Nov 04 2009
Growing Your Business With Blogs And Twitter
Social media is becoming increasingly important for businesses today. Sites like Facebook and Twitter offer not just fantastic social tools that allow you to chat and meet new people, follow the latest news and trends and generally stay connected with other online users around the world from the comfort of your own home or while at work in the office, but more and more businesses are discovering that, if done correctly, social media can also be a very profitable way to spread information about your products and services and grow your business.
The main problem for most business owners when it comes to using social media to grow their businesses (and especially small business owners), is that there is too much new information to take in and so little time, that most people end up feeling either overwhelmed, or frustrated that they are missing out on some powerful ways to expand their business online and take advantage of all these new emerging technologies.
Take Twitter for example. Everyone’s talking about it. Many businesses are using it quite successfully to get their message out to a growing number of potential prospects and to keep in touch with existing customers, and some very successful Twitter marketers have even created guides on how to make money with Twitter (see Twitter Marketing Product Reviews for a review of some of the more popular guides on Twitter marketing.)
Part of using Twitter successfully to grow your business online is to get people “following” your tweets. To achieve this, however, you’ve gotta be tweetin’ often and follow some of the people who are following you. This means that there are tasks you have to perform on a regular basis (e.g. writing and posting tweets and clicking on links to follow people), which means piling on more work on your daily “to do” lists.
In this post, I am going to share with you a couple of simple strategies I use to help grow my businesses using Twitter that you can easily duplicate by following the instructions I am about to give you. At the very least, the automated strategies I am going to share with you will get your finger in the “Twitter pie” until you can devote more time to learning how to maximize the benefits of using social media for growing your business.
The strategies below assume you already have a Twitter account set up. If not, visit twitter.com and set up an account now (it’s best to set one up sooner rather than later, before someone else takes up the username you may want).
Step 1 – Set Up A Blog
A blog allows you to easily publish content online. If you don’t have a blog yet, then check out my “step-by-step” training product on how to install, set up and configure a fully optimized blog that will help you grow your business online fast.
Step 2 – Get TweetMyBlog Plugin
I have written a whole post about this fantastic free plugin for WordPress blogs here.
TweetMyBlog is free, very easy to install and it automatically notifies Twitter every time you publish a new post on your blog. It then links your automated Twitter post back to your blog, so visitors can read your post. (When I downloaded the plugin, the software developers also included a great and really useful FREE guide on how to use Twitter – what to do and what not to do, etc …)
Once you have set up a simple system for automatically notifying your Twitter followers about your new blog posts with TweetMyBlog, it’s time to take things to the next level.
Step 3 – Automate Twitter Account Management Tasks
When you first get started with Twitter, it can be fun to try and follow everyone who is following you and get to know what’s going on. After a while, however, it just becomes too hard to try and keep up with all of the messages flowing into your account. More importantly, however, is to develop a routine of regularly broadcasting and promoting your business to others.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could just spend a couple of minutes each week writing a few great tweets about your products and services and special offers, then scheduling these messages to be delivered over the following week, say once or twice each day, or at a specific time to coincide with a particular event you will be attending or presenting at?
Well, this is what Social Oomph allows you to do.
Social Oomph is a fantastic FREE tool that allows you to automate and schedule your Twitter feeds, send welcome messages to new followers, and do so much more to help you promote and grow your business on Twitter. This tool has a free signup and a paid option. Obviously, you get a lot more benefit and functionality with the paid version, but the free sign-up option has many great features too, such as:
Auto Welcome – You can automatically send a message to new followers (and even rotate several different messages using their spinnable welcome message text feature).
- Auto Follow – Automatically follow people who follow you.
- Vet Followers - You can manually approve a new follower before you begin to follow them.
- Auto Unfollow – SocialOomph will automatically unfollow people who unfollow you.
- @Replies Digest Email – If you get too busy to check your replies in Twitter, this option will email you a digest of the replies other people have sent you.
- Keyword Alert – This is great and really useful feature that allows you to set up an automated search for tweets containing certain keywords. (One great use for this feature for example, is to see what other people are tweeting about your business, by simply adding your business name or domain address to the list.)
You can see a full list of all of the features and a comparison table when you visit their site.
I suggest you take up the FREE trial offer for the Professional level when you register for your FREE account, and get a feel of just how powerful this tool can be. Then, if you don’t think the upgrade is for you, just don’t renew at the end of your trial period and you will automatically revert back to the FREE membership.
Your first step, then, should be to open a free account with Social Oomph.
Once you’ve got your account set up, take a few minutes to go through the video tutorials that explain how to use all of the features and start automating some of the tasks you need to do for growing your business using Twitter.
Let me show you just how useful this tool is, using my audiobook store business as an example.
1) After setting up my account with Social Oomph, I then clicked on “Tweets’ > “New Tweet” and scheduled a message promoting one of my monthly special titles.
2) I then went ahead and scheduled several more tweets, using the “publish at exact time” feature.
3) In just a few minutes, I added and scheduled an entire week’s worth of posts. Each day, a new post will be automatically added to my audio book store Twitter account and sent to everyone following my tweets.
A terrific time-saving feature of this tool is that it allows you to manage multiple Twitter accounts and schedule a ton of messages ahead of time.
Now, I can just go ahead and keep working on my business as usual, while my business marketing goes on happening 24/7 thanks to:
- A blog that has been set up to notify search engines and feed directories automatically each time a new blog post is published (go here for more details: How To Set Up A Blog Step-By-Step Tutorials),
- A plugin that automatically notifies Twitter of my new blog posts (TweetMyBlog)
- A tool that automatically manages my Twitter posts and followers (Social Oomph)
After setting up all of the above (a one-time only effort), the total time required to keep growing my business online using blogs and social media tools like Twitter using the method I’ve just shared with you here is less than 2-3 hours per week (writing new blog articles and Twitter posts).
I hope you have found this information useful and I wish you great business success using these great new technology tools.
(click on the banner above to sign up with Social Oomph)
PS: If you want more special “insider” tips on how to grow your business using Twitter, then sign up to my FREE Newsletter below where I share with subscribers many proven strategies for growing your business online fast.
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PPS: Follow me on Twitter here: @internetadworks
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