12 Ways To Do Social Media Marketing With Twitter

Twitter is a wildly popular microblogging service. It is written Tweets, which are short updates on a maximum of 140 characters that tell your supporters what you're up to. Although your Tweets are technically supposed to answer the question: "What are you doing?" Twitter has moved far beyond this. Tweets used to share stories, links to photos, promotional content, breaking news, and a lot more. Twitter has also become an incredibly important tool for social media marketing professionals. Here are 12 ways Twitter can be used in your social media marketing campaign.

1. Sharing Links to topics of interest

Once you read something online that you think is interesting, is it easy to share it with all your Twitter followers. Twitter is very effective in this way because it's such a quick way to be able to reach a large group of people. You can also get a lot of good ideas for blog posts from Twitter because many new ideas and stories are floating around who have not even made it to the blogosphere and certainly not the mainstream media.

2. Building Your Network

Using Twitter is a great way to build your network because it allows you to find and follow people with similar interests. You can use the Steeple to find people who live in your geographic area. You can also use other tools to help you find new people to follow based on who your Twitter friends follow.

3. Build relationships within your existing network

People in different networks often use Twitter to connect with their contacts immediately, rather than using instant messaging for this purpose. In addition, many people are using Twitter to connect with their networks during events such as conferences.

4. Re-distribute content from your blog or website

Twitter can be used to redistribute content from your blog or website. However, make sure you do it wisely, as many of your Twitter followers, who can already read your blog. For this reason, you can avoid using a blog plug-in that automatically Tweets your posts. Your best bet is to tweet your content manually and customize each Tweet, so it does not get old.

5. Be involved in Live Tweeting Events

Twitter launched at SXSW last year, catapulting microblogging conferences to fame. Live Tweeting events are great because they are a form of citizen journalism that allows you to connect with more new people in your niche, while active and valuable contribution to ongoing discussions in your community.

6. Pitching stories to journalists on Twitter

You can send a direct message to a journalist who follows you on Twitter to pitch a story idea.

7. Communicate with your team

You can use Twitter as a company intranet that connects all your employees. Twitter can be very useful in this respect, if you have a virtual company with employees in different geographical areas. You can configure your updates to private for security reasons. Anytime you are working on group projects, you can keep in touch with your team members using Twitter.

8. Fire Monitoring

Stay current with no mention of your company on Twitter. If there is something negative, you will be able to respond quickly. You can also use Twitter as a way to get feedback from your customers and improve your business. Just ask your supporters to give their opinion about something. For example, if you design a new website, ask your supporters what they think about it and get their constructive criticism, so you can make your site design even better.

9. Acquire more votes on Social Media Websites

If you submitted a story to Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, or other social voting site, tweet a link to this statement, to try to score more votes from your fans. If your fans like what they see, they are sure to vote on your content.

10. Hiring People

Looking for a programmer, designer or writer? Whatever type of professional you are looking for, try to find them on Twitter. Simply send your fans a twitter tell them you are looking for someone for a job. They can either recommend someone to you or to make themselves job. Using Twitter in this way is ideal to find skilled freelancers. It is far more practical than placing a classified ad.

11. Build your personal brand

When you use Twitter to talk about things as banal as what you ate for breakfast, or how you should sleep early tonight, you make your fans feel that you are relaxed and welcoming. Even those with running a company that has a cold, corporate image could create greater appeal and build a unique personal brand using Twitter.

12. Streamline Electronic communications

When you use Twitter, you'll probably find yourself using chat, email and other electronic communication methods less. Twitter not only gives public chat via Tweets, it also allows you to send direct messages. Twitter will help you streamline your electronic communications, allowing you to scale back online.