There are many ways to use Twitter to market your organization, business or services.

Twitter is commonly used as a quick and easy way to microblog in 140 characters or less about the goings-on of one’s personal life. More and more businesses and organizations, however, are coming up with creative ways to use Twitter for effective online and word of mouth marketing.

First and foremost, Twitter is an interactive publishing medium. To use Twitter well for marketing you have to write, write often and write strategically.

Here are some high-level steps you need to take to use Twitter for marketing your organization, business or services

1. Get on Twitter – setup an account with a name that makes sense, is easy to spell and matches the name of your organization, business or services. If someone is already using your name then you have to get creative and come up with an alternative spelling or add a dash between two words etc.
2. Create a Twitter Marketing Strategy – Figure out how you can best use Twitter to your advantage and come up with a plan for how you’ll roll out your strategy including how you’ll get followers, the types of people/companies you’ll follow, posting frequency, posting content type, landing pages, on and offline promotion, etc. Some common Twitter strategies are:

• Post regular specials or sales on Twitter
• Use Twitter to search for people Tweeting questions you can answer as a way to build relationships and potential future customers
• If your business is mobile you can use Twitter to post your daily location
• Encourage word of mouth between your followers
• Post quality content with the aim to get others to Retweet and spread it to their followers
• Notify followers about events you’re attending or putting on

3. Start Following People on Twitter – Start following others on Twitter who are working in your industry or who are somehow related to your industry. See who those people are following. Follow some of those people too. Don’t go overboard following thousands of people right away or your account will quickly start looking like one of the many Twitter spammer accounts out there that follow thousands, have no followers and only post affiliate or viagra links
4. Setup URL Tracking using hootsuite or bit.ly or tinyurl so you can track which links you post get the most clicks
5. Use Proper Twitter Tools  & Twitter Etiquette – make sure you use good third party Twitter tool such as TweetDeck to enable you to post and read posts of those you’re following quickly and easily. Remember to not just post about yourself, how great you or your services are. Instead, interact with people, retweet useful & relevant content posted by those you’re following.
6. Setup Twitter Landing Pages on your company or organization’s website to optimize conversions when you drive people from your twitter page to your website.
7. Promote Your Twitter Address on your company or organization’s website, facebook page, in your email signature, etc. Even consider having your tweets publish directly to a section of your website or have your website blog posts publish directly to your Twitter account
8.Record, Measure & Assess Results. Keep doing what’s working. Stop doing what’s not working. Don’t be afraid to ask your followers for feedback along the way

What ways have you or others you’ve seen used Twitter to promote yourself, your organization, business or service?

Need help creating or implementing a Twitter marketing strategy? Contact us at Twitter Marketing Agency today for a free consultation and strategy session.

WordTwit is a WordPress plugin that utilizes the Twitter API to automatically push a published post to your Twitter account as a tweet. It allows all your Twitter contacts to keep up to date with your blog postings. One cool feature of WordTwit is that you can assign your own shortened url instead of using tinyurl.com or bit.ly or others. This way you get to build your own brand instead of someone else’s. In our case TwitterMarketingAgency.com is way too long of a domain to use, so instead we use http://www.stirbuzz.com. It’s not the shortest domain around, but it serves our needs of building our parent company’s “stir” brand. We are just kicking the tires on this baby, so will let you know how it goes.

bit.ly allows users to shorten, share, and track links (URLs). Reducing the URL length makes sharing easier. bit.ly can be accessed through our website, bookmarklets and a robust and open API. bit.ly is also integrated into several popular third-party tools such as Tweetdeck. A more full list of third party tools can be found on the bit.ly blog. Unique user-level and aggregate links are created, allowing users to view complete, real-time traffic and referrer data, as well as location and metadata. Tracking stats are available after users shorten their long links with bit.ly by clicking on the “Info+” link on bit.ly, or just adding a “+” sign to the end of any bit.ly link (for example, http://bit.ly/n0og+).
Read full bit.ly article on NYTimes