More and more people are using twitter as a marketing tool and yet too many fail to understand how it works.  In a nutshell Twitter is a microblogging site with a very distinct limitation: all messages are limited to 140 character very much like an SMS message.

If you have a blog, very much like any other website (imagine a newspaper site) you don’t write to a particular person (Email and other messaging services can help for that) but to your audience.  If your blog is popular you will have many readers, if you are at the beginning probably just a few, unless you are famous person (e.g. celebrity) or a successful blogger at your third or higher number launch.  If you keep writing good content (what Chris Garret, one of my favourite bloggers, calls Killer Flagship Content) then you will build up a broad audience.  Your audience in Twitter is made by your followers.

Who are your followers?

Anybody interested in you and your tweets that decide to follow you. At the beginning you are likely to have no followers but as you start following other people many of them will start following you back and so on.  The more followers you have and more and more people will start following you.  When I encounter an individual with a Twitter account and many hundred or thousands of followers I feel more inclined to follow him or her than if he/she is a beginner with a few followers.

What do you do with Twitter?

You Tweet. You send out these messages and your followers have the opportunity of reading them, simple.  Considering that 140 char is not really lots of information many people have developed a way of writing words in a VERY succinct way or simply adding the URL of a site/blog/page they want to promote.

What do you tweet about?

Everything you like. Many neophytes of twitter tend to be confused about how to use their newly created account.  My style is to promote some of the business activities I am involved in and re-tweet similar content from other people I am following.  I personally find nearly disturbing those that mix business activities with random personal messages about their family life or what they just had for lunch… A Twitter account is free so it makes sense perhaps to have more than one and channel different content to different accounts and keeping each of them coherent to the main topic.  In my case the main business account maxgaet is only for my entrepreneurial activities while carismauk is used to promote my martial arts activities and saluswellness is tweeting about my other business venture.

Why re-tweeting?

To promote a tweet from a person you are following to your followers. People that ask this question usually don’t get the basic mechanism behind Twitter.  You can read what is written by people you are following: if you like what you see then re-tweet it so also your followers will get the same tweet.  If many people start re-tweeting a particular message you have what is called the viral effect and the original tweet, re-tweeted many times, become a very popular topic.

Twitter is a great marketing tool and is has been proven to be a great contributor to traffic generation.  If you found this post interesting perhaps the best thing you can do is tweet about it 🙂