Twitter feed: 7 ways to promote your business on Twitter

Engaging Twitter users via concise, relevant tweets of 140 characters or less has great potential to create new customers for online businesses. To attract attention, tweets should stand out among the many daily messages flowing in reverse chronological order through the Twitter feeds of consumers. Consider that there were, as of 2015, over 270 million active Twitter users—a growth of 50 million over 2014, and that about 20% of all Internet users had a Twitter account. This makes the marketing importance of getting into users' Twitter Feeds quite apparent.

Using Twitter Effectively

To get on the Twitter Feeds of as many people as possible, online businesses need to have an attractive, informative profile that generates a large following. To make the most of their Twitter Feed presence and create a snowball effect that maximizes the impact of Tweeted content, there are a number of helpful tips that should be followed, including:

1. Tweet Often: To make sure at least some of your Tweets are actually read and that you stay on top of your followers' minds, it simply is not enough to Tweet only monthly or weekly. Daily posts are the best way to keep your Tweets from getting lost in a crowded Twitter Feed.

2. **Retweet and Favorite:**Retweeting helps to create additional pathways to your Tweets and to the links they contain. Favoriting prior Tweets highlights them and gains them more attention, on average, than even Retweeting does.

3. Tweet Smartly: Be sure each Tweet is relevant and useful to the target audience and contains links, pictures, video-clips, and other high-response media formats. This will generate optimal numbers of reads, clicks, Retweets, favorites and shares from your followers.

4. Use Promotional Tweets: Offer special discounts to followers, including contests where you reward, say, the next 100 users who Retweet your message. Also use Twitter's Promoted Tweets, which give you access to special tools for targeting the right audience and getting your content onto their Twitter Feeds.

5. **Use Trending Tweets:**Find out what topics related to your business is currently trending and tag some of your Tweets with those hashtags. Day by day, as you Tweet on topics many are already interested in, new followers and new leads will begin to materialize.

6. Do Twitter Customer Service: Encourage customers to use Twitter as a forum for discussing your products, and be there to respond to all their questions. Twitter customer service is fast becoming a new marketing tool, and it can yield worthwhile fruit.

7. Run Twitter Analytics: Check on how followers are responding to your content on their Twitter Feeds with your analytics dashboard, and adjust accordingly.