Twitter is a short blog, 140 characters in length not much effort right, unless you start to think about how just 140 characters can work for your own business model. Use a url shortener (ex.http://tinyurl.com) rather then a whole link and save some character space and get your blog or web page link part of your message.
For the newbies twitter may seem at first to be challenging. Sort of like sitting in the middle of a super bowl game and trying to listen to all 120,00 people in the crowd. Don’t less this scare you away because sometimes tweets are about business and other times it is just about killing time. The trick to twitter marketing is to keep your audience interested without always blasting them away with the often hard sale,internet sales tactics common to all of our email today.
Twitter is about relationships and for the small business owner a chance at small time chat with local patrons who hopefully tell your friends to follow you. You see the personality of your tweets is the real salesmen not the business promotions. Building a list of followers is not about finding the buyer of your products or services but establishing short, intermittent relationships.
Here is some twitter lingo for you a message is a “tweet” and a “tweep” is a person that use twitter.
I read of a local pizza business, “Naked Pizza” in New Orleans that gave it a try locally for one month and they wanted to see if it would impact their small business.He’s gone so far as to erect a billboard outside his store publicizing Naked Pizza’s Twitter. Naked Pizza kept track of all the business coming in, phone calls, walk ins and realized it increased their business 150% in the initial month.
I truly believe Twitter can be used in any business model. A web site, a blog, Facebook account and a twitter account is probably the vehicle to use.
For my buddy Thomas Herrmann, who runs a wildlife control business in New York City. He is now using his phone, Facebook and twitter to say he is on his way to a raccoon problem in Brooklyn in Twitter. Twitter immediately posts the same message to his friends on Facebook. Thomas can post the photo with his mobile phone uploads to his his photo or photos to his Facebook account while doing an inspection. Later Thomas can write about it in his Facebook account and or reference the same job in twitter. Should the story prove interesting add it to his blog(he still needs one) and everything references to his business web site http://wnrsinc.com. A tweet to start the job, a tweet after linking to his photo on Facebook and a tweet to the blog story. Total time invested about twenty minutes and he marketed locally. Use Twitterfeed to put your rss feeds on Twitter
Add a few other tweets to let his friends and followers know he has a life like taking my daughter to a rehearsal at school, spent Memorial day boating for the day with the family or just spend 3 hours in a traffic jam on Fifth Avenue. May be a tweet mentioning some of his friends and followers(tweeps) business’s like met Sarah & Cindy at Guido’s Pizza in Manhattan and keep his followers following him.
Using Twitter to reach a local audience should be any small businessman’s goal. You can also link to other professionals in the industry read their blogs, join with them using Facebook and if you are in the wildlife control industry join my network and stay abreast of all of my marketing opportunities I offer the industry.
I got a message from another professional in the industry who needs to work globally for his business like me. Same rules apply but your audience is again about keeping friends & market the industry . Make announcements of new products and services, sales items and integrate it some items in your personal life . Feed a blog to the twitter, post video announcements etc.
You can follow me on twitter, seems you can follow most anyone on twitter these days too!
http://twitter.com/robbrussell
Or just follow the network at
http://twitter.com/WildlifeProNet
