Editor's Note: Check out our latest ebook on How to Use Twitter for Business, complete with updates for 2011! Click here to download it.
Twitter is a tool for "micro-blogging" or posting very short updates, comments or thoughts. In fact, since Twitter was designed to be very compatible with mobile phones through text messages, each update is limited to 140 characters. Truly, a micro-blog. Another way to think of Twitter is like a cross between instant messaging (IM) and a chat room, because it is an open forum, but you restrict it to the people with which you connect.
I have to admit I have not always been sold on Twitter. At first I did not get it at all. Then I thought I understood it, but thought it was stupid and useless. Then I used it a bit more and got some more followers and followed a few more people. Now I think it has some value, especially as a marketing and PR tool.
Ideas for How to Use Twitter for Marketing & PR
- Engage your CEO in social media. Social media is a great way to have a conversation with your market and make and mange connections with prospects, customers, bloggers and other influencers. But for a CEO, the typical routes to social media can be hard. Especially if you are a larger or global company. A CEO typically has little time to write a blog or answer lots of messages and friend requests on Facebook. I cannot tell you how many CEO blogs I have seen with only 1 or 2 posts because the CEO never had time to update the blog after the first couple entries. But, Twitter is limited to 140 characters per update, so it is all about short thoughts and comments. If your CEO can send a text message, they can use Twitter from anywhere in the world as a marketing and PR tool. Twitter is actually perfect for CEO or founder who is always on the road meeting with people and who has some interesting opinions on your market.
- Keep in touch with bloggers / media. It is really easy to follow someone on Twitter (see below). And you'll be surprised how often they decide to follow you as well. In fact, I have lots of people I consider "famous" in the marketing and PR worlds following me. In my opinion, this is a way easier way to connect with influential people in the media than calling and emailing them.
- Monitor your company / brand on Twitter. A while back we noticed that Guy Kawasaki mentioned Website Grader on Twitter. Well, of course we had to let him know a bit more about Website Grader and maybe ask if he would also blog about it? The result was this blog article on Website Grader which drove a good amount of traffic and leads. (See below for a cool tip on how to easily monitor people talking about your company on Twitter.)
- Announce specials, deals or sales. If you are a retailer or anyone who often has special offers, you can use Twitter to announce these deals instantly to a large audience. You know those commercials from Southwest Airlines about that "Ding" application you could download and would then alert you about specials on flights? Well, Twitter can be used as a kind of free version of that. Dell and Woot have done just this type of marketing, with a lot of success.
- Live updates on events or conferences. If you participate in a large trade show or run your own corporate event, you can use Twitter to announce last minute changes, cool events that are happening ("Just announced, David Meerman Scott book signing in the exhibit hall until 11am") and more. It is a great last minute marketing tool.
- Promote blog articles, webinars, interesting news and more. Its really easy to post a link to something in Twitter, and I often post links to blog articles on this blog, or other news articles relevant to HubSpot. A good idea is to post articles on other websites that are relevant to your business, like a customer success story or other PR coverage. If you have other content that is appealing to your audience like a free webinar, post links to those too.
For example, here's a recent report that we posted on Twitter to promote Marketing Transformation Week:
Notice how we've added a specific "hashtag" (#transform) to help us track when this content gets retweeted or shared.
Using Twitter for Marketing & PR - A Step-by-Step Guide
- Sign-up and post a profile. Visit Twitter and click on the "Get Started - Join" button in the middle. The rest is simple enough that I think you can figure it out without my help.
- Write some updates. The beauty of Twitter is that the 140 character limit is the great equalizer - I am about as good of a writer as Shakespeare on Twitter. Post a link to a news article you liked with a one line comment, mention an interesting thought you had, or tell everyone what you are cooking for dinner. Just write something.
- Make friends. Making friends on Twitter is pretty easy. Just surf around the web on your favorite blogs, people's Facebook profiles etc, and when you see a Twitter box that tells you what they are doing click on it. That will bring you to their profile and then you just click on the "Follow" button on the top left and you are now following them. Most of the time they will then follow you back, and the audience for your 140 character insights will have grown by one person. You can get started by following me: Mike Volpe on Twitter. You can also click on the people that other people are following to find more people to follow.
- How to post URLs. Twitter is based on 140 character updates. If you have a really long URL, that doesn't leave much room for Most people on Twitter use www.TinyURL.com to take a long URL and make it short. Give it a shot if you have a long URL that you want to market on Twitter.
- Monitor conversations about your company. Even if you don't join Twitter yourself you can monitor what people are saying about any person, company or brand. This is quite useful from a marketing and PR standpoint. Twitter has a search engine that lets you do just this. For instance, here is a list of everyone who is talking about HubSpot on Twitter. You can subscribe to these searches by RSS to keep yourself updated. Another tip is that you can "follow" all the people you find talking about your company (just click on their username to go to their profile). If they are talking about your company, they would probably be pretty happy that someone from the company wants to follow them.
- How to "chat". Using the @ symbol before someone's Twitter username is how people have "conversations" in Twitter. This makes their username a link to their profile so other people can follow the conversation (sort of). For example if you wrote "@mvolpe thanks for the cool blog article about Twitter today" that would be a way of telling me you liked this article. Try it out. It's not IM (instant messaging), but it is sort of like a publicly broadcast IM service.
Inbound Marketing Blog Feed
Production Music Library 2:27 PM on March 05, 2008
Please be our friend...puh-leeeease???
www.twitter.com/5alarmmusic
:)
Anonymous 2:42 PM on March 05, 2008
@5 alarm music - done!
Internet Marketing Joy 5:23 PM on March 05, 2008
I think Twitter is a great and fun site...It has a lot of potentials...also the people there are pretty friendly and helpful.
Bhupesh Shah 12:40 AM on March 06, 2008
would love to follow you LOL....
http://twitter.com/ethnicomm
tks :)
Anonymous 12:54 AM on March 06, 2008
@Bhupesh Shah - you got it!
Brian Humphrey 6:32 PM on March 06, 2008
Mike,
Our agency experiment has proven that success with Twitter is limited only by your imagination.
Thanks for the always enjoyable site!
Respectfully Yours in Safety and Service,
Brian Humphrey
Firefighter/Specialist
Public Sercice Officer
Los Angeles Fire Department
Federico Muñoa 5:46 PM on March 12, 2008
Well... why not?
Here is mine, I would be glad to follow you guys.
http://twitter.com/buyandwalk
Gregory 12:49 AM on March 26, 2008
Hi Mike Volpe,Great Information.
Thanks
Debbie Johnson 3:40 AM on May 26, 2008
Awesome tips!
Thank you for sharing!
Webmaster and money makers, please add me on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/MoneyMakers
jason 3:45 AM on May 26, 2008
Added you Debbie Johnson, please add me too: http://twitter.com/jasonlowjy
Daegan Joel 3:46 AM on May 26, 2008
It'll be great to follow each other as we are like minded people.
http://twitter.com/NetworkMarketer
Followed the rest above.
:)
Paula 12:53 AM on June 06, 2008
Awesome article. I'm definitely atwitter about Twitter as I see it as a simple, easy way to blog without getting glassy eyed at the computer. It's a terrific marketing and PR tool that can be fun in the process!
IVA debt advice UK 8:54 AM on July 03, 2008
We feel that twitter is so easy to use and it offers so much potential for marketing on a budget
peter parker 10:02 AM on July 04, 2008
------------------------------------------------
Dave Winer, father of RSS says “Twitter, as it was conceived, was never meant to live.”
“It’s very possible with better engineering its architecture might have gone on for a few more years, but eventually it would have hit this wall, where there were too many people posting too many twits to too many followers. The scale of the system as conceived rises exponentially.”
So is the end of Twitter getting near? I hope not. Twitter I hope that you are listening and you better start taking things more seriously.
-----------------------------------------------
Here's my two cents.
For instance there are about 100m users of yahoo messenger and usually 2-3 of them talk at a time that means scalability of 300m conversations. On the other hand with 100m twitter users who usually send messages to 100-10,000 other users the scalability required is 10,000m to 10^6m I have never known any current architecture based on webservers to handle such a scale. So according to me Twitter was never meant to live. It is like a concept car that will never see production. Users of twitter don't understand this and they don't care.
They don't know whats happening when the website is down. The sad part is that the best analysts claim that Twitter is a billion dollar company in one year of operations. There is an old saying before the days of when people understood permutation combinations. One peasant asked a king to give him rice equal to the total amount gotten by placing double the number of rice grains on a chess square than the previous square, starting with one rice grain. There are 8x8=64 squares. We seriously need to visit grade 7 mathematics.
I know of only one News/Messaging system that supports around 1 billion users sending messages to all 1 billion users each. Thats a scalability of 10^12m. It is not Web based but rather on a massively scalable serverless P2P architecture based. The team is soft spoken and when I last talked to them I was told that they don't care about money or hype or fame but rather for just the passion of next generation global systems that will stand the test of worldwide use. Its called Mermaid News Mermaid
They have other softwares too but this post is about Twitter and Messaging. Once everyone comprehends basic mathematics that goes behind scalable algorithms they would go past the flashy screen and hype to actually want a system they can trust. To the analysts I would say it is easy to create a business plan, create a hype and raise $20m funding it is far more difficult to create something of use.
Robyn 2:31 AM on August 08, 2008
I just found this post from your answer on LinkedIn. I like the bit about being able to follow tweets about your company, but the url you provided isn't pulling up (terraminds). Is there another that accomplishes the same task?
Thanks.
www.twitter.com/PurelyCosmetics
Mike Volpe 3:46 AM on August 08, 2008
@Robyn - Thanks for letting me know. Twitter now has a search engine of their own - I updated the link in the article, and here it is: http://search.twitter.com
Debt 12:33 PM on August 21, 2008
I've used twitter for a few projects with mixed results. I agree though - you're only limited by your imagination!
Debby 5:17 PM on October 12, 2008
Thanks for the great information! I never heard of Twitter before. Thanks for posting this!!
Jeff Pontes 5:06 PM on October 15, 2008
Twitter is a great tool when not abused for pointless posts. I find it works well as a means of establishing relationships with credible industry professionals, for developing a personal brand and for keeping in the now with what industry experts are doing or sharing.
Peter Robert Casey 1:34 AM on November 28, 2008
Solid list here. Thanks for sharing.
Yvonne Garcia 6:37 PM on December 05, 2008
I am so grateful for this podcast. You I have been online for years and have SEO clients, BUT I have never taken Twitter seriously.
I like how you present this information.
Thanks,
Yvonne
Shannon 6:43 PM on December 16, 2008
I want to invite people on my company website to follow our company twitter. How do I do that? I'm finding Twitter has a pretty steep learning curve for those of us new to social media. Thanks so much for your very detailed and convincing help.
@ashleighcasner 4:24 PM on December 30, 2008
I am just starting to use Twitter and found this article interesting and helpful. Thanks!
Sean 4:47 PM on December 30, 2008
You might also want to take a look at this article about using twitter for promoting real estate http://www.wpreality.com/twittering-your-property-away.html
Lionfire 2:14 AM on January 07, 2009
Wow, this is great! Here's another valuable resource on How to Use Twitter for Marketing and PR.
Amit Desai 8:30 AM on February 10, 2009
I have learnt a lot from hubspot and i really like the content here. Keep up the good work guys.
Recently started using twitter, i have shared my first hand expereince here http://tinyurl.com/bxfdpk
Amit
Dennis Lankes 6:08 PM on March 09, 2009
I work with several clients that I am trying to impress the importance of using twitter. I am wondering if you only had a 140 characters to do so what would you say?
Josh Melrebin 7:33 PM on March 31, 2009
Started promoting our site ibenefitRx. Its kinda hard with not realy "specials" to micro-blog about though.
and the @ chats seem slike they are spamming!
Christopher Tremblay 12:03 PM on April 03, 2009
Hi - thanks for the great story - I just signed up for Twitter today and love the advise given here.
Stefan Birrer 2:42 AM on April 18, 2009
Thanks for the howto. We have been using twitter for a bit. It's a great tool to communicate on the go.
AaronZ 6:03 PM on April 18, 2009
Useful article and presentation Mike. Thanks. We're going to recommend it and post a link from our site.
Glad to hear that your opinion on Twitter has changed, although it sounds like you still have some doubts ("Now I think it has some value...")
The Ashton Kutcher / malarianomore.org win this week is an excellent example and only the tip of the iceberg.
UGGS 8:26 AM on April 26, 2009
great post, i got my first twitter now.. hope can help my marketing. :)
Craig 1:02 PM on May 01, 2009
Hi
I have been wondering - if when I post it message on my home page would or would not all the people following me see it ?
Also what about people I am following ? Would they see it as well ?
I would like to know if I can I send a message out to everyone at once ?.
Please tell me how all of this works.
Thank you Craig
Mike Volpe 1:44 PM on May 01, 2009
Craig - you should check out our Twitter Marketing Hub, you can doanload our Twitter eBook for Beginners: http://www.hubspot.com/twitter-marketing-hub/
helptobiz 6:20 PM on May 01, 2009
Excellent post,nice tips.I have officially become a twitter user myself and this will come in handy!
Jim,
http://helptobusiness.com
ISREALTY 12:47 AM on May 07, 2009
we are on twitter - updated property listings for sale / rent in singapore.
Joy Paterson 12:30 PM on May 19, 2009
Great article Mike... follow me on Twitter JoyRealEstate
Virginia SEO 10:55 PM on May 19, 2009
Very Good article! Like you, I didn't get it at first. Once you learn how to apply the benefits to your market, WOW! Amazingly enough, it's a gold for local marketing too :)
Coco 11:45 AM on May 22, 2009
Great tips! Thanks for sharing.
I just started Twittering, if you want to add me I am RPF_Jewellery.
hhehe 7:51 PM on May 28, 2009
http://www.howtousetwitterformarketingandpr.com/
David 8:23 PM on June 18, 2009
Great read very useful information this will help in our marketing efforts!
Dave
builderelement 6:00 AM on June 22, 2009
Great artical!! Thanks! Please add me on Twitter and i am builderelement.
dofollow 6:04 AM on June 23, 2009
I love Twitter and love your article too!
igottiffany 2:10 AM on July 03, 2009
thank you for such great tips.
Elizabeth 1:33 PM on July 06, 2009
Great info, thanks for sharing, I have been using twitter for a while but have just started using it for marketing in the last couple of months and its going pretty well
justme 5:50 AM on July 09, 2009
folow me twitter http://twitter.com/makatuk
tiffany 1:25 AM on July 11, 2009
Everything will be all right,Thanks anyway.
Tommis Dart 3:12 PM on July 11, 2009
i started using twitter before 2hours, and now when i read this HTU(how to use), i started thinking about making money from twitter, thx for this HTU, this will help me a lot
Latest Seo News 1:37 AM on July 22, 2009
Good Tips and Thanks for sharing the info
kim 1:50 PM on August 02, 2009
Hi Great article .Its sounds like you had the same problem understanding Twitter.I am just now learning more about it .I have a question if you don`t mind.Do you no if i can place my affiliate link in my profile? Thanks
zapping 9:06 AM on August 12, 2009
Something like this i guess??!!!
http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/4985/Retweeting-in-Real-Life-Cartoon.aspx
Sujit 5:19 AM on August 18, 2009
Nice Posting, thanks for sharing your thoughts!!! :)