Twitter launched in 2006 and on the 21st March 2011 turned five years old.  In a relatively short span of four years has taken the world by storm. You would be hard pressed to find any celebrity or famous brand name that is not taking advantage of this service. While other social networking sites have been busy trying to get everything from chatting to online stores under their roof, Twitter has done the complete opposite.

At first glance the usefulness of Twitter might escape some people. Twitter allows you to broadcast 140 character messages to all the people that want to get your “tweets”. However if used properly those 140 characters can become one of the most powerful marketing tools in your arsenal.

But the big question remains, “How can I use Twitter for maximum effect?” Follow a few basic rules and over time you will find that by simply “tweeting” you can drum up demand or buzz in the market for your company or product.

• Keep a simple name: This is just plain common sense the simpler the name the more likely people are to remember it and in turn follow. Instead of being creative and replacing numbers with digits and using too many underscores differentiate words by using capital letters. So instead of Bobs_Gr3at_and_tasty_seaf00d_palace use BobsSeafoodPalace
• Keep a personal touch instead of developing a corporate identity. People feel more comfortable when they feel a message is coming from a real person and not some entity
• Use the direct message service on Twitter for your customers making them feel special and valued. Direct messages can only be seen by the recipient and can help promote special offers
• Use Twitter as a way to not only generate revenue but as a way to impart knowledge to your client base. “Tweet” about topics that you feel your customers will find interesting. This will help them look at you as a trusted advisor and not just a company. By providing valuable content you increase the chances of your customers “retweeting” what you said to their followers which exposes you to many more potential clients
• Start following your clients or people you know on Twitter. Many people will reciprocate and start to follow you which increases your potential client base.

There are a number of other applications which you can use to increase your effectiveness on Twitter. TweetDeck is an application which can speed up the Tweeting process. It’s a desktop application which allows you to easily manage your followers and tweet right from your desktop. TweetBeep allows you to setup keywords and be alerted when someone tweets about them.

Be warned, get too carried away and Twitter can start to hurt more than help.

• Don’t tweet a hundred times an hour, no one likes to be spammed
• Don’t only talk about your own company or products, show people value or they will feel like your tweets are more like ads and less like valuable pieces of information
• Don’t get stuck in a rut and keep tweeting the same thing.

Keep your content fresh and your followers engaged and you’re sure to find value in this pint-sized service!

On the back of this we purchased www.businessraterelief.co.uk, added a load of information about business rate relief and voila!  The site now receives 5000 visitors per month and is not only a great tool for our business owner friends but makes us a small amount of money using Google Adsense.  It has also raised our profile both locally and nationally.

A few weeks ago we decided to try out a the exact same technique on the slightly tougher search phrase software development london.  We created the website http://www.softwaredevelopmentlondon.com/ and populated it with some brochure information about our company and the services we offer making sure that we didn’t copy/paste text from our existing Atlas website.  We’re still patiently waiting for Google to realise that our new softwaredevelopmentlondon.com website exists, but we’re quietly confident that given time and a little gentle SEOing we should see this website march to the top of the search results for the phrase software development london along with similar phrases.

software development london website

Now we hear what you’re saying.  Atlas is a software development company therefore these things can all be done in house for free.  So let’s apply some commerical costs to this gamble of setting up an entire website:

Design work ~ £1000

Hosting (per annum) – £50

Installation of Word Press – £FREE!

Configuration of Word Press to work with your chosen design – £1000 to £1,500

Tally that up and you’re looking at an investment of roughly £2,500 which in our case will see a minimum of 15 new customers knocking on the Atlas door each month.  Not only that but the phrase we have targetted is so specific the amount of time wasters should be minimal.  Now consider this – how much does your organisation currently pay in order to generate that number of leads each month?  Probably a lot more than a one off payment of £2,500!

We think this is a sound investment, what phrases do you think your organisation could target to generate new customers using this technique?

There are a multitude of tools out there all offering to perform the job but the one we keep coming back to is: http://www.auditmypc.com/xml-sitemap.asp

It uses Java so you’ll need to make sure you have that installed, but it outputs a perfect site map and as an added bonus will highlight any broken links it finds which is very useful indeed.

Have a good weekend everybody.

http://twitter.com/simonswords