Social media marketing is a process that requires great ability from the user and from the platform. One that I am most fond of is Twitter. The reason that I use it often is its simplicity, which creates amazing flexibility.

Twitter is an uncomplicated platform. Users have 140 characters to describe their thoughts to their followers. Users also create a stream of information from the people they follow. You can directly contact people you know and those you don’t. That’s pretty much it…well, except for the fact that they keep mentioning that there will be grouping capabilities in the near future. This feature would allow you to keep all of your potential clients in a different category from the rowdy buds from college…

This simplicity allows you to explore what builds followers and drives traffic. I find that a combination of conversation with others, link sharing and miscellaneous nonsense works best. One way to measure the effectiveness and interest level of your tweets with urls is to use a tracking service like TweetBurner. Here you can shorten your url, post it, then watch to see who clicks on it and when. This is great market feedback and will help you learn what works best in what format. This site also has a top feeds link that keeps you current on Twitter interests.

Speaking of Twitter interests…I also recommend that you use a site like Twist which helps you chart trending topics. By checking in with what topics are prominent on Twitter, you can introduce tweets or blog posts that will likely gain more traction.

Try these two tools out and see if they don’t help you increase your social media marketing effectiveness in Twitter. It really is the difference between being a casual user and an effective marketer.

Tags: Social Media Marketing

This entry was posted on Friday, December 12th, 2008 at 6:03 am and is filed under Social Media Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.