Recently a woman in my local blogging group asked:
“Anyone know much about tweeting? Good “get started how to’s??” I want to drive more traffic to my blog and Etsy store … thanks in advance”.
Because so many of you have asked similar questions about Twitter, I thought it would be a good day to discuss how to use Twitter for building your business and getting traffic to your blog.
For those you who are not familiar with Twitter, it is a social network that allows you to send out mini-updates, or in Twitter lingo, “tweets” in 280 characters or less. Unlike Facebook, Twitter is a very basic, fast-moving conversation, where profiles contain limited amounts of information, and individuals don’t need permission to be your “friend.”
So how do you use this fast-moving social media platform to drive traffic to your blog and market your business?
How to Use Twitter to Promote Your Business or Blog
1. Add Your Blog’s RSS Feed
Because Twitter is such a basic platform, you’ll need to use some third-party applications to help manage your account. The first thing you’ll want to do is to sign up for a Hootsuite account; here you can add your blog’s RSS feed, and it will automatically push out new blog posts for you, hence driving traffic to your blog. You can also use Hootsuite to schedule tweets, reply to conversations, and you can even sync it up with other social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn, allowing you to manage the majority of your accounts in one place.
2. Join a Tribe
To get more eyes on your blog posts, you’ll want individuals to re-tweet (RT) your content. While some of this sharing will happen organically, it can be helpful if you’re part of a tribe that helps to spread each other’s content around on Twitter. Triberr is a third-party application, that allows individuals to do just that, but automatically. How it works is each tribe member has their blog’s RSS feed linked into Triberr, then on a daily basis members log in to the platform and approve or deny tweets from their tribe. Once tweets are approved, they are automatically staggered and scheduled for publication on your Twitter stream. Triberr allows your blog posts to be seen by more people, by collectively working together for greater exposure.
3. Get Even More Eyes on Your Blog
Just ReTweet is a community where individuals share each other’s content, and by doing so, they earn credits. So if you have a blog post that you would like shared by the community, Just add the tweet, the number of credits you’re willing to give each member for sharing the tweet, and you’re done. Credits can be earned quickly by following, re-tweeting and filling out your account information… however credits can also be purchased giving you more Twitter RT power. The one thing I really like about this community is because it is set up through a rewards system, individuals are more likely to share and participate, where a lot of other communities seem to be based on popularity and self-service.
4. Offer Something of Value
I’m personally not a big fan of automated direct messages on Twitter, but with this said, I’ve seen a few companies do automated messages really well. To set up an automatic direct message, you’ll need to use a third-party application called Social Oomph. What happens is when someone new follows you on Twitter, you can send them an automatic direct message using Social Oomph. But a word of warning, if you’re going to do this you need to offer the individual something of significant value – a coupon for 10% off or free shipping could be enticing.
5. Use Hashtags
One of my favorite ways to use Twitter is as a search tool. So that your updates are quickly and easily found, be sure that you’re using keywords and hashtags. Simply put, a hashtag is a word or phrase that is preceded by the pound sign (#) and it is used to identify a certain topic. By adding hashtags to your tweets, you can ensure that your tweets will be found in relevant search queries. Not sure which hashtags to add to your content? Use a tool like Hashtagify to help determine popularity, trends, and word correlations.
6. Join the Conversation
While I’ve mentioned a bunch of different tools and techniques for building your business and blog traffic on Twitter, by far the best way to market yourself is to join the conversation and build relationships. Just like in face to face encounters, you need to be gracious, respectful, and genuine. Ask questions, reply to queries, thank individuals for RTs, and always remember to give more than you take. One fun way to do this is to join a Twitter Chat; these are generally scheduled conversations around a certain topic. In fact, my good friend Melissa just wrote a post on a bunch of different Twitter Chats you can get involved with.
7. Monitor
You can monitor what people are saying about you and your brand, just by using the Twitter search function. I just used the search to locate what people were saying about The Work at Home Woman and I found some tweets about my blog, and then other random tweets about women working from home.
Another unique way you can monitor on Twitter is by using this format in Twitter’s search box from:TheWAHWoman OR to:TheWAHWoman and you can see all the messages that I have sent and received. So that if you have someone managing your Twitter account for you, you can monitor what they are tweeting and how they are responding.
8. Engage
Now that you are monitoring what people are saying about your brand, when someone tweets, “Brand X Rocks” you can reply back, “Thanks for the mention, we appreciate it”. The cool thing about Twitter is it allows you to connect with your audience on a more personal level. You can both reply to tweets coming through the stream and send out your own personal tweets.
9. Sell
Of course, you’ve probably already figured this one out; you can tweet out coupon codes, sales, and promotions that you are running, but some companies have really figured out a unique to sell their products using Twitter. Kodji BBQ delivers Korean BBQ and will tweet out the location of where their truck will be at a certain time. According to Guy Kawasaki, when the Kodji truck pulls up to the specific location they will be 50 or more people there waiting for this delish Koren BBQ. Just think about how you could use Twitter in this manner to increase sales for your business.
10. Support
Companies like Comcast and HP have created specific Twitter accounts to deal directly with customer service issues and concerns letting the public know that these companies care. Of course, you don’t have to create a separate Twitter account for your customer service issues, but perhaps you tweet out, “Happy to answer any questions you may have about our business” just letting your customers know that you’re there for them is huge!
11. Prospect For Clients
This is a really neat way to find new customers and clients on Twitter. Just do an advanced search, with your keyword, ideal customer and where they would be located. So let’s say, I make delicious cupcakes and I’m looking for people in Austin who love cupcakes. Once I get my search back about people who are tweeting about cupcakes and their love for them, I decide to follow these people on Twitter, because there is a good possibility that they will enjoy my cupcakes, heck I may even send them a coupon for a free cupcake to get them in the door of my establishment. The possibilities for prospecting are endless. You can also do an advanced search of an individual’s Twitter Bios, so using the same example, here are the results I would get.
Conclusion.
Just like anything else, marketing your blog and business on Twitter takes time, effort, and consistency, but if you join in the conversation and focus on building relationships the rest will fall into place.
And if you’re interested you can find me @TheWAHWoman. What’s your Twitter handle? How are you using Twitter to promote your business or blog?
Bound for Style
Loved this post! I use twitter a lot for my business and it really helps. I also use a tool for it. Thanks for this awesome post!
Holly - The Work at Home Woman
Glad you enjoyed the article!
Ian Zafra
There are a lot of tools to boost your business’ online presence and I can say that Twitter is one of those valuable tools. It also helps you reach out to a larger scale of audience.
Rick Magennis
Great tutorial Holly!
I just started an internet business and started a Twitter account, but did not know how to utilize it. Hootsuite and Triberr are going to be great tools for me to use to get my site exposure. I was always wondering how to get my tweets RT, and now I finally figured it out.
I have been waiting for an article that could help me generate more traffic and I found it.
Thanks again
Nancy Lundy
Thank you, Holly. I just joined Hootsuite. As a organizational freak, I just love having everything in one place. FANTASTIC! Thank you so much for all the knowledge you have passed on to me. I am forever grateful!
Holly - The Work at Home Woman
You’re welcome Nancy! You’ll love Hootsuite, it’s super easy to use.
Martine | Work at Home Mom Writer
I only started to come out of my shell on Twitter very recently. I’m so grateful for the new friends I’ve met there. It’s really about building a relationship with your Twitter friends, isn’t it?
A friend invited me to Tribber, and it’s working well so far — still figuring it out, though. And I still have much to learn about using Twitter effectively, so thanks for these tips, Holly.
Holly Hanna
Hi Martine,
It really is about building and cultivating relationships, the other tools are just accessories to the main outfit.
Triberr can be a little confusing, especially when you start creating your own Tribe – but I think it’s a great community tool, if you get with the right tribe and don’t compromise your values.
Gail Gardner
I hope you don’t mind some Twitter tips. First, if you use a plugin that encourages your commenters to leave their Twitter usernames, you can answer their comments and tweet to them (bringing your post more traffic for each time you do that).
You can also more efficiently get to know them and your readers will start following each other and then tweeting about what you’re writing or their own and others’ comments.
Also, if you configure your tweet tool to include your Twitter username you will get more followers and more RTs. Right now yours promotes @Shareaholic but not you.
Gail Gardner
Twitter is my primary and strongest social network and every blogger really needs to be active there because it is how we spread links and support each quickly.
You mentioned Ana so I’m surprised that you don’t use CommentLuv. One of the very best ways to generate more traffic and grow your influence is to be part of our community – and if you decide to be part of our DoFollow CommentLuv community there are huge benefits and many influential bloggers who will promote your content and interact with you.
I write about Twitter all the time and rounded up all my how-to Twitter posts and other’s getting started posts and videos in one Twitter Best Practices post. You can get there by clicking on my name in this comment.
Holly Hanna
Hi Gail,
Those are definitely great ways to reward your readers. I used to use the CommentLuv and DoFollow plugins, but they slowed my page loads down, so to make reader’s experience a more positive one, I got rid of any non-essential plugins to speed up my page loads.
Good suggestions – thanks for stopping by!
Valentine Belonwu
Hi Holly,
Thanks for writing such an awesome blogpost and revealing ways on how to use Twitter to grow your business. And thanks to including JustRetweet on your list :)
Valentine
Holly Hanna
You’re welcome Valentine! Thanks for introducing me to JustRetweet – it’s a really great Twitter tool!
Anna
The thing I’ve learned about using Twitter is that it doesn’t take spending a lot of time over there to make a real difference. About 15 minutes a day max will do wonders!
I also installed a plug-in called “Tweet Old Post” that will tweet out the links to older posts I’ve written sporadically throughout the day. You can set it to do it as little or often as you like, and you can also tell it to omit certain posts or categories if you don’t want to share them.
Great information! Thanks :)
Holly - The Work at Home Woman
I totally agree Anna, it doesn’t take a lot of time to be useful on Twitter. I spend about 10 minutes a day on there, and the majority of that time is spent chatting with people.
Thanks for letting me know about “Tweet Old Post” I hadn’t heard about that one before.
Barbara
Even though it is more basic it seems that there is more of a technique to Twitter and it’s important to know the best way to use Twitter if you want to be successful.
Holly - The Work at Home Woman
Hi Barbara, I know when I first started on Twitter I wasn’t sure what to tweet, but after some observation and trial and error, I slowly figured it out. And just remember there is no one right way to tweet, Guy Kawasaki has a totally different strategy, than say Chris Brogan – yet both are known as social media experts. Thanks for stopping by!