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.