It’s no surprise that small businesses are following suit by marketing their products and services on Twitter. Twitter makes it so easy for small businesses to update their customers on upcoming events, sales, promotions, and new merchandise. However, there’s a huge difference between simply having a presence on Twitter and using to effectively market your business. Twitter has already been flooded with a lot of noise, so it’s tougher and tougher to stand out be heard amongst all of the noise and bull crap that is on Twitter. Here are a few strategies to help you market effectlvely on Twitter.

Make use of hash tags

When running a giveaway or a contest on Twitter as part of a marketing strategy for a client, I almost always incorporate a hash tag that I made up. First of all, it’s much easier to track participants of the contest/giveaway, and it easily allows Twitter users filter out the noise from what they want to read. For instance, I ran a contest on the popular Mac blog, Cult of Mac, and to enter the giveaway the readers had to tweet or re-tweet a certain phrase with the hash tag #cultofmac.

Prompt customers to participate

Don’t just give something away on Twitter to the first person that responds to you. Make them for it a little bit. If it’s a giveaway, make followers post a photo on Twitter or answer a question as their entry. If it’s a contest, make it somethig that could go viral like a short video or photo contest.

Host a Twitter Chat

A great way to make use of hash tags on Twitter is to host a Twitter chat. A great example of this is #greenchat and #bp. I started Green Chat for RezHub.comfor people to join in on green living and travel discussion on Twitter. Craig Kessler from Budget Pulse knew that the personal finance community was huge on Twitter, so he stated a Twitter chat about personal finance. So, on Wednesday nights at 7pm if you follow the hash tag #bp, you’ll see a running conversation from people around Twitter talking about personal finance. It’s great for spreading brand awareness and becoming an authority in your industry.

Don’t spam followers

Use the 4 to 1 rule. For every 1 marketing tweet you send out, make sure you send out 4 more tweets that are relational or conversational. If your Twitter account looks just like a billboard or newsletter about what’s going on at your business with no conversation or interaction happening, followers will get annoyed and bored by your Twitter account.

If you have questions about Twitter Marketing and wonder if it’s right for your business, please visit my company’s website, Presence Media Group. You can check out our portfolio and contact us with your company’s info and your marketing needs.

About a week ago, Mashable broke the news about Bing and Google reaching a deal with Twitter to allow tweets to be searched within their search engines. To most people, this isn’t a big deal, but for social media marketing professionals, you know that this will have a huge impact on how Twitter is approached from a marketing standpoint and traffic building standpoint.

We Must Be More Strategic With Our Tweets

If you are tweeting for a company or brand, your tweets will soon be searchable within Google and Bing in virtual real-time, so this means that your tweets could be crawled and indexed rapidly. This also means that keywords will be even more important within your tweets. Before, it only mattered within Twitter, but now you must be thinking of good SEO principles when updating Twitter with a strategic purpose.

Be More Careful With Twitter

We must now be even more careful with the way we use Twitter and what we say and share on Twitter. It’s not as mainstream to do a Twitter search, but it’s VERY mainstream for someone to “Google” your name or a brand. Now, they will find old tweets in their searches, along with web pages.

Own Keyword Rich Hashtags

What do I mean by “owning” a hashtag? Well, if no one is actively using it, then you should start using it and dominating it. Then, people will associate it with you. For instance, I work with RezHub.com doing social media marketing for them. They are a travel booking website that focuses on making your travel experience more green. A week ago, I started a formal Twitter chat using the hashtag “#greenchat”. Basically, we throw out topics, and people tweet their answers and append the #greenchat hashtag to it. The keyword “green” is hot right now, so not only are we building a green community, but we may see some search engine traffic from it once it starts getting indexed by Google and Bing.

What are your thoughts? Will this be a good thing for heavy Twitter users? Will it change the game of search engines, now that they will be embedding real-time content into their search?

After experimenting heavily with Facebook and Twitter marketing, I now have pinpointed which social media outlets to use based on the product/service and the situation. This is what I have found out so far.

Starting and Holding Meaningful Conversations

Winner: Facebook

Are you looking to get feedback about your business? Do you want to interact and start discussions with prior and current customers? Facebook is the best medium. No matter how many platforms there are to organize Twitter, I have such a hard time keeping up with all of it, plus I am not constantly staring at my @replies the entire day, so it’s tough to go back and forth with conversation. Facebook’s commenting features that work like a comment thread on a blog are great for holding conversations, because it’s easy to keep track of, you don’t want to make your statement with only 140 characters, and Facebook is good about alerting you when someone replies to you.

News And Information About Your Industry

Winner: Twitter

Twitter does a great job at giving you real-time information and news regarding any subject matter you want to keep up with. All you need to do is identify the quality twitter accounts that can deliver this information to you. Then, you can choose what to read, when to read it, and so on. Facebook’s platform is not good for consuming massive amounts of information and finding new article recommendations from trusted sources.

Reaching Out To Young People

Winner: Facebook

The Guardian and others have written about why teens aren’t on Twitter. It’s true, the majority of them haven’t embraced Twitter. They are more into Facebook, because they feel more like a community, they can choose who they are friends with, and they can control who sees their updates and photos. With Twitter, anyone can follow you and start reading your stuff. Sure, you can block them, but that’s Twitter suicide if you block everyone.

Building Brand Awareness:

Winner: Facebook And Twitter

This is why both should be part of your social media marketing campaign. Both allow you to tap into a different market segment and demographic. Both give your brand more exposure and allow people to learn more about your company and recognize the logo. Both require interaction on your part. You can’t be one-sided and pump out marketing information. The strategy I like when using Twitter is to send Tweets that could be valuable to your followers. Send out valuable links from blogs and news sources other than your own. Give out a tip or trick pertaining to the industry you are in. Ask questions that don’t require long answers. Think of Twitter as a sophisticated information stream. Then, use Facebook to connect more intimately with your customers or potential customers.