Twitter Business Marketing

Twitter marketing is becoming an increasingly popular method for drawing in new customers. The Internet has changed the way businesses interact with their customers and prospects. Now, more than ever, people want to communicate with and almost feel part of the brands and companies they buy from. Services like Twitter have had a huge impact on how people market and draw in new leads, customers and long-term brand-loyal followers. Using Twitter to market your business is a terrific way to initiate conversations about you. It is also a powerful way of establishing a direct line of communication between your business and your customer base—but how do you do it?

Whether your business is offline or online, using Twitter to market your business is one of the easiest online marketing methods to implement—and anyone can do it.

The first thing you’ll need to do is set up an account at Twitter.com where you can pick a username and set up your profile. Pick a username that fits your business or is, preferably, your business’s name. That name may be taken and, If so, pick a close variation that makes sense. After you set up your account, upload a picture to your profile to help customize and brand it. Upload your logo or a picture of your store if you’re a brick and mortar business.
The next thing you’ll want to do when it comes to using Twitter to market your business is to “populate” your account with some Tweets so it doesn’t look too vacant. The big thing to remember about Twitter is that you need to be consistent and regular. Make a few “tweets” the first day to set it up and keep tweeting as often as possible—but not too much. Tweet maybe 3-5 times a day. Is your pizza shop having a buy one get one free deal? Tweet about it. Is your website posting up new coupon codes for 10% off? Tweet about it.

It’s important that you begin to accumulate “followers” of your tweets as soon as possible. If you have a local pizza store with a website try putting a link to your Twitter profile on your site and tell people to follow you for discounts and coupons. If you’ve got a website that sells eBooks do the same on your website. You’ll want to get as many people to follow your tweets as possible so you can have more people to interact with and get marketing messages to. However, don’t worry if you have only accumulate 20 followers. The number will grow over time as friends see who their friends are following and begin following you—and as long as you give good information and deals on your Twitter feed people will begin to gradually follow you more. There’s a lot more you should know about using Twitter to market your business properly so checking out some available online guides or tutorials is a great way to really squeeze the most results out of your Twitter marketing efforts.

Changing the look of your Twitter page

In order to increase the impact of your Twitter page it is important to differentiate from other Twitter pages. Aside from creating interesting 'tweets,' one way of achieving this is to avoid using the standard Twitter default page design.

The simplest way to modify a page is to use one of Twitter's basic design options. These are found by logging into your Twitter account, clicking 'settings' and the 'design' tab and then selecting one of the Twitter themes available. You can then adjust the color scheme by clicking the 'change design colors' button. Make sure that when you change colors there is enough contrast between the text and background so that it is legible.

If you want to be a little more adventurous, ColourLovers has introduced a very comprehensive and easy-to-use app that enables a vast array of different design options, specifically for Twitter. The site is called Themeleon and includes the ability to specify palettes and apply them to a large library of patterns.

Finally, it is great idea to provide textual information as part of your Twitter background. Although the information is not 'clickable' it makes good use of valuable screen real estate. To modify your background images, follow these steps:

1. Create an image which is 2048 pixels wide and 1707 pixels high in Photoshop or image editor.
2. Create a design, but make sure that any textual information is kept within a column of 240 pixels on the left hand side of the design.
3. Save the design as a JPG making sure the file is no bigger than 800 kilobytes.
4. Open your Twitter account. Click 'settings' in the top right and then select the 'design' tab. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click the 'change background image' button. Browse for the image you just created and press the 'save changes' button.
5. Click 'change design colors' and select some colors that match your new background design.