milagros fine: How to Increase Customer Engagement (and Sales)

Friday, September 28, 2012

How to Increase Customer Engagement (and Sales) - AudienceBloom

Twitter will be around long enough for today?s toddlers to tweet their way to puberty.

Who would have thought that 140 characters could compel people to take unified action? Who would?ve guessed that it takes just 140 characters to transform an idea from conception to physical reality with incredible speed?

Twitter marketing is tricky for many Internet marketers. But for veteran online entrepreneurs, it?s an indispensable element of the overall marketing strategy.

What can an effective Twitter marketing campaign do for a business?

Create a unique online brand for products and services. Your business?s products or services need some sort of personality. They need a powerful image and representatives so people can recognize and find them.
Generate a substantial number of new followers for your business. Twitter enables your customers and followers to track your updates and learn about your latest offerings. If done right, your Twitter campaign could create loyal brand evangelists for your business from among the followers that regularly read your updates.
Measure your online success. With the right set of tools, you can measure your company?s success online in terms of the number of people that support your brand and the number of visitors that get redirected to your main website via Twitter.
Develop into a powerful market research tool. With Twitter, you can track what people say about your business or your brand. You can also monitor what people assert about the competition and the industry to which your business belongs. With Twitter, you can almost instantly defuse any negative customer feedback, and address potentially dangerous rumors as soon as you learn of them.

Now that we?ve established why you should integrate Twitter into your online marketing efforts, let?s take a look at how you can use it to increase your website?s traffic.

1. The profile. For a more effective branding strategy, use your business name as your Twitter handle. The profile should also clearly establish what your business is about, and include a link to your business?s main website.

Want to make your Twitter profile memorable? Get creative.

2. Tweet with value. Promotion is good. After all, it?s why you created a Twitter profile for your business in the first place. But shameless promotions have flooded the social space. Your followers on Twitter expect to get value out of your tweets ? updates that will help them with their issues. Tweet links that could help them ease their pains and increase their pleasure. Try a few good jokes every now and then.

After you?ve established your account as one that delivers value, you can sparsely promote your business. Following this best practice should preserve and increase the number of followers you have on Twitter.

3. Re-tweet, reply, and follow back. Each time you come across a tweet from elsewhere that might interest your followers, re-tweet it. If you find a tweet to be especially valuable, share it with your followers. And when someone else re-tweets your updates, show your appreciation by acknowledging their re-tweet and thanking them. Also, when someone directs a tweet at you, respond quickly.

Although you are by no means obligated to follow back someone who follows you on Twitter, doing so is seen as a courtesy. Think of yourself as the gracious celebrity who is willing to acquiesce to a fan?s request for an autograph.

4. Learn the power of magnetic tweets. In copywriting, headlines should be written carefully to pull in readers? attention. The same is true with Twitter updates. Post exciting and interesting updates. Don?t be boring.

Instead of just plainly tweeting ?New update (link)?, post something that arouses attention and thought, like ?What does this (product) do that the competition can?t? (link)?.

Be playful. Be creative. Arouse interest. Be magnetic.

5. Tweet with passion and tweet regularly. You want to provide your followers with something fresh on a regular basis and you want to engage them daily. That?s what tweeting is all about. So tweet regularly and tweet with passion. Just don?t flood your followers with a worthless stream of shoutouts.

Twitter is one of the most game-changing inventions in the last decade. It has helped politicians win elections, moved thousands of people to accomplish a common goal in less than a day, and allowed companies to rake in boatloads of profits.

Conclusion
Get on the program and do it right. Use proper Twitter marketing to your advantage and you?ll see your business soar.