What's the most effective way to market on Twitter?

I have a Twitter account, but I never use it. To be honest, I don't see the appeal of it, but I've heard it can be a great place to market a business. If this is true, what's the most effective way to use it?

 

Start following people that are within your niche and get a feel on how you can best make use of your account. Tweet regularly but not too much promotional stuff. I usually tweet about what's going on in the news that's related to what I'm promoting.

 

Feedly (to find great, new stuff to share) + Buffer (to schedule posts across social accounts). Use hashtags, direct tweets at people like @wordpress etc, and follow people in your niche.

 

To be honest, while this is the conventional approach, you wont really be following people that will buy your product. All you will be doing is following your COMPETITORS. Most buyers of website products/services etc don't even have a twitter account. Most people that have a twitter account are marketers just like yourself.

However that said, these are people like you who are looking to build their own user base and network with other site owners in the same niche as you so it can be a good way to find people to network with, find guest posting opportunities etc and for that extra traffic that it can bring and because you can learn a lot about your niche and what your competitors are doing.

Keep your friends close but keep your enemies closer as they say

But the nature of tweets is they get buried and forgotten about under a million new tweets. So Twitter marketing is an ever ongoing thing and if you don't have the time then it might not be for you. However, twitter can be very effective if you know how to use it right or you just get lucky or you have a super cool site/product. But if anything, it can be used to build some metric to your site as part of your overall SEO score. How many tweets you have, how many retweets, shares etc they have and so on.

I'm working on a new Twitter project now as a working example for you. @DroneListr is following other drone related accounts. I essentially haven't done much yet but retweet a few things and a lot of them are tweeting about me and my tweets etc etc but which all helps in the long run but its not going to happen over night ya know?

 

Twitter isn't for all type of businesses. Twitter is a fast phased platform, and if you can't go with the flow you will not succeed on using it.
I've tried it before and I've learned a way on how you will be able to get people/businesses you.
First, would be timing. It is important that when posting a tweet you should consider a time when people are most likely to engage.
Follow people or businesses that tends to follow. How? People/businesses who follows more than having followers are most likely to follow you back.
Do it manually, and you'll get real people to follow you. And lastly, engage and let people know that you're not a robot. Tweet, retweet, reply and react.

 

Totally agree about the importance of engagement, and a little tip that I found extremely helpful, when you follow people back, make sure these are people/companies in your industry, because often they can tweet about you to their followers and this way get you exposure to their audiences, this usually will get you quite few new followers

 

Yeah, its often a good practice to retweet other peoples tweets in the same industry as you. This shows that you aren't just using Twitter for self-promotion and are helping other people too by retweeting things that are relevant and interesting to your niche. They often end up seeing these and retweeting them again which can get your twitter account retweeted by some big accounts.

 

You could also use a service like http://socialfox.co.uk or http://socialchain.com , they manage lots of accounts. Saves you having to build your own account

 

I work @ an agency that manages social for several customers, most of which include twitter. From a B2B or B2C perspective, twitter is great for engaging with current & potential customers. If you're looking to drive traffic to your site or landing page to generate leads, signups, or other, twitter ads offer some incredible advertising options such as "Leads on Twitter" which uses a CPL model (cost-per-lead).

 

It depends on what you are trying to sell, but the best way to do it is to use hashtags and most importantly, OUTREACH.

Honestly, I've been coaxed into buying several items from certain websites and asked to write for several motivational articles via Twitter. It's actually the perfect real-time promotional medium since it has no "tweet filtering" and all.