Startup Guides > How to Become a Twitter Marketing Expert Quickly

You may know Twitter as a consumer application; however, many businesses, not to mention politicians, have realized in recent years that Twitter's effectiveness and reach make it perfect for marketing.

People these days have short attention spans, and sending out your message - known as a tweet - in a quick sentence or two can get the idea out there before potential customers have time to lose interest. But how can you successfully use Twitter marketing?

Once you've decided that Twitter is going to be a part of your marketing strategy, it's important that you take it seriously. Just because messages are limited to 280 characters or less doesn't mean you don't need to put in much effort. A Twitter account and campaign must appear professional and polished. Twitter allows you to set up brand pages that are similar to Facebook, which include call-to-action banners, custom backgrounds, featured tweets, and other tools at your disposal to help you effectively get the word out.


Although it may seem much more difficult to successfully utilize SEO because of a tweet's length (now 280 characters), it's really not. You simply need to learn how to take advantage of it. Start by creating a username that is unique and professional. You can change your username at any time, so if you change your mind later, that's fine. Also, be sure to include keywords in your bio. And finally, keep your tweets on the shorter side, between 240 and 260 characters, to compensate for any added letters when a person retweets your message.

The great thing about Twitter is that much of the legwork has already been done for you, as past businesses have tested a variety of techniques to figure out the best strategies. Here are a few that you can utilize for your business:

1. Use relevant hashtags.

You can create a hashtag with any word just by adding a pound sign (#) in front of it, but be sure that you're using this technique to integrate your tweets into the keywords that you'd find new clients from. It's also a good idea to watch trends and then use appropriate hashtags that are currently trending.

2. Post to multiple outlets at once.

By connecting your Twitter account to your Facebook page and business blog, you can have a single tweet find itself to all of your social media outlets at once.

Social media services like 40Billion make this easy by broadcasting and promoting your tweets to a large network of several million users across the most popular social networking sites - including Twitter, LinkedIn, 40Billion, and even Facebook. Innovative services like promoted posts and promoted company listings were created for businesses and marketers to tap into a growing, active network online without spending a lot of money and wasting a lot of time on pay-per-click ads or traditional advertising.

3. Post free offers.

Give out something free on Twitter, if you plan to. Your message will be retweeted, which can spread your business name around very quickly.

Some businesses still refuse to see the marketing power of Twitter, probably because of its low character count. But when used wisely, you can go a long way to gaining added exposure to your companies or campaigns.

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