As a handmade craft store owner I am always looking for ways to get my products in front of people. My role in our family business is to program/manage our Etsy store
(http://beadsandquilts.etsy.com) and our Yahoo! store (http://www.beadsandquilts.com) along with managing our social presence in forums, Facebook, Beads and Quilts on Twitter and our Beads and Quilts blog. With so many facets, managing our social presence is the most time consuming part of my role. It is easy to get bogged down with replies to forum posts, writing blog posts, monitoring and writing Tweets, and on and on and on…

Many small web business owners do not have the time nor resources to manage a social marketing presence in addition to their daily tasks within their business. This and future articles will touch on some of the key online social marketing tools and how to manage them without getting dizzy every time you look at your computer screen.

Take a deep breath in and let it all out (continue breathing throughout the article )

Twitter has been gaining a lot of momentum as a social marketing medium. I personally just started to grasp the power Twitter has as a marketing tool. Twitter allows you to make little statements or ‘Tweets’, 140 character max, that people who “follow” you can read, reply or ReTweet to their followers. Reread the previous sentence and think about it for a moment. Twitter is an easy way to develop ‘word of mouth’ advertising. To be successful with Twitter you need to do two things.

First you need assets that will make each Tweet you make a valuable resources to others. An informative blog that you frequently update is a great asset. After each post you can Tweet that there’s new information to read. Perhaps you have an “in” within your industry and you can Tweet about what is happening. If you do a lot of browsing and article reading you can Tweet links to those articles so others can also read the information. These are all assets to make your Tweets valuable. Using your Tweets to constantly advertise your products will quickly annoy and disconnect you from your followers. Certainly throw in plugs on occasion for specials or new things you add to your business but try to be more of a ‘friend’ to your followers. Be the friend that has helpful things to offer…hopefully this is natural for you.

Second you need ‘followers’. With Twitter it is easy to start developing a follower base. You can utilize Twitter’s Search to search for things in your industry that others may be Tweeting about or looking for. You can contact leaders in your industry to see if they have a Twitter presence and follow them. You can start following some of the top 1000 leading Twitter accounts on the web. If you have industry forums you participate in you can post your Twitter name requesting them to follow you. People will start following you.

Once you are up and running with Twitter there are some great add-ons and programs you can use to manage your Tweets and the Tweets of people you are following. I personally like TwitterFox. It is an add-on to Firefox which puts a little icon in your status bar so you can stay up to date on the Tweets you are following and have easy access for adding your own Tweets. TweetDeck is another great standalone application that you can use to put your Tweets and followers in groups plus a number of other great features.

Twitter can get very addicting. Try to limit the amount of time you spend reading and Tweeting. If you follow some seasoned vets of Twitter you will probably get an amazing amount of information to read. Set time aside to read the information and possibly ReTweet the info to your followers.

Look for the next installment where we’ll go over Blogs.

Additional resources/reads: Top 15 Twitter Acronyms, Twitter Applications, 50 Ideas on Using Twitter for Business (amazing amount of information), Twitter Drives Traffic to Blogs and Social Networks, But Not to Retail Sites

Tags: E-commerce, social marketing

This entry was posted on Friday, March 13th, 2009 at 4:25 pm and is filed under E-commerce, Success. 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.