June 29, 2012

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Millions of people in the U.S. utilize Twitter to connect with people and discover new interests online. And while it is used for a variety of reasons, Twitter can also be an effective online marketing tool for small businesses.

Twitter now has around half a billion registered profiles, with over 100 million in the USA alone. This suggests that many of your customers and prospective buyers are using the platform. So the question is, “Have you engaged with them lately?” If not, you definitely should.

But if you’re wondering how Twitter is relevant for your business here are four reasons why you shouldn’t discount it’s usefulness:

- Twitter can act as a multiplier and amplifier of your marketing messages.

- The micro-blogging platform delivers immediate social proof, given a user is more likely to follow an account that is recommended by their friends.

- Twitter is a viable tool for broadcasting promotions and presents a high probability, when done correctly, that your message could go viral.

- People love to share interesting content. What better way to share your content with others than through a free social media network?

While there are many more advantages one could identify based on prior successes with Twitter, those listed above scratch the surface of possibilities. Therefore, when you’re ready to start using Twitter as a strategic business tool, here are three ways you can gain instant traction.

1.Drive traffic to landing pages for lead generation.

This is one of the most widely practiced uses of Twitter. If you have content such as landing pages for lead generation and insightful blog posts, sharing a link on Twitter can drive quality traffic to these areas.

To track the effectiveness and popularity of various tweets, add a simple company specific hashtag (i.e. #keyword) to each Twitter post and track the activity with social media monitoring tools such as HootSuite and TweetDeck.

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