How to Use Twitter for Business and Marketing
Is Twitter a part of your social media marketing?
Or have you let your Twitter marketing drop off lately?
In any case, with the latest Twitter updates, trends in multi-screen usage and real-time marketing, you’ll likely want to take a fresh look at what Twitter has to offer.
Here’s a checklist of everything your business needs to do to get on (or back on) Twitter and start seeing great results.
About Twitter
Twitter is a short message communication tool that allows you to send out messages (tweets) up to 140 characters long to people who subscribe to you (followers).
Your tweets can include a link to any web content (blog post, website page, PDF document, etc.) or a photograph or video. If a picture is worth a thousand words, adding an image to a tweet greatly expands what you can share to beyond the 140-character limit for tweets.
People follow (subscribe) to your Twitter account, and you follow other people. This allows you to read, reply to and easily share their tweets with your followers (retweet). 
Twitter Marketing: How to Use Twitter for Business
Do you use Twitter for your business?
Are you wondering how Twitter can help you build relationships?
To learn about Twitter marketing and how it can help your business, I interview Mark W. Schaefer for this episode of the Social Media Marketing podcast.
More About This Show
The Social Media Marketing podcast is a show from Social Media Examiner.
It’s designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.
The show format is on-demand talk radio (also known as podcasting).
In this episode, I interview Mark Schaefer, author of Return on Influence and The Tao of Twitter. He’s also a marketing faculty member at Rutgers University and he blogs at Grow.
Mark shares how he uses Twitter to create stronger business relationships and improve customer service.
You’ll learn about the best Twitter tools and how they can fit into your marketing strategy.
Share your feedback, read the show notes and get the links mentioned in this episode below!
Listen Now
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
You can also subscribe via iTunes, RSS, Stitcher or Blackberry.
6 Twitter Analytics Tools to Improve Your Marketing
Do you know if your Twitter marketing is working?
Monitoring and analyzing your Twitter projects can be challenging.
With the right metrics, you can improve and tailor your Twitter campaigns for better results.
Luckily, third-party Twitter tools provide these metrics, but there are MANY tools to choose from out there.
So here I’ll share some of the best Twitter analytics tools to help you improve your Twitter marketing.
#1: SocialBro: Explore Your Community
I consider SocialBro one of the top three most effective marketing tools for businesses.
SocialBro comes with excellent analytics that give great insights not only about your marketing campaign, but also about your Twitter account and followers.
Here are the analytics tools available with SocialBro.
Real-time Analytics
Real-time Analytics gives you details of the people who are active users and have tweeted in the last 10 minutes in real time. This helps you determine the specific hour of the day when people are active.
It’s a quick way to know when you should be tweeting. This is more relevant than depending on studies done by others, because it’s tailored specifically for you and your Twitter community.
How to Split Test Your Twitter Marketing
Would you like to improve your Twitter marketing?
Are you testing to see what gives you the best results?
Traditionally, split testing is a practice that’s applied to individual pages on your website to compare page variations and ultimately determine conclusively which version results in the highest overall conversion rate.
However, implementing split tests on your website alone is short-sighted! In fact, you can harness the power of split testing to generate valuable information about your target audience and their overall engagement with your brand on social media websites.
To see how to do this, let’s go step by step through how to carry out a split test on Twitter.
Step #1 – Create Your Split Test Tweet
The first step in the split testing process is to craft the text of the tweeted message you’ll use.
As an example, suppose you want to determine when your Twitter followers are most active. While services like Tweriod will estimate popular times, narrowing down these ranges and confirming their effectiveness using split testing will help you determine when future tweets should be published to reach the biggest, most engaged audience.
Sample split test tweet features a single call to action prompting followers to click through to a company blog.
3 Twitter Tools to Enhance Your Marketing
Are you looking for tools to help better manage your Twitter presence?
Managing your Twitter presence along with your other online networks can be difficult if you have limited resources.
In this article, you’ll discover 3 tools to make your basic Twitter marketing tasks easier.
#1: Manage and Analyze Your Community with SocialBro
Every business needs at least one management tool to manage its Twitter presence, and there are many excellent Twitter management tools to choose from.
SocialBro is one of my favorites, thanks to the excellent features it offers.
SocialBro offers many features to manage your Twitter account.
SocialBro allows you to not only manage your Twitter account, but it also provides you with useful information you can use for your social media strategy.
3 Ways to Grow Your Email List With Twitter
Do you want more email subscribers?
Have you tried using social media to grow your email list?
One of the most powerful aspects of social media is just how well it integrates with building a strong email list for your business.
Of all of the various platforms, Twitter offers some of the best (and most unique) tactics to use if you’re looking to increase email sign-ups.
In this article I’ll go over 3 tactics to utilize Twitter’s massive audience to grow your email list with qualified leads.
Let’s get started!
#1: Link Your Twitter Bio to an Opt-In Page
Putting your website in your Twitter bio is a no-brainer, but smart marketers know that when you link to a page with a direct call to action (a “landing page”), this is going to convert much better than your general homepage.
Amy Porterfield does this well. She links to her webinar page in her Twitter bio so followers who are interested can opt in right away.
How to Maximize Your New Twitter Profile
Twitter is starting to look a bit like Facebook.
Twitter changed their account profiles so you can visually tell the story of your business.
With a little thought and planning, you can now create a Twitter page that performs like a business welcome page for existing and potential customers.
And you can instantly publish your story to desktop and mobile Twitter users.
What’s New With Twitter
Twitter recently announced changes to Twitter account profiles and headers. These changes include:
- New profile header images. Now, your Twitter account starts with a main image, much like the Facebook timeline format’s cover image, but with some important differences.
- Updated photo streams. It’s easier than ever to highlight images you have posted with your tweets and share them with your followers.
- New mobile apps for Android, iPhone and iPad. These Twitter changes are not just on the desktop. They rolled out to most mobile devices at the same time.
The new Twitter header profile for the Today Show visible on the web and across all mobile devices.
