Top Tips for Better Twitter Marketing

Perhaps now more than ever, it’s time for you to use Twitter to build your audience and promote your business.

The Twitter buzz has eased a bit with all the talk of Google + and Facebook, so those who are still using Twitter (and there’s millions of them) are a more captive audience.

For those of you wanting to know how to use twitter more effectively for your business, here’s my top tips for making it work!

Focus on Your Target Market - The first step is to understand who your target audience is. Communicating and engaging with the wrong people is a waste of time and effort.

Acquire Twitter followers - Now that you know who you want to be engaging with, you need to get out there and start acquiring followers. A good place to start is the people in your industry that have large spheres of influence. They’ll have large groups of followers that you can follow to start the engagement. The larger your audience, the more likely you’ll find potential clients from your twitter marketing efforts.

Engage with Your Twitter Followers - Effective Twitter marketing is all about engagement! NOT just broadcasting! The best way to cut through the clutter is to start discussions, ad value to conversations and share information. Just “pushing out” content alone will see you lose your captive audience.

Engagement takes on various forms; at the very least ensure you’re replying to your mentions, answering questions, using hostages, mentioning others in your messages.

Build Authority - One of the bets parts of Twitter is how quickly you can build your perceived authority in an industry. With some selective following and sharing and commenting on poignant industry information, you can quickly build your personal or business profile in the twitter sphere.

Be Captivating - You have got 75 characters to get your point across…so dig deep and make sure you’re using your most persuasive writing skills to capture your audience’s attention. You need to make sure your content stands out from the clutter.

Be consistent - More often than not, small business owners go at hyper speed for 2 weeks, twitting 100’s of times a day and then give up, because they don’t get immediate results. The key with twitter is to be persistent and measured. It’s rarely an instant ROI marketing channel – so take your time and keep focused on the long term bigger picture.

Twitter is not a set and forgets marketing strategy, so don’t think it’ll be a silver bullet to your marketing needs…but with a well planned and strategic approach, it can really help you build your business.

Social Sites added to Google Realtime Search

Google only included its social search results in real time search, then Twitter feeds started making an appearance and now Google has upped the ante by including a range of new social media sites to its real time search.

Sites now included in real time search include Quora, Buzz, Gowalla, Facebook, MySpace, Google Buzz, FriendFeed and TwitArmy. This indicates that Google has finally realized the importance social signals in making search a better experience.

The update was actually first noticed by one of the sites themselves. Activities on the Quora site, including asking questions, adding answers, voting answers and submitting posts are now being indexed.

Bing also has been reported to be doing similar social research, and including social feeds like status updates and links shared from fan pages on Facebook and Twitter feeds. Given that Bing has a better relationship with Facebook it is expected that Bing will be able to integrate Facebook Open Graph data into its search results.

What other social sites you would like to see included in Google relatime search results? Feel free to share your suggestion below.