Getting your Twitter account set up and understanding that Twitter can be used to help you market, brand, and interact with you clients is just the first step. Now, you need to actually use it. Don’t worry, the task is not as daunting as it sounds. There are some great twitter tools out there to help your business monitor and engaged in social media. Using Twitter for business has never been easier. Let’s take alook a few of the top tools for social media dashboards to help business ride the social wave.

Twitter Tools for Business

TweetDeck

TweetDeck: Awesome Social Media Dashboard

TweetDeck, well to put it simply, is awesome. Especially since they updated and added the ability to schedule updates. This desktop social media dashboard is more than just a twitter tool. First off, it is built on Adobe Air and can run on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Secondly, it is packed with features. It can manage multiple accounts, schedule updates, manage Twitter lists, share and view photos, and many others. TweetDeck is your personal real-time browser, connecting you with your contacts across Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Google Buzz and more. It is what I use for my personal tracking of my social media accounts.

HootSuite

HootSuite is Top Shelf Social Media Management

Hoot Hoot. This is, in my opinion, the top shelf social media manager. It is what we use at MosaicTeam to manage not only our social media accounts, but the accounts of our clients. HootSuite has many features and is truly aimed towards businesses who handle multiple accounts. A few of the features that we liked were:

• Multiple Networks
• Team Workflow
• Statistics. This is a huge plus!
• Multi-Stream View

• Tabbed Layout
• WordPress Intergration
• Schedule Updates

CoTweet

Manage your Corporate Twitter Accounts Easily

CoTweet is a fairly new Twitter tool for business. We mention it here, because if you are only going to use Twitter (really?) and you have multiple people in your company using the same Twitter account then this may be your tool. It does have some great features such as: multiple accounts, schedule updates, multi-account posting, assignments, and sharing of On-Duty responsibilities. This is definitely one platform to watch.

Other Twitter Tools

Along with having a great dashboard tool to manage your Twitter accounts, there are a couple of other tools that we would like to mention.

TwitterFeed

TwitterFeed will allow you to take several feeds from your blog, Facebook, other Twitter feeds and mash them together and have them posted elsewhere. There is also some great tracking tools that go with this. TwitterFeed integrates very well with HootSuite, as one of its features is to bring in RSS feeds.

TwitterStats

We just started using this in addition to the HootSuite analytics. TwitterStats will create a graph representation of your tweets/hr, tweets/mo, your tweet timeline, and your reply statistics.

Yesterday we had a chance to look at “Why Your Business can’t afford to Ignore Twitter“, which looked at the importance of Twitter and its relationship building opportunities. This relationship marketing approach is exactly what we are going to dig deeper into today and look at twitter business marketing.

Think of Twitter as a tug-o-war competition with a big mud pit in the middle. Twitter marketing is a push-pull relationship that; and as business owners using it, you have to maintain balance; and be sure not to move to hard in one direction otherwise you get all muddy. The push part of using twitter is getting your message out and promoting your business. The pull part is listening to your clients and business partners and taking necessary steps to ensure high quality customer service. The key is to making twitter marketing work is that your twitter stream doesn’t become a push-push relationship. So, use the following advice of promoting your business equally with listening to your clients and sharing information with them for ultimate success.

Continuing Your Brand and Image

Twitter can be a great way to get your brand out: known as twitter marketing. The key is to have your image, or your brand marketing, the same across all media platforms. Your online image and offline image should match. This is an area where you should hire a professional design company to make a custom twitter background for you. The investment in a custom twitter background is worth it so that your brand across all your media markets is congruent. Make sure that you take the time to write a bio and always add your website to your profile.

Twitter Marketing

Promoting your business on Twitter is simple and can be highly productive, as long as it is not overdone. Think about what a great opportunity it is to let your followers (your clients) know about a last minute sale or maybe you can create an exclusive Twitter Followers Only promotion for a special discount. Creating a kickoff countdown to a new store opening or to your annual Biggest Sale Ever will help build anticipation and suspense! Your clients will appreciate being treated special and being “in the know”.

Link With Your Other Accounts

Linking with your other social network accounts or your blog is a great way to share information regarding your company. By linking your blog with your twitter account, you can push out your latest company news to followers, increasing your readership. Also, you can push your email marketing campaigns with MailChimp to all your followers, letting them know that there are even more exclusive deals. As far as linking Facebook and Twitter together, they work well but just make sure that you aren’t pushing the same message to both places all the time.

Be An Expert

Twitter gives your business the opportunity to become the expert in your field or industry. By retweeting or sharing new information, you are letting your clients and partners know that you are at the forefront of your industry; always staying up to date with trends and positioning your business for the future. This is also a great way to create new partnerships with the people that you follow and share information with.

Final Thoughts

Don’t let your twitter marketing become a one way street. It is important to create a balance with your followers that lets you get your message out without being pushy while at the same time taking a step back to listen to your clients. Also, don’t let the message be one way. Start to follow some of the other leaders in your field or a similar industry. If your in the coffee business, maybe following a local news company or reporter would be beneficial to your clients. Who doesn’t want to drink their coffee and get some news. Twitter can be used for business marketing, but it really shines as a way to connect and share information with others. Make sure you keep this in mind when you are pushing out those 140 characters.

Twitter for Business

Have you thought of using Twitter as a sort of mini-blog? Well maybe you have thought of it, but how do you have a blog when you only get 140 characters to write your information in. Well, that is exactly the secret to using Twitter as a mini-blog publishing freight train. Getting to the point!

Whats the Difference

Twitter reaches an entirely different audience than your standard blog. Twitter users are looking for a quick update that they can decide whether or not they want to dig a little deeper and click on that shortened url. Most are looking to consume a large amount of information in a short period of time.

Of course the major difference is size. It does matter to Twitter and your target Twitter audience. Blog post will definitely give you some freedom when it comes to how much information that you put out there on web, but that isn’t always better.

Whats the Benefit to using Twitter

The reason is quite simple. To reach another client. This is another opportunity to reach a vast audience that you may have never reached using your website or your standard type blog. Now, we are not saying to not have a website or a blog because we believe that both are important and vital to your marketing strategy. What Twitter does is to help you promote both of those marketing sites. Yes, Twitter can help you sell. Use Twitter to drive more traffic to your blog or your website. Twitter is proving to be a great point of entry for potential clients to you and your brand.

Ok, I am going to start using Twitter, Now What?

To use Twitter in your brand marketing, you need to follow a couple simple guidelines in order to maximize your exposure and making sure that your potential clients will want to learn more.

1. Have a Fantastically Amazing Title

Just like in the rest of your marketing material such as your blog and website, have a great title will grab attention. When dealing with the vast internet machine, the attention span of users can be very limited. A great title will grab attention and get your readers to hang on for a second more than normal, giving you the opportunity to have them click on your link to guide them to your product or service. Think of each tweet as a major headline and you should be fine.

Links…yes shrink them!

Since you only get 140 characters, long url’s are out. Use services such as bit.ly, tr.im, TinyURL, or zi.ma. These url shortening services will provide stats also which can be very helpful.

Use Keywords

This is a great opportunity to let your clients know who and what you do. The major reason though is that Bing and Google both index tweets. This means with keyword targeting and a relevant headline, your tweet can make it to the front page of Bing and Google. Not bad for 140 characters.

Don’t let the size of Twitter slow down your marketing efforts. Using Twitter effectively and as a supplement to your marketing efforts can pay off big time. It may be small, but the potential of tapping into an brand new pool of potential clients is enormous.

While your here, check out our other brand marketing tips and information on using Twitter for business.

Image provided by: wordle

Ok, so you’ve heard about Twitter but still on the fence to as why you would need it for your business. There are 5 simple reasons to get started with Twitter that can definitely have an impact on your business and the way you communicate.

Twitter is a social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters. That’s it. Nothing real magical except for the fact that millions of people can follow the messages that you are sending out. Great Viral marketing! So, why should you as a business owner get started with Twitter?

1. It’s Quick and Easy

Twitter is Easy! The sign up only takes a few moments, but the real beauty is in the fact that the “tweets” are only 140 characters. The service lets you get right to the point. Not like a blog post, a press release or other marketing materials that can take hours to create. Tweeting takes very little time at all to get your message across. The service can be used with your phone, the website, or text messaging, as well as tons of 3rd party applications.

2. Get Connected

Twitter is a social network. This is a great way to find other business owners in your field as well as make connections with those who share an interest in a particular subject. Its a great way to find tips and tricks on marketing, social networking, design, websites, and anything else you can think of…someone is tweeting about it.

3. Stay in Touch

Twitter enables you to stay in touch with your team and/or peers. Quick updates let everyone know what you are working on or what you find interesting.

4. Raising Awareness

The social network that you create will become your best advertising. You can send updates on last minutes sales, promotions that are going on, live event status updates, and more. This is a great and inexpensive way to promote your business or event with the ability to reach millions.

5. Instant Updates

Another great feature of twitter is that it is instant. Not like email that can get hung up for hours, twitter updates are real time. Enough said.

Twitter is a great way to communicate with clients and peers in a very direct way, without a lot of time. This is a perfect communication tool for the busy business owner. Head over to twitter and sign up and start promoting your business.