How to promote your company, product or prand on Twitter
There are many newbies who are using Twitter the wrong way to promote “stuff”. These users actually lower the value to all other Twitter users by being of low value and generally being a nuisance by adding irrelevant “noise” to the Twitter feed.
Eventually, these accounts will be permanently blocked by Twitter users, removed by Twitter if a spammer account is reported and flagged by 3rd party spam busters like TwitChuck.
Now I suspect that a lot of these users are not really hardcore spammers (although there are those too). But rather, people who don’t understand how Twitter works and have no empathy for the people who mutually follow them.
If you want to promote your business or product on Twitter, here are some guidelines on how to do it professionally and ethically:
1. Age of your account.
Do not promote any business or product unless your account is at least 6 months old. Additionally, you should only promote a product that is relevant to your followers. Which brings us to rule 2.2. Build a target audience per Twitter account.
You should follow and friend users with similar interests. You should build up goodwill by offering useful content that is relevant to the product you are promoting. Use a separate Twitter account if you are involved in more than 1 market niche.3. Have a balanced ratio of friends and followers (unless you are a mega celebrity).
Spammers tend to use software scripts or robots to add thousands of followers in the hope that they will follow back. If their Tweets have no value, many people will “Unfollow” them leaving an unbalanced ratio of friends and followers. Meaning, the number of people they follow is significantly more than the number of people who follow them.4. Join the conversation.
Another self-centered strategy that spammers use is to just have a few posts about their product or service and then just focus on adding friends and followers instead of actually joining the conversation. Communicate. Retweet good tweets (see my post on How to Retweet Like a Pro). Reply to direct messages. Join conversations using the #tag. Mention others in your tweets.5. Avoid the hard sell terms
Don’t use a lot of spam terms like “free”, “join”, “subscribe”, “viagra”…etc. These will get flagged.