by Katie Morell Contributor, OPEN Forum Editors
Now five years old, Twitter attracts nearly 200 million monthly visitors—grandmothers, teens, CEOs—and many of them are your customers.
So how do you craft tweets that will turn into sales?
First, remember not to get drunk on self-promotion.
“Twitter is like a cocktail party; it is a place to build relationships, not just talk about yourself,” says Christy Cook, founder of Teach My, a Toronto-based company that sells learning kits for children.
Alex Levine, a social media strategist at Paco Communications, a multi-cultural marketing agency in Chicago, recommends balancing your regular tweets with your sales-driven tweets. “I recommend tweeting at least three times a day and limiting your direct sale tweets to one in four,” she says.
What should you tweet when not selling?
Try responding to customers every time they mention your product, offering helpful information and tweet positive product reviews and testimonials, Levine advises.
In practice
Use Twitter correctly and it may turn into your biggest costumer attractor—just ask Tiffany Aliche. “The majority of my business—about 70 percent—is acquired via social media,” says Aliche, a.k.a. “The Budgetnista,” a financial literacy consultant based in Newark, New Jersey.
She does this by staying away from hard selling, and instead offers freebies that could lead to later sales. For example, she may give away the first chapter of her book, The One Week Budget, for free on Twitter. The link will take visitors back to her page where they can purchase the entire book if they choose.
Aliche also holds weekly Q&A sessions with Twitter followers—something she says her costumers love. “I will take money questions from them, re-tweet them, and answer them—often referring my product or service as a solution and providing a link,” she says. She also recommends using Twitter bios to offer free products or services with a link that includes items for purchase.
Continues at: How To Sell On Twitter Without Pissing Off Your Followers : Marketing :: American Express OPEN Forum.
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