5 Reasons why you should Twitter for your Business

See Also: The Future of Facebook Online Marketing

It seems everyone is twittering these days and you are wondering if you should be using Twitter for your business also. You’re already active on Facebook, why bother with Twitter? You’re limited in what you can say (140 character posts), they use all those weird symbols and heck, even the name sounds stupid. But if you aren’t doing it for those reasons, then you risk not tapping into this great marketing strategy. Here are 5 great reasons why you should consider twitter for business:

Generate more traffic to your website

Twitter is another wonderful way to get traffic to your websites. As of April 2010, the last statistics I could find, Twitter has 105,000,000+ registered users averaging 300,000 new users sign up per day. What is also exciting is that they get around 190 million visitors per month.

Since Twitter posts are in real-time, it has become a place where people go to to find the latest information on topics. Do a keyword search in Twitter’s search tool and you’ll find up-to-date and targeted resources you can’t get with Google (at least not yet or as easily that I’ve found).

But why is that important? Well, if someone is searching on a specific topic and you’re tweeting about it and have a link to your site for more information, they can click right on through. Also for your followers, if you’re tweeting about items of interest, they will want to know what you’re all about and can click onto your site from your profile.

But the traffic generating power of Twitter doesn’t stop there. What can happen, and what you want to happen, is for your followers to “re-tweet” your post, which is basically sharing your tweet to their list of followers. That’s what the mysterious RT means, by the way. Being re-tweeted gets you exposed to more people than just those that follow you. So the potential to have your posts go viral is a marketing dream.

Read the latest news and discover excellent resources

I’m amazed at how much valuable news, information and resources I am referred to by the people I follow on Twitter. In fact, I have to limit myself (I’m on Twitter only about 15 minutes a day) or I’d just be reading all day and not working. You can also subscribe to Twitter feeds for specific websites/conferences, which allows you to receive and view content quickly. This is very useful for active social news participants.

Networking

You can use Twitter to interact with other like-minded people, those in your industry or in related industries. I’m amazed at the people I have gotten to know just by actively communicating with them via the reply function (that’s what the @ symbol means next to the person’s Twitter name). We’ve even been asked to do joint partnerships with some of the respected people in our industry because of all my tweeting from my home computer! Now that’s exciting since that has the potential to really increase our business exponentially and take us on new and exciting endeavors. Imagine how that would help your business.

Find prospects and customers

Twitter is also good for finding potential customers or clients. You can do a search for keywords related to your product on Twitter Search and then follow those users who are posting about it. Most people who you follow will return the favor and follow you back. Then when you tweet about topics relating to your products, you increase the likelihood that they will see what you have to say as well. They can then communicate with you.

You do have to do this with discretion, however. The point is not to try to sell to them right away; the point is to let them know you are a resource for them for the future. If you are consistently posting about issues and topics important to them, then they’ll get to know you and may likely turn into a loyal customer one day.

Improve your copywriting

At first I hated being restricted to 140 characters but see it as an advantage the more I tweet. I found that I now have to not only send eye-catching posts, I also need to be brief. If you’ve ever met me, you know how hard that is for me! But now it’s a fun challenge to say something interesting in as few and as powerful words as I can. I’ve become so much better at copywriting in all of my marketing material as a result.

So if you haven’t started using Twitter for your business, now you have 5 solid reasons to begin. I’ll be covering more reasons it’s such a great marketing strategy as well as tools as to how to do it effectively in later blog posts. But in the meantime, I invite you to follow me on Twitter. I post links that don’t make it on this blog to articles about video, internet marketing, special interest video business and boosting marketing success, among other things.