There is a steady influx of new social networking sites on the internet. Twitter is just like these sites. Twitter is a social media community with the the easy-to-grasp concept of “What are you doing?” or where people can just update everyone on their lives as often as they like. You can share as many small and intimate details about your life as you want and change the information provided at any time.
There is a limitation of 140 characters for each update (tweet) that you post, which means you need to get to the point in your messages.
The first thing you need to do is sign up for a free Twitter account. This process is simple and does not take much time. You don’t even need to have a website of your own to sign up. All you need to do is pick a username and your account is ready. When your account is activated, you can invite people (prospective customers) to follow you. This is simply a promotion asking people to follow you, nothing more. Nothing is mentioned about products or services when you are inviting others to follow you. You can use contacts that you already have in your email address book and send email invitations, with an explanation of why and how they should follow you on Twitter. You may be surprised to find that many of your contacts are already members of the Twitter community and don’t need to sign up to become your follower. Slowly the number of followers to your account will grow. You have to treat your followers as Gold and take care of them. How do you do this? Provide interesting offers and helpful advice to them frequently. As an example, you could have “Twitter Only” discounts offered exclusively to your Twitter followers. Theses discounts would be limited to those individuals who follow you. By doing so, more people will share this info with their contacts, getting more potential clients interested in checking out your promotion.
The first thing is to get a Twitter account. No, you can’t start driving traffic without it. Getting a Twitter account is completely free, and your contact list can be scanned to see if you already have people you know using twitter. As soon as you sign up, you can start using your account and get it ready by uploading a photo (of you or your company’s logo) and add a link to your website/blog on your profile. Unlike MySpace or Facebook, this social networking site is different in that it will not let you micro-blog, meaning that it will not let you upload a lot of photos and keep them on your page so that everyone can see them. You can, however, add a picture or share them with friends as part of an update. After you have established an account with Twitter, you can then begin following different people. Following a person on Twitter is much like receiving regular updates from someone you have subscribed to. On your profile page you can read any specific Tweet that has been posted by someone on your friends list. It is easy to follow somebody, you simply use the ‘follow’ button which can be located under their profile pictures. You will see that the higher the number of people that you follow, the higher the number of people that will follow you and this is an excellent strategy for driving traffic.
It’s necessary for you to make the effort to build a relationship with your Twitter followers; if you don’t, they won’t trust you enough to buy your products. When you have built a solid relationship with your followers, they’ll see you as the authority in your market area. When you start reaching this level you can begin sending in relevant content links that are blended with promotional links, as long as you don’t go overboard with it. Another excellent idea is to start making your own targeted searches on Twitter and begin looking for folks who are asking specific questions which are related to you particular niche market. After you have enough questions that are relevant to your niche, you need to start giving out some good quality answers to those questions. For this you can either create a high quality blog post or also an article/video/audio that not only answers the question but tries to solve the problem. This answer needs to be useful so that people find it valuable. In addition to the valuable information you’re provided you will include a link for your product or affiliate site at the end.
Finally, to really make Twitter work for you and start getting good results from it, you need to make sure that you don’t rush into it. Make a commitment to building your following and gaining their trust before you hit them with promotions. Spend some time hunting for relevant questions too.
After you’ve developed a reputable Twitter account, it’s easy to promote stuff with it. Just the other day, I tweeted about how I was using Squeeze Theme, and I got quite a few sales from people clicking through. So setup your Twitter account right now, and take advantage.