Promote Your Small Business: Use Twitter

Twitter isn't just a place to voice your frustration with the quarterback's inability to complete a pass or to share a link to the latest cute kitten video. It's a technology tool that's perfect to promote your small business.

Most business owners I know are continuously searching for new ways to connect with their customers. They want to promote their services and products, sure, but they want to do it in a way that doesn't turn off the prospects. A lot of companies use emailed newsletters, but those require a fair amount of work, even with services like Constant Contact, and can be annoying to the recipient. Depending on the frequency and content, these emails could also easily end up in a spam filter.

Instead, Twitter allows the customer to control when he or she sees the message. It doesn't interrupt workflows by demanding attention or make it difficult to unsubscribe to an email list. Readers can follow or unfollow your business easily, and can share your message with any number of prospective clients that you normally wouldn't reach. There are also a variety of ways that the user can digest the information via desktop clients, phone apps, SMS, or even specialized devices.

Now that you aren't ticking off your prospects, how do you use Twitter in a productive way? Sure, you could send out messages saying "Buy Brigitte's best buttermilk biscuits" every half hour but that isn't very effective and can get annoying pretty quickly.

Instead, try making your tweets useful by sending tips or links to interesting articles (don't link only to your own, by the way). Sending a recipe or instructions on how to keep your cupcakes fresh is a great way to build customer loyalty and get your messages retweeted to reach a larger audience.

You can also use more direct, timely promotional techniques. Invite immediate action by offering coupons good for the next two hours. Or use automatic tweeting services to send messages on a regular basis. You can set up a bunch of tweets in one sitting and have them sent out while you work or even sleep. There are bakeries, for example, that tweet when the bread is fresh out of the oven. That's hard to do with emails or radio ads and impossible with traditional print media.

Another great thing about the technology behind Twitter and its related tools is the ability to track your results. Sign up for a free account with a URL-shortening service like bit.ly and you can track the clicks on the links you tweet. Using a bit of brain matter, over time you'll learn what tweets get results.

Don't forget that Twitter is a community. Follow users in your area and reply or retweet liberally. Involvement in the community is a great way to stay in touch and get your business noticed. Using Twitter to communicate your business' benefits is an easy no-cost way to increase your advertising effectiveness without bugging your budget.