Using Twitter to Market your Store or Business

Are you marketing your business/store through social media? If not you should be! We're no experts here, but we want to share what we've learned in the hopes that you can all benefit. This information could apply to your boocoo store, personal website or your stores on other sites.

Twitter has become huge over the years. When this unique service first came out no one understood the marketing capability that it held. Now (years later) Twitter has become an integral part social media marketing. At first Twitter can be a bit intimidating, but the learning curve is a lot easier to manage than most people think.

People post everything on Twitter, from the most boring web blog ever written to great resources and links. The trick is to know what to look for. Your goal is to reach out to your customers by posting content that would be of interest to them.

You can determine exactly how you want to do this, but we think the best way is to post a combination of promotional material (links to your products/services), links to content on other sites that would interest your customers (blog posts, news articles, etc.) and unrelated posts that your customers might enjoy (viral videos, funny news, that type of thing). Make sure to also include information on specials, sales and events.

First research your "niche" in the marketplace. You can start with the big names in your industry; see what they’re posting. This can help you understand how Twitter is being used so that you can get a better grasp on what YOU can do. You don’t want to copy their content directly, but you can emulate them as a start to see what works for you.

Twitter search is a great tool for this. Once you have found resources on Twitter create a list so you always have that information to refer to.

There are a lot of tools out there to help manage your efforts. Many allow you to automatically post to Twitter based on a predefined schedule, so you could set up an entire week or month content ahead of time.

Tweet Deck is a good one, as is Hootsuite. Find a tool you like, learn it and love it; it can be a lifesaver! Many of these tools can also allow you to post to Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare and other similar sites.

Don’t concentrate too much on one tweet/message. Focus on the overall identity you want to create for yourself and your business. Your customers will have access to all your tweets, so in between all your business tweets be sure to add some personality. Engage in conversations with your costumers, ask and answer questions, develop relationships and use hash tags. Hash tags let Twitter know what the tweet is about.

Find an interesting image to use as your avatar, and change your background to something that fits your theme. Use your tweets to announce products, sales, for getting feedback and generally interacting with your customers. One of the worst things you could do for your company is not market online.

The most important rule of all, have fun!!! If you find your information interesting other people will too.

Let us know how you use Twitter, and check out boocoo's Twitter page to see how we're using it. If you know how we can do something better make sure to let us know!