Twitter Marketing & Social Networking

Twitter is one of the fastest growing social networks, and can be most useful for marketing.  This social networking site is estimated to have over 200 million users updating their profiles with tweets, a micro-blog of 140 characters or less that appears on the user's profile page.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project conducted a survey, and found Twitter users to be mobile and very engaged online.

Tweets are shared with users who "follow" you, so they can be updated on what your company is doing, special deals, or answer any questions you may have.  Twitter has the ability to increase awareness of your brand and in turn you gain the insight of your consumer.

There are many ways to utilize this social network site, by using twitter search or following your followers.  Understand your consumer by exploring their likes and interests, and see if they've mentioned you.

Twitter's system isn't all that different from Google AdWords, which is a system for placing ads alongside search results based on the keywords the searcher used.  Twitter advertisers place CPL (cost-per-thousand views) bids on keywords and their tweets are displayed in the search results based on their bid and quality score, which will likely be calculated based on how people respond to the tweet, i.e. retweets, @replies generated by the tweet and new followers.  The higher your quality score, the lower your CPM.

The benefit to advertisers according to Twitter is your tweets will be displayed "above the noise" of ever-changing search results, which gives brands the power to respond to discussions in real-time and not be buried by rapidly changing Twitter search results.

Eventually, promoted tweets will find their way into Twitter streams and desktop/mobile Twitter clients like TweetDeck and Tweetie.

Now, are sponsored tweets right for your business?  If you have something to say that's relevant in real-time, then yes.  If you want to use it to promote a static message the same way you would with Google AdWords or banners, sponsored tweets are probably not right for you.

Twitter is one of the best ways to update your followers, and can easily be stretched across a number of social networking platforms, like Facebook, LinkedIn and your very own website.