New Poll - What is the best way to build your business through Twitter?

[Scunizzo]

In last week’s Entrepreneur Poll results I asked you What Was The Best Thing You’ve Ever Done For Your Website? The number one answer was focusing in on Social Networking and Social Media Marketing.

Using Twitter was a popular choice for many of our readers so this week our new Young Entrepreneur poll is:

What is the best way to build your business through Twitter?

Many entrepreneurs are just coming on to the service and have no idea how to use it. What strategies are working for you? How do you use your time on Twitter to build connections and grow your business?

I would love to hear your thoughts so we can build a list of best practices for other young entrepreneurs to follow.

Please post a comment on our blog at What is the best way to build your business through Twitter? - Entrepreneur Poll with what you’re doing on Twitter to build your business and stay tuned for the results!

[Talha]

Hi,

Well thats something i am looking up to please have some light over it

[paul2145r]

I've had ALOT of great results ever since I began integrating Twitter into my existing ventures. I am so excited by the potential for using Twitter for Business, that I started TweetClubb specifically to help business owners and entrepreneurs develop a Twitter-based targeted marketing campaign custom-built for their business or new ventures.

The concept of Twitter is still a bit alien to us in today's marketplace. It took me hours and hours to figure out how Twitter could help one of my ventures. Once it clicked, it was as if my eyes were opened anew. I could see the potential for other businesses and projects that I own, and i was able to help a number of my clients integrate Twitter into their marketing plan.

I'm not a 'blogger', but I have been able to generate traffic to my blog/opinion posts. Any blogger that puts a little more time into it can generate all of the traffic their servers could handle from people that will truly be interested in what you have to offer. Online businesses can interact directly with their customers, and can see who is talking about their products or services with seeming intrusive. Brick and mortar ventures can bring in new clients and meet new distributors and providers.

Take a look at the program, and let me know what you think.

If you are interested in 20% affiliate sales and ongoing passive income, PM for the TweetClubb affiliate manager's contact info.

[FortuneDarryl]

I need all the Twitter help I can get. Just got on last week. Can't wait for it to "click" with me

[fordsuccess]

I'm also still learning the process of Twitter. I'm not sure how many tweets you can post per day, how to find great leaders to follow...sadly I've been on Twitter for quite some time but just now getting around to doing more serious stuff with it.

I read some training course which was excellent and it compared the traffic to Facebook and YouTube. Twitter is growing but not even close to the traffic FB and YT has yet. What does that say? It says that the opportunity to market yourself on Twitter is right there, b/c they are just going to gain more momentum.

So I want to utilize the site in the fullest capacity...but I want to do it RIGHT. Any insight would be awesome. Thanks!

[solokkhz]

start following people, they will follow back, automate your twitting with RSS and automate followbacks to build a bigger list of followers

good luck

[Scunizzo]

Our latest YoungEntrepreneur.com poll is:

What is the best way to build your business through Twitter? Post your comments at our blog at: What is the best way to build your business through Twitter? - Entrepreneur Poll Update (2)

We’ve gotten some amazing responses so far and have one more week left before the poll closes so make sure to get your suggestions in!

To give you some additional inspiration I thought I would share Chris Brogan’s list on 50 ways to use Twitter for Business:

First Steps

1. Build an account and immediate start using Twitter Search to listen for your name, your competitor’s names, words that relate to your space. (Listening always comes first.)
2. Add a picture. ( Shel reminds us of this.) We want to see you.
3. Talk to people about THEIR interests, too. I know this doesn’t sell more widgets, but it shows us you’re human.
4. Point out interesting things in your space, not just about you.
5. Share links to neat things in your community. ( @wholefoods does this well).
6. Don’t get stuck in the apology loop. Be helpful instead. ( @jetblue gives travel tips.)
7. Be wary of always pimping your stuff. Your fans will love it. Others will tune out.
8. Promote your employees’ outside-of-work stories. ( @TheHomeDepot does it well.)
9. Throw in a few humans, like RichardAtDELL, LionelAtDELL, etc.
10. Talk about non-business, too, like @astrout and @jstorerj from Mzinga.

Ideas About WHAT to Tweet

1. Instead of answering the question, “What are you doing?”, answer the question, “What has your attention?”
2. Have more than one twitterer at the company. People can quit. People take vacations. It’s nice to have a variety.
3. When promoting a blog post, ask a question or explain what’s coming next, instead of just dumping a link.
4. Ask questions. Twitter is GREAT for getting opinions.
5. Follow interesting people. If you find someone who tweets interesting things, see who she follows, and follow her.
6. Tweet about other people’s stuff. Again, doesn’t directly impact your business, but makes us feel like you’re not “that guy.”
7. When you DO talk about your stuff, make it useful. Give advice, blog posts, pictures, etc.
8. Share the human side of your company. If you’re bothering to tweet, it means you believe social media has value for human connections. Point us to pictures and other human things.
9. Don’t toot your own horn too much. (Man, I can’t believe I’m saying this. I do it all the time. - Side note: I’ve gotta stop tooting my own horn).
10. Or, if you do, try to balance it out by promoting the heck out of others, too.

Some Sanity For You

1. You don’t have to read every tweet.
2. You don’t have to reply to every @ tweet directed to you (try to reply to some, but don’t feel guilty).
3. Use direct messages for 1-to-1 conversations if you feel there’s no value to Twitter at large to hear the conversation ( got this from @pistachio).
4. Use services like Twitter Search to make sure you see if someone’s talking about you. Try to participate where it makes sense.
5. 3rd party clients like Tweetdeck and Twhirl make it a lot easier to manage Twitter.
6. If you tweet all day while your coworkers are busy, you’re going to hear about it.
7. If you’re representing clients and billing hours, and tweeting all the time, you might hear about it.
8. Learn quickly to use the URL shortening tools like TinyURL and all the variants. It helps tidy up your tweets.
9. If someone says you’re using twitter wrong, forget it. It’s an opt out society. They can unfollow if they don’t like how you use it.
10. Commenting on others’ tweets, and retweeting what others have posted is a great way to build community.

The Negatives People Will Throw At You

1. Twitter takes up time.
2. Twitter takes you away from other productive work.
3. Without a strategy, it’s just typing.
4. There are other ways to do this.
5. As Frank hears often, Twitter doesn’t replace customer service (Frank is @comcastcares and is a superhero for what he’s started.)
6. Twitter is buggy and not enterprise-ready.
7. Twitter is just for technonerds.
8. Twitter’s only a few million people. (only)
9. Twitter doesn’t replace direct email marketing.
10. Twitter opens the company up to more criticism and griping.

Some Positives to Throw Back

1. Twitter helps one organize great, instant meetups (tweetups).
2. Twitter works swell as an opinion poll.
3. Twitter can help direct people’s attention to good things.
4. Twitter at events helps people build an instant “backchannel.”
5. Twitter breaks news faster than other sources, often (especially if the news impacts online denizens).
6. Twitter gives businesses a glimpse at what status messaging can do for an organization. Remember presence in the 1990s?
7. Twitter brings great minds together, and gives you daily opportunities to learn (if you look for it, and/or if you follow the right folks).
8. Twitter gives your critics a forum, but that means you can study them.
9. Twitter helps with business development, if your prospects are online (mine are).
10. Twitter can augment customer service. (but see above)

What do you think of Chris’ list? What would you add? What other advice would you give to other young entrepreneurs who are trying to build their business through Twitter? This is the last week to have your say before we release the results!

Post your comments at our blog at: What is the best way to build your business through Twitter? - Entrepreneur Poll Update (2)

Evan Carmichael

[Scunizzo]

The results are up! Check them out at: What is the best way to build your business through Twitter? - Entrepreneur Poll Results

[jingwen]

Yes, twitter could take us traffic,but i think if you want to do well,it is not easy.But we should try,right?

[Barkri12]

The two largest age demographics on Twitter are the 45-54 crowd and the 25-34 crowd. Twitter clients in this age group have a larger amount of disposable income, so they make the best customers and they offer the best ideas on how to improve your business and customer service. You can use Twitter as a tool to:

*survey customers on what's hot in your field or local area
*get opinions on your current promotions
*offer coupon codes to entice customers to buy
*promote your products directly
*spread info about product launches and business services
*give advice about how to use your products.

Best Twitter Business Tools

When you use Twitter for your business, here are a few tips:

*Use a URL-shortening site (such as snurl.com or tinyURL) to reduce your character count.
*Vary your tweets - a good rule of thumb is use 1 tweet out of 10 to pitch your products. The rest should be observing business trends or offering useful information to customers.
*Have more than one employee tweeting, so there's no lag if someone is sick or goes on vacation.
*Search for local customers by using LocalTweeps.com or simply popping your city/state into the Twitter search box.

[MpyreDzirez]

What I use Twitter for is to deliver blog posts and network
with potential partners, especially the influencer's in my market.

Once they are on my blog I try to deliver high quality information
and I find people then start to like me. Once I get them liking me
they are more comfortable buying from me so I place my products
for sale in links on my blog.

I use Twitter more as a relationship building tool and that's working for me

[clabrat]

Great tips guys, started last week so I'm still experimenting. I got one account suspended already, but I don't think it's from sending too many messages...maybe from adding too fast? Not sure because when i clicked on the link to look at the reason, the URL was broken =O

Anyways, will be trying another method this weekend.

[ellaanderson]

am still learning the use of Twitter. hope i'll be able to learn more about different techniques in how we can improve our business.

[redslazers]

what i did was found people who had more than 500 followers and twittered things concerning my website (zombies) and gave them a bit of money to twitter my url and description of my website it worked wonders for the 24 hours it was on the top

[vinmann]

I am new to twitter. What is the safe line between promotion and giving information.