How To Use Twitter As A Marketing Tool Part 1: Links

In this three part article, which will be posted in segments over the next three days, I’m going to describe some of the methods you can use, and practices you can observe, to promote your business and your products onTwitter. Today, I’m going to tell you how to post tweets containing links in order to gain the trust of your followers, increase your following and drive traffic onto your sales website.

I’m also going to describe how you can use hashtags to compliment your tweeted links. If you want more information on using hashtags than that which is provided in this article, have a look at an article we posted earlier this month, entitled “How To Run A Successful Multi-Platform Hashtag Campaign”.

URL Shorteners

Twitter’s 140 character limit means using URL shorteners in tweets is a must. Twitter has its own automatic link shortener, but it shortens links to 22 characters, which is still quite long. I wrote an article last week about SMF’s five favourite link shorteners, with bitly taking the top spot.

There are some who consider URL shorteners to be spammy, but bitly’s great features – customisable links, analysis tools and private links, to name just a few – make using the service a better option than wasting characters, even if some people won’t click on a shortened link. After all, as long as the content you are posting is good, people won’t care how the links you post on Twitter look.

Provide Value

Post links to content that will be valuable and interesting to your customers. You want to attract followers who might be interested in buying from your company so that, in the future, you can post deals and offers with links to you company website. You could even post links to deals that are exclusive to your Twitter followers, giving people even more of an incentive to follow you.

Use Twitter to break news about new products and company updates. Tweet the news with a link to a blog post or article detailing the announcement in full. If you’re announcing a product you could even post a link to a sales page. Make sure that you alternate between links to your own blog and websites, and links to other content you’ve found online that will interest your followers.

Make Them Sharable

The best way to ensure that your links get seen by as many people as possible is to make them sharable. If you provide your followers with links to interesting content, you’ve gone some way to ensuring the tweets get shared. Try not to use all 140 characters in your tweets, use around 100 so that people can put their own thoughts/comments in retweets.

As I said earlier, I’m only going to be talking about hashtags in relation to posting links on Twitter. Use hashtags to make your link-containing tweets more sharable and easier to find. Create and promote a hashtag about your industry, encouraging other users to tweet links to related content with the hashtag.

Drive Traffic

Ultimately, the reason you’re using Twitter is to drive traffic onto your website, so that more people will buy your products. You need to keep this in mind, but be careful, don’t just post links to your website and your products. As I said earlier, post links to content that is both valuable and sharable.

There is no point, however, posting valuable content if you don’t get anything in return. Make sure that enough of your links funnel your followers back to your website and sales pages where they can buy your products.

How do you use links in your Twitter strategy?

Pinterest Marketing - Get High Quality Traffic Super Fast

Businesses are beginning to realize the significant role Pinterest marketing can play in getting high quality traffic and more exposure for their products quickly. There was a bit of skepticism if Pinterest would manage to generate enough buzz online or fall into the category of social networking sites puffing up and then fizzing out.

It's now safe to conclude that Pinterest could perhaps go on to play a more influential role for businesses than what Facebook or Twitter may have had. Having said that Pinterest marketing should not be an alternate promotional strategy but a mandatory one!

So, how do you get high quality traffic fast using Pinterest marketing?

Start by figuring out what you intend to promote. It's important must understand the difference between Pinterest and other social networking sites to craft this idea. Twitter has a restriction on the content you can post and although there are text extenders and links that can be inculcated in a tweet, the basic concept of making short posts work well as the platform is for updates. You can tweet about an update for a product or tweet about some related news.

With Pinterest, the marketing strategy can get highly diverse. It can be product centric, customer centric, innovation centric and several other types. What Pinterest offers is also not a feature that can be enjoyed on Facebook. For example, the idea of following people you would want to notify about your business and content. You can create a Facebook page and that would be available for people to like, comment or provide other feedback but you can't reach out further than that to get more targeted traffic.

Pinterest marketing gives you the opportunity to take your pin boards and pins across to all the people you want to. That way you get targeted traffic, not to mention the traffic is also extremely high quality traffic that generates sales. A fashion wear brand would definitely reap more benefits if the followers of their pins and boards are concerned about fashion and not just a random like from anyone.

Pinterest marketing should not be juxtaposed with Twitter and Facebook marketing strategies. The platforms are different. Pinterest calls for a more specific approach. Do not just create a page for your business. Instead focus on a specific topic. For example, a mobile manufacturer may want to create a board for a specific mobile phone model and put up interesting pins for the viewers to share with interest. That's how you can get high quality traffic fast and easy!

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/6951766

How to Drive Traffic to Your Website Fast

So you have a website and now you need to generate customers. What is the fastest way to drive traffic to your website for the best results? There are MANY ways to do that but the easiest and fastest way is to publish articles -- either through a blog or an article such as the one you are reading here.

First, understand that it is a numbers game. Simply put, whether you are an affiliate marketer with many quality items to offer fo different tastes, or offering a single product to a niche band of users, the more traffic you generate, the more sales you will make, period.

Two things are needed for article writing: keywords and writing skills. Keywords can be a complicated area but the short explanation is that keywords are what brought you to this page. If you punched in the search term "how to drive traffic to your website" into Google, you were brought almost directly to this page. "How to drive traffic to your website" is the keyword phrase. What you need to drive traffic to YOUR site is a program that will tell you HOW MUCH web traffic uses WHAT specific keywords, phrases, or search terms to locate YOUR specific product(s). Once you find which words or phrases generate the most activity, you can use those magic keywords to compose articles. That way, when someone searches for the keywords you've chosen to write about, they will read the article and ideally, be given a link to your site, where hopefully, they will like what they find. Many different keyword programs are offered through the internet and would give you the information you need.

If you do not consider yourself a writer, not to worry. You can outsource the articles. Many sites on the internet will offer a writing service. I would be sure that all articles are submitted to you before publication to make sure the articles are accurate and well written. In a short time, you should be well satisfied that the writers you use are competently composing articles the way YOU want them done.

If you have your own site that serves more of a niche marketplace, newsletters are an excellent additional way to drive traffic. Again, using keywords in your newsletter would be a powerful way to attract new visitors. Perhaps you would have one free newsletter with more general information and one for subscribers with more detail. A keyword program would help you find the more popular search terms so that YOUR writing would be listed first on the pages of Google.

Finally, don't labor under the misconception that if you have capital, you should not use article writing to generate traffic when there are so many other ways available. Don't forget; you are trying to leverage both time and money here and this is a VERY inexpensive way to drive massive amounts of web traffic your way. if you have the capital, outsource the article writing if you like, and move on to other areas of traffic generation. and market penetration

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/6947459

Facebook Hits New Traffic Record

With its most recent privacy backlash seemingly behind it, Facebook surged ahead to a new traffic record in the U.S. during the month of June. According to comScore, the social network pulled in more than 141 million unique visitors in the U.S. during the month, beating its previous record (set in May) by better than 11 million.

Year-over-year, Facebook’s traffic has nearly doubled, from 77 million unique U.S. visitors in June 2009. As a result, as you can see in the chart above, Facebook has blown past its social networking competition –- most notably MySpace and Twitter, both of which have shown little growth in the past year according to comScore.

Twitter, however, is quick to point out that it is still seeing record traffic in terms of tweet volume, a result of users accessing the site through third-party clients and mobile devices instead of its website.

In any event, Facebook’s continued growth puts it within striking distance of Google for title of most visited web property in the U.S.; the search giant had a total of 179 million unique visitors across its sites in the month of May.

Is there any end in sight to Facebook’s growth? At the moment, a recent survey suggesting teens are starting to suffer “Facebook fatigue” is about the only bearish news to report about the social network, but there is that pesky movie about the company’s controversial beginnings that hits theaters in October.

10 Social Media Tips And Pointers For Start Ups

While convincing people that LinkedIn is a good professional tool is not hard, many folks are not using Facebook for anything other than communicating with friends or playing games, and are not using Twitter at all; articulating the business value of Facebook and Twitter to those people can be challenging.

Are you looking to convince a colleague or a client of the value of social networks? Or perhaps you are still not quite convinced they are actually useful for work? Here’s a list of some basic ways you can use LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter for specific business activities. No bells, no whistles, just business.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a business-oriented network. Useful networking and information gathering tools are built right into the tool that you can use immediately with good results.

1. Get answers. LinkedIn offers an integrated feature on its network, LinkedIn Answers, to help you ask questions of up to 200 of your immediate contacts. You get up to a seven days to gather answers to your question, then you rate the answers you’ve received.

2. Showcase your knowledge. The flipside of LinkedIn Answers is that you can respond to other people’s questions and get rated for the value of your answers. It’s good way to network with others while showing what you know.

3. Distribute polls. You can create and send a poll to your first degree contacts for free and feature it on your profile page using the LinkedIn Polls application. Do quick and dirty market research via your network. For a fee starting at $50, you can also send your poll to a targeted slice of the 75 million or so LinkedIn members.

4. Get (and give) recommendations. You can strengthen your network and expand your presence on LinkedIn by giving kudos to other members you know through the LinkedIn Recommendations feature. You can also solicit recommendations from colleagues and clients to add testimonials to your profile.

5. List your business. You can list your company in the LinkedIn company directory for free. You can connect your profile and the profiles of your team members to the listing and provide news updates. Other business professionals can then follow your business to get the latest updates.

Facebook

Facebook isn’t the most straightforward business tool; it’s primarily focused on socializing. Still, you can’t beat its interconnected features and the potential reach you can have by creating a Page on the network.

6. Build a global — or local — presence. Your Facebook Page can actually be as global or as hyperlocal as you want it to be. It’s a matter of how you design it, market it and manage it. Using Facebook Social Ads, you can zero in on your ideal target audience from Facebook’s rich demographic and psychographic data. When set up strategically, you can get a lot of impact and results for a very affordable price.

7. Build a following. Understanding how to build value into your Facebook Page as well as the dynamics of building an online community are essential for building a targeted, engaged and evangelizing following. Once you hit a critical mass, your Facebook Page’s community will take off, but it will need constant guidance and strategic direction to translate into conversions to sales.

8. Identify and engage “superfans.” I’ve written before about identifying your superfans on Facebook and converting them into grassroots brand ambassadors. Actively engaging your customers in an open dialogue and providing them with the tools they can use to help you spread the word about what you do takes a great deal of thought and consideration but it’s tremendously useful when done appropriately and effectively.

Twitter

Twitter can be a very effective business tool, but building the kind of following that is large enough and pays enough attention to what you say to be truly valuable takes time.

9. Build your brand. By tweeting relevant and useful information you can showcase your expertise, define your point of view and create a springboard for conversations. Compared to Facebook, it takes time to build a brand on Twitter, but it can prove to be just as valuable.

10. Broadcast timely information. When you have something you need to get out to the public, you can tweet it out. The response you get will be commensurate with the quality of your following, of course.

11. Drive traffic. Again, the usefulness of Twitter as a traffic driver depends on how engaged a following you’ve cultivated. It takes time, attention, and care to build real connections with your customers or potential customers. But once you have an avid following, you can include include links in your messaging to direct people to a website or blog; just make sure there is value for them when they get there.