Unleash the Power of Twitter as an Inbound Marketing Tool

Those who scoff at Twitter as an inane, ego-centric, attention-grabbing waste of time are overlooking its potential as a powerful inbound marketing tool. While many people do use Twitter to provide a running commentary on the tedious minutia of their daily lives, Twitter is also the powerful instant disseminator of news events as they happen and the dynamic instigator of exhilarating flash mobs. While its 140-character limit enforces message  brevity, the immediacy and phenomenal reach of Twitter -- it can instantly reach millions of people -- make it one of the most powerful inbound marketing tools available today.

As in all marketing strategies, the trick is to use Twitter effectively and creatively to promote your business and disseminate information of value to potential customers. Rather than think of tweeting as a random jumble of unconnected thoughts, consider each tweet to be a sentence in an ongoing microblog. Give your daily tweets a comprehensive focus or message by tweeting on a theme or pegging tweets to a news event or concentrating tweets on a single aspect of your business. Like the old Burma Shave signs that used to grace the highways with a series of pithy thoughts, let your daily tweets build on each other. In creating each tweet, contribute to a central thought, allowing the culminating thoughts to come together in the recipient's mind like the pieces of a puzzle form a picture. Be yourself. People follow personalities and perceived experts, not robots. Tweeting every few hours on the same theme builds anticipation for the next tweet while cementing your business or brand in customers' minds.

Using Twitter As an Inbound Marketing Tool:

• As a way of building a personal or corporate following
• As a means of promoting blogs, videos, webinars and other content
• As a public address system to announce the start of a podcast or a change in store hours.
• To make events interactive. For example, invite seminar participants to tweet colleagues; stream tweets and include them in the seminar dialog or ask viewers to tweet questions during a podcast, then address those questions.
• As a text messaging system to pass along directions or event changes or invitations to a large group.
• To crowd source for information you need but don't know. 
• To initiate instant feedback to respond to customers' questions.
• To survey or poll followers.
• To promote sales by tweeting coupons and unadvertised deals.

How are you using Twitter for inbound marketing? Let us know if we can help.

Photo Credit: Brian Lane Winfield Moore