Five ways to generate business using Twitter

Twitter can be a great marketing tool for ecommerce sites – and so much more. Here is how you can win more business using Twitter.

1. Engage with Twitter

The best way to generate business using Twitter is to engage with followers and other relevant people that tweet. This isn’t about conversion per se, but about brand awareness: letting people know that your ecommerce site exists and that you can help them.

Engage with your followers, search for relevant things and start the conversation! Eventually people will start remembering your brand and will visit your ecommerce website. As you tweet interesting and topical information related to what your ecommerce site sells, you’ll gain other followers who want to hear what you have to say.

2. Don’t expect to close business

Twitter is a great place to start the business development and marketing process, but this isn’t where you will close any deals.

As with all other forms of marketing, Twitter is good at raising awareness of your brand and it can help you position yourself as the go-to place for a certain subject or type of good. It gives you access to prospective customers so you can warm them up. Then, when they’re ready to buy, they will.

3. Be visible and active

It’s important that you be active every day to generate any meaningful marketing presence. What does this mean? In an ideal world, you should tweet five times a day at least.

4. Provide a mix of content

But do not plug your business all the time! This is extremely important. The biggest trick to winning business via Twitter is to get the right balance of content. Too much conversation and it’s difficult for people to engage with you personally. Too much broadcasting sales messages gets boring very quickly.

Don’t let your Twitter feed get stuck in selling mode. Provide a balance of content – interesting articles from other sites, cool products, useful tips – and show your followers that you relate to them and their wants, and that you can help.

5. Have a strategy

Very important with Twitter is to have a social media strategy. Don’t just start using Twitter willy-nilly. You need to consider what it is you want to achieve: what audience do you want to engage with? How will you promote your ecommerce business? What do you want out of using Twitter?