Adam Marquardt
One of the easiest and most effective channels to communicate to the world about what your company is doing and thinking is Twitter.
Twitter is one of the best forms of viral and word-of-mouth marketing that exists on the internet. Most businesses know how to send tweets, how to use hashtag on their posts, and how to interact with customers on twitter. But what about using Twitter to take your company's marketing to the next level?
These four tips can help you recreate your Twitter feed from a simple shoutout channel to an interactive marketing tool that enables you to effectively draw your targeted audience closer.
1) Follow the experts
If you want to attract hordes of new followers on Twitter and, in turn, bring in new customers to your business, follow other people in your field and related fields who have an established and active Twitter presence. Watch what these experts do on Twitter. Observe what they tweet, how often, and who they tweet to. If you learn from what the experts are doing and try similar strategies yourself, chances are you’re going to do well too. You should also interact with these experts. You can retweet their posts, reply to them, tweet to them, and even direct message them (use this one very sparingly, if at all). Getting experts to retweet your posts or endorse you in the Twitter feed is an excellent way to gain new followers.
2) Target people with keywords
To draw new people to your website, tag your Tweets with searchable hashtags. Be specific and strategic about the hashtags you use. Check Twitter and see what categories are trending. These are the things that people are writing about and are currently looking at on Twitter. Tag your posts with trending hashtags on Twitter topics pertaining to your post and your products or services. Doing this will make it more likely for you to be found by people searching for, and engaging in the trending topics. Make sure to use hashtags that are relevant to your business as well as the context of your post.
There are several tools available to help you find out what hashtags are relevant and popular; Hashtags.org gives you a list of trending hashtags as well as current tweets containing the hashtags, and platforms like Trendsmap.com has maps that shows what’s trending in a particular region or area. This can be particularly helpful to businesses targeting customers in specific areas.
3) Tweet regularly
It’s important when using Twitter for marketing purposes to Tweet consistently, and consistently well. It might be easy to build up an audience on Twitter, but it’s not nearly as easy to keep one. Your followers expect to hear from you regularly so keep a steady stream of tweets going all the time.
Do not send a million tweets back to back. Use platforms like Tweetdeck or HootSuite to pre-schedule Tweets throughout the day. This will allow you to preplan your Tweets and execute them all at once beforehand. This makes it easy for your to determine which times of the day to best send tweets, and space out your posts effectively. If you are a Hubspot user, you can also use their social media tools to preschedule your tweets.
4) Know who you’re Tweeting to
It can be extremely helpful to know who you’re Tweeting to and how to interact with them. Some of the people who follow you on Twitter are going to be current customers, while others are going to be potential ones. One helpful way to make sure you are engaging with the right followers appropriately is to use tools like HootSuite, Tweetdeck, or Hubspot. These platforms allow you to create lists of different categories of users – your current customers and your potential ones. This makes it easy for you to configure what to say to a particular audience, and what they are telling you.
Twitter is one of the most popular social media channels as well as an extremely effective marketing platform, if you know how to use it right. Many businesses use Twitter to expand reach, but by implementing strategic use and creating a powerful Twitter presence, you will be able to set yourself above the crowd. 
Image Credit: Matt Hamm