Is Twitter any good for business as a marketing tool? Since the hype peaked this year, I have often thought over this question. Even during the peak of the hysteria over Twitter when Ashton Kutcher and CNN were racing to be the first to make it to 1 million followers, I just could not comprehend the hype. For those of you who have lived under a rock for the past 24 months and have no idea what I’m talking about, Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters shown on the author’s profile page and delivered to the author’s subscribers who are acknowledged as followers. Users can send and receive tweets via the Twitter website, Short Message Service (SMS) or external applications.
Whilst I don’t think I will ever fully understand Twitter, it’s more a case of if you can’t beat them, then join them. So over the past 6 months, I’ve begun using Twitter to compliment my site where possible. Because I had no idea about Twitter, initially I was unsure on how to use it to generate revenue or traffic.
There are many uses of Twitter but I decided to use it to drive more traffic to my site and indirectly generate revenue through Adsense. Given my site focuses on freebies, the fact that I can use a free service is just fantastic.
To begin with you will need to get followers. Basically I manually followed a couple of people and began from there. Obviously much like Google search, you want followers that are interested in your niche. So type your key word into Google and check out all the sites on Page 1. More than likely they will have a Twitter account. Start following all their followers and you will notice that you will increase in number. However after a while, you won’t want to keep manually following people because it’s time consuming. That’s where an automated following procedure comes in handy. We purchased a licence and have been using this service for a couple of months. We now have over 17K following us.
Also for efficiency sake, I’ve installed the Twitter bar that allows you to type your message into the URL bar for immediate posting instead of logging into my Twitter account. Once a day I update my Twitter account with the latest offerings and freebies, spending less than 5 minutes a day on Twitter.
All this and according to Google Analytics, I receive between 80-100 hits from Twitter a day. Is it worth it? Well I suggest it is after getting the initial setup. So whilst I still will never understand Twitter, as long as it continues to drive traffic to my site, I will use it.
More about FreeStuff4Free
FreeStuff4Free.com is a website that specialises in finding free stuff, free samples and freebies. This site is visually compelling and easier to navigate than text based free sites. The site is updated daily and dead links removed regularly. There are no scams and all freebies are 100% legitimate.
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