Promoting Your Products and Services Part 4: Use Twitter

Online promotion with Twitter?  Isn't that a microblogging site? Aren't you limited to only 140 characters? How can you promote anything with only 140 characters?

Are those some of your questions?

Answers: yes, yes, I'll tell you how.

Promoting on Twitter is possible and it works. I've written a few posts about Twitter so if you're new to this social networking application, then you might want to start here.

Keep in mind that Twitter is a SOCIAL NETWORKING site. That means you're being social and networking with the people who are following you. You must balance chit chat, building rapport, providing valuable content with your promotions.

The idea of twitter is that you post short "tweets" either letting your followers know what you're up to or in response to someone else's tweet.

It's best if you participate on Twitter for awhile before you begin promoting stuff.  However, the first thing I did and I know others do, is I set up Twitterfeed to "feed" my blog posts to my twitter account.

Every time I post on my blogs, the post is pushed out to my twitter status. That is one form of promotion.  Especially if you're using a blog to promote your product or service. Any blog title over 140 characters will be truncated and converted to a short URL.  This is where it becomes really critical to pay attention to your blog post titles.

Yesterday after my previous blog post showed up on my twitter status, I got a response from one of my followers:

See, it works! Ok, so that's one person, but most people won't tell you they signed up for your program. They just do it.  And this illustrates something else.

See that part about "posted it on my profile"? That means they clicked on the Share button on Facebook and pushed it out to their profile and mini feed, as I discussed in my last post. Now, our free teleclass is visible to even more people who we probably don't know, yet.

You can see that you can create a viral effect if what you're offering is compelling enough.

In addition to pushing out your blog posts to twitter, you can simply write a quick tweet. I will do this several times between now and the date of the class by putting this into my status box: "Free teleclass 5 Internet Marketing Traps http://www.actandattract.com/5traps".

Until I update my status, that will be on my twitter profile. Since new people sign up to follow me every day, there will always be someone new to see the tweet.

How are you using twitter to promote your products and services?