By now you know that Twitter is an awesome tool to use when trying to grow your brand using the internet. It’s great for networking, business building, and growing traffic to your website.

However, Twitter is a beast. Let’s look at the stats, first and foremost:

According to Twitter’s about page; Twitter boasts:

• 320 million active monthly users
• 1 billion unique visits monthly to sites with embedded tweets
• 80% active users on mobile
• 79% accounts outside the US

A lot of solopreneurs and business owners struggle with what to do on Twitter, and how to make it work in their marketing strategy.

As always, you don’t want to appear to spammy and salesy and drive people away rather than draw them in. The golden rule rings true on Twitter as well: People don’t like to be “sold” on social media. It’s not the yellow pages.

So how can you leverage Twitter, anyway?

Let’s go over 10 ways of how you can use Twitter for your business:

1. Have an attractive bio. In the previous post, we went over how you could create a fun and engaging bio that will attract the followers you want to eventually in your lead list. Include a photo, keywords and true information about yourself in your Twitter bio.
2. Target your followers. Be intentional in who you want to follow you. You can do this through Twitter native search as well as advanced tools like SocialQuant or ManageFlitter. Again, like other social media channels, you are not looking to have everyone and their mother follow you; you want the people who follow you to be people who are actually interested in what you have to say, sell or serve.
3. Write content that speaks to those targeted followers. The first part of your tweet should show who you are as a business and your personality. You need to include a call to action in your tweets. Point people to a blog post, a capture page, or another social channel where they can follow you. Make sure to ask people to retweet your best content. This increases your reach by possibly thousands! Another tip: curate and tweet other user’s content in your niche as well. This shows that you care about the community you serve. For example, if you sell weight loss products, tweet articles from Fitness magazine with helpful tips. Remember you are there to help your target buyer!
4. Be intentional with your headlines. Your headline is what grabs the user and entices them to click your link. Google search “headline generator” to come up with fun ideas for your content headlines.
5. Include a link. Make sure to not only include links in your profile, but in some of your tweets. Take people off the noisy mess that is Twitter, where you can talk to people more personally via a capture page, or a blog post on your website. At IMU we focus on driving viewers to a capture page, where you can gather an email address, and add people to your list.
6. Include hashtags! Hashtags are an extremely powerful searchable tool. Users will search hashtags based on what they are looking for; do you want to be found in the feed that is returned? Of course you do!
7. Promote a freebie. At IMU, the cornerstone of your marketing sales funnel is the lead offer (freebie) offered through a capture page. This will drive traffic to your website, as well add names to your list. You can then promote your paid products WITHIN your free product! It’s that easy.
8. Use multi-media. Images, gifs, and videos will increase your engagement if you do it right. Make sure your images make sense with your Tweet and make sure they are high quality and professional.
9. Tweet often. Do you know that I tweet up to 30 times a day? No, I am not sitting at my computer or on my phone sending out tweets. I leverage some pretty awesome tools to make that happen. Many of them, like Hootsuite, offer free plans, so if there is any piece of advice you take from this post, it’s that. Use tools!
10. Show up for your job. You can’t go half-a** on Twitter. As I said above, I tweet 30 times a day. This is because Twitter moves so quickly that my Tweets are off my followers’ feeds within seconds. Could you post 30 times on Facebook? ABSOLUTELY NOT! That’s a sure-fire way to get kicked off Facebook in a hurry. But the rules are different for each channel. And on Twitter, the more the merrier. And guess what; it only takes me about an hour a week to make that happen.

What do you think? Are you ready to get on Twitter and rock your business?

Learn how and more with IMU’s Twitter: How To Use Twitter For Business course.