As more and more traditional media talk about twitter, and more and more personalities leverage both for there own gain, a greater number of small business are starting to consider using one or the other as part of there online strategy. In the past year we have noticed three distinct types of business appear on Twitter.

1. Click Me – These twitter businesses make no attempt to engage in the conversation. They have twitter accounts purely to post links to there own products. Most are controlled by robots and blog plugins.
2. Shy Businesses – these business generally just retweet other people’s posts. There is rarely if ever a link back to there business, there is rarely a personal post. A quick chat to the people controlling these accounts and you will undoubtedly here the phrases “I’m embarrassed about posting anything like that” or “No one wants to read what I did this morning, it’s boring”
3. Let’s Be Friends – Twitter businesses that get so involved in the conversation that they forget to try and monetize there followers. Not necessarily a bad thing (well form a profit point of view it s akin to collecting newsletter subscriptions and not sending a newsletter). Some of these businesses are classic and I really enjoy following them, it is refreshing to follow someone that has no motive, but from a business point of view it wouldn’t hurt them at all to remind us they have something to sell.

Get your Twitter Ratio Right

So – how much should you twitter and how many should link back to your website ? There are a few schools of thought and precise numbers are debatable. A couple of rules to live by before I make some specific numbers up.

1. Don’t twitter so much that you become a burden. With people following hundred – even thousands – of people if you are tweeting 20-30 times a day you will become annoying – especially if you aren’t really saying anything. The smart money is somewhere around 6-8 times a day.
2. Don’t twit about your own website so often that people stop reading your tweets. Obviously – if the bulk of your tweets are about how great you are- people won’t have to read your tweets- they will assume it is the same old crap and either stop following or stop reading – eventually both.If you tweet 6 times a day – once a day include a link to your website and once a day include a link to something else. 1/3 posts can include a link, 1/6 can link to your own website
3. Retweet ? I keep having trouble coming up with a number for retweets. I follow people that retweet 8 times a day  – and I look forward to each and every one of them. Other people retweet once and I will block them after a week. The difference ? If the things you are retweeting are new and unique (well internet unique) AND you are retweeting something genuinely interesting go for it. If you are retweeting because the person id famous or you want to see them naked – don’t. We have all followed that person that doesn’t tweet without including the @account of some celebrity – painful isn’t it. The golden rule of retweets is if you truly think your followers will benefit form the retweet and havn’t seen it before go crazy – if not – save it – your followers will thank you.

Do you use Twitter as part of your sales strategy ? Is it working ? Have you found any pitfalls we should know about ?

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Tags: twitter