Using Twitter for Marketing Without Annoying Followers
Sunday, September 6th, 2009 | by Rajan Sodhi | 
5 Comments |
With the explosive popularity in Twitter comes the growing annoyance of spammers and businesses using it to primarily sell their wares. Followers like myself are having to get more vigilant about who to unfollow rather than follow. So does that mean Twitter shouldn’t be used for marketing purposes? Not necessarily. At PEER 1 and ServerBeach, we have company Twitter accounts where we update followers on web hosting products an services, network issues, customer stories, design and programming tips, and other items to help followers run a successful online business. We also use it for advertising with almost no complaint. In fact, since we started advertising through Twitter six months ago, our followers have grown 400% and we’ve reached $10,000 in monthly recurring sales. So, how has this been possible?
The first thing I decided when we began experimenting with advertising through Twitter, was to have it available at the exact same time for the same duration every week. The next thing was to publish it on our company website. As a result, we created the weekly 48 Hour Twitter Promo, which starts every Wednesday at 6pm EST and ends by Friday 6pm EST. During that time, followers can take advantage of a special promotion on our web hosting services. Outside of these times, we do not do any advertising through Twitter. This sets the expectations up front with our followers and minimizes their annoyance with random advertising blitzes.
Followers have now come to expect we will send out a 48 Hour Twitter Promo notice every Wednesday. So much so, we now get inquiries about the promo details in advance or re-tweets of the promo by our followers. Respecting their time and striking the right balance between information and advertising are key to using Twitter as a successful marketing channel. And as Twitter evolves, so does the culture around it change, so continually re-evaluating the approach is also necessary to ensure the balance is still there.
5 Comments
October 31st, 2009 at 11:05 am
Hi,
nice review. thanks..
Its also important that you don’t abuse Twitter for marketing and promoting your products, services or affiliate links. Most of your tweets should give your friends useful contents and valuable link or information.. Only once in a while should you try to use Twitter to promote something. Otherwise You will be marked as Spammer!
http://webmasterdailytips.com/2009/10/top-ten-ways-to-use-twitter-for-marketing
December 13th, 2009 at 9:46 am
The 48 hour twitter promo sounds like a great idea. I’ve also seen companies having a lot of success with customer service via Twitter. The idea is to search twitter for mentions of your business and then respond to them as opposed to waiting for followers to react to your tweets.
March 17th, 2010 at 11:48 am
If you are considering using Twitter as a marketing source you should do it, but you unquestionably should do it the correct way, following all the rules. Twitter is without a doubt one of the best social media website today for online marketing.
March 17th, 2010 at 11:50 am
If you’re able to get more Twitter followers, then you are in a really good position to use the Twitter marketing to get more traffic and buyers.|Automation is a indispensable way for you to be efficient to talk to your Followers without having to be at your computer the whole time.
April 2nd, 2010 at 2:01 pm
Twitter is essentially a free social networking website where it allows members to send and also read messages that are called tweets. The tweets are available for a person’s follow to view, but the fantastic thing about twitter is that you can as well restrict the messages to certain groups or friends to see. And because of the fact that twitter is free and comfortable to use, a lot of people use them. People today are now taking advantage of Twitter by promoting their products or to advertise their businesses. You can even use Twitter to advertise your web page or site in order for you to generate targeted traffic flowing into your web site and start making some money.
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