits to grasp. Twitter is about making connections, not about selling to every follower with every single tweet. If you think of it like a party, how likely are you to hang out with someone who just talks about themselves?

Twitter is similar. No one wants be bombarded with 20 offers a day to buy your new book or sign up for your new service. Be selective in the timing and the content of your promotional tweets and focus a majority of your tweets on crowd-pleasing messages that don’t have anything to do with you wanting them to buy something from you.

Twitter can be a fantastic tool for driving sales, just make sure you’re using it correctly for maximum return.

Author: Courtney Gordner

Main image credit: Hubspot

Sourch: Technorati.com

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The Top 7 Twitter Imperatives For Bloggers

Many bloggers accustomed to dealing with topics in 400 to 600 words are finding concentrating their messages down to a mere 140 characters to be extremely challenging. Twitter can be a minefield and the slightest error can cost you readers and reputation, so follow these top 7 blogger imperatives for Twitter and rise to the level of a whiz tweeter, not a whizzing twit.

1. Wach ur Spelink & Gramma – Your Twitter content represents your blog and if you’re illiterate in your tweets then the reader can expect more of the same in your blog. Even though you only have 140 characters to work with, abbreviations are generally frowned upon, so it’s best to state what you have to say very concisely but in perfect English.

2. Ice your head first – The CEO of the leading company in your field has done something so profoundly cretinous that they’re making Steve Ballmer look like Albert Einstein, so your first temptation is to fire off a tweet calling him a moron and a bozo. You shouldn’t insult anyone on Twitter ever as it can come back to haunt you and will alienate many of your followers. You’re best off to criticize the factual policies, without engaging in ad hominem attacks.

3. Thicken your skin – One of the most frustrating things about being on Twitter is how many of your followers will not hesitate for a moment to call you a moron and a bozo. Just like you shouldn’t engage in vulgar tweeting about industry figures you have to restrain yourself from engaging in an exchange of expletives with instigators. Just ignore them and they’ll go find some other playground to engage in their silly games.

4. Just the facts ma’am – Twitter is a factual communications medium, so you’re best off to reserve your editorial ruminations to your blog and provide information and links which are both relevant and valuable to your reader. They read your blog to obtain the latest happenings in your industry, whether it be the specs on the latest 128GB SSD or what Lindsay Lohan has done now. “Just had a great Mocha Frappuccino #starbucks” is not really either relevant or valuable to anyone and it verges on…

5. Shill Shill Hurray (Not) – The great dirty non-secret of Twitter is that influential tweeters can cash in bigtime. When a major celebrity movie or sports star makes an offhanded remark about how great their shoe/car/watch/whatever is you can bet that their motivation is not altruistic sharing of a great customer experience but a real big check.

As a blogger you have a responsibility to remain unbiased and balanced, so ranting on about how fantastic a specific product is will communicate to your readers that you’ve succumbed to payola and your opinions can no longer be trusted to be your own.

6. Politickmeoff – Are you writing a political blog? Then feel free to engage in all the political wagging your heart desires. If your blog is not related to politics in any way then your tweets should never broach the subjects. If your readers are seeking information on your industry’s latest news, they really couldn’t care less if you’re voting for or against Obama. You can make an exception when political maneuvering affects your industry, such as the Keystone XL pipeline being momentous for the oil business or the Stop Online Piracy Act shaking up internet providers.

7. No laughs for gaffes – We all laugh uproariously when a major twitter makes a boneheaded mistake, such as Ashton Kutcher railing against Penn State Coach Joe Paterno’s firing before learning it was due to a molestation scandal, Kenneth Cole connecting the violent Egyptian uprising to his new spring fashion collection, or Gilbert Gottfried making jokes out of the Japanese Tsunami.

So… what have learned, Dorothy? Don’t repeat their mistakes! You should be lighthearted in your tweets but not ever broach the limits of insensitivity or make factual errors. The wrong 140 characters can wipe out years of work building up your blog!

Hal Licino

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How To Add Official Twitter Follow Button to Blogger

Adding Twitter Follow Button to your website, making it easy for you to discover the Twitter accounts of your favorite reporters, athletes, celebrities, and other personalities. Using the Follow Button is as simple as a single click. You can also see the profile and latest Tweets of the account you want to follow by clicking the username next to the Button.

For publishers and brands, adding the Follow Button to your website and using Twitter to stay connected with your audience is a powerful combination. People who follow your account are much more likely to retweet and engage with your Tweets, and to repeatedly visit your website. Adding the Follow Button to your website is quick and easy.



Follow the steps given below add twitter follow button to your blog posts.

Step 1 : Go to "Edit HTML". Click on "Expand Widget Templates"

Step 2 : Scroll down to where you see below code:

<div class='post-header-line-1'/>

Step 6 : Now Copy below code and paste it just below the above code.

NOTE: If you can't find <div class='post-header-line-1'/> in your template, paste the code just before<data:post.body/> .

<div style='float:right;margin-right:5px;'>
Your Twitter Code Here
</div>

Now replace "Your Twitter Code Here" with the code, taken using below link:



http://twitter.com/about/resources/followbutton

Now save your template and you are done.


BloggerTipAndTrick 

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