12 Tips For Using Twitter to Grow Your Business

1. Monitor Your Name and Brand

Use the search feature to find out who’s talking about you and your products.

• If someone tweets something nice about your company, thank them. If it’s really good, ask if you can use their tweet as a testimonial on your site.
• When someone tweets something nasty about you, apologize publicly, fix the screw up and let them know it’s fixed. If they’re happy with how you handled the situation, ask them if they don’t mind sharing the good news on Twitter. Remember: it’s not just about that one customer; everybody else is watching you.

2. Grow Your Network

These are my three favorite ways to grow a Twitter followers base:

• Follow people talking about a keyword related to your market. They’ll follow you back. Un-follow those who don’t. I use FlashTweet for this.
• Find the authorities in your market and follow the people following them. They’ll follow you back. Un-follow those who don’t. Again, I use FlashTweet for this.
• Use Twitter directories such as Twellow and WeFollow to find people in your market.

But remember, it’s about quality, not quantity. I’d rather have 500 great followers than 5,000 good ones.

3. Invite People to Follow You

Include your Twitter link on your site, blog, email signature, and business cards. The more people who see your link, the more followers you’ll get.

4. Balance Following/Followers

If you follow a lot people and very few people follow you, you’ll be seen as a spammer. If a lot of people follow you and you don’t follow them back, it’s not very nice of you. Use FlashTweet or FriendOrFollowto balance your ratio.

5. Re-Tweeting

Re-tweeting is the equivalent of email forwarding. Teach your followers what re-tweeting is and ask them to re-tweet your tweets. This will result in your tweets spreading to their followers, who then may follow you as well. When someone else tweets about something you find interesting, re-tweet it so your followers can benefit from it too. Plus, when you re-tweet other people’s content, they notice you and want to learn who you are.

6. Respond to Messages

Click on your Twitter ID to see who’s talking to or about you.

7. Avoid Direct Messages

It’s OK to send some DMs once in a while, but a lot of spammers DM people all the time, so use these with caution.

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