Twitter: How to Win Followers and Influence Your Customers

Here are some tips for using Twitter to market your company and increase or create some brand integrity. Hopefully, if you follow this advice and avoid the many stated and unstated social network faux pas, your efforts will generate leads that turn into business. If you'd like to read about how social networks generally can benefit your business, read our earlier article.

The key to using Twitter successfully is to understand why people would want to follow you. If you are a large company with a well established brand name then setting up an account in that name and using it to blog personal notes from the lunch room is probably ill-advised. Decide right from the start whether people will follow you because of your brand or because of you. If it's the latter then read on...

1. Choose the right moniker - Twitter is about people so choose something that relates to you as a person. Your name would be a good start or, failing that, a name that is readily associated with you as an individual.

2. Take aim - Twitter is about people, but be clear about why you have joined the network. Have a strategy about what kind of people you want following you and how you're going to get them. Then stick to it.

3. Be interesting - Within the bounds of point 2, share your thoughts, your ideas and interesting information you come across in your travels, online or otherwise. If your target market sees you as a valuable and reliable source of useful information then you have half the battle won.

4. Honour thy followers - if you treat your followers as little more than your target market then you will be cyber-snubbed. If people make the effort to follow you and comment on your postings then make the effort to reply, even if only occasionally. It will go a long way.

5. Capitalise - And I don't mean LITERALLY. Once you have people's attention wave yourself in front of them from time to time. Don't be obnoxious, obviously, but let them know about where you're working, what you're working on, and how it might be useful to others. Create opportunities for your followers to contact you about your products/services.