Through the use of top social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook, companies are getting creative and effective new ways to stay in contact with their customers and also build a personable brand in the process. Some companies are doing this wrong, while others are excelling to top of the social marketing latter. No matter what type of business or brand you currently have, it’s important that you follow these tips for proper etiquette and social marketing usage on Twitter.

The majority of this post will focus on the concepts of creating, branding and promoting your own ecommerce this. These tips will work whether you have an existing online store, or looking to start a new one of your own.

Once you have set up your website with your chosen ecommerce software, you need to take advantage of online promotional techniques using social media, such as Twitter.

Twitter can be invaluable to your business, as long as your tweets are interesting and pertinent.

Here are some top tips to get you started.

1. Learn the nuts and bolts of what Twitter can do for your ecommerce business.

Make time (it shouldn’t take long) to get to know Twitter and how you can effectively utilize it. For absolute beginners, read through Twitter for Business,   which will tell you all you need to know about this great social platform.

Using only 140 characters or less in your message, you can connect with your audience telling them about the latest updates on your ecommerce website, contests, relevant articles, links, and more – the sky’s the limit.

The aim here is to promote your business through instant, relevant and interesting tweets – and to get your audience to retweet to their followers, and so on.

Tweeting is powerful. Use it.

2. Make your Twitter profile unique to your business

Reflect the personality of your business through the customization of your Twitter profile page. Remember, your profile page reflects your brand and you want it to boost engagement and lead towards your business objectives.

Don’t forget to always prominently display your company’s website address.

Your profile is completely public and anyone on the web can see it, so keep it appealing and relevant.

This is something I discussed in a previous post, how Twitter backgrounds are branding machines. Get a custom background and avatar for your profile and your branding will keep working for you day after day.

3. Personalize your tone

Tweeting works best when using a personable and casual tone.

Whether your ecommerce business has a more formal approach or not, using a familiar tone in your tweets will be more effective in engaging your audience.

You can ask for opinions, give great tips, and share funny/amazing related web content.

Avoid speaking in the third person:

DON’T: ‘White Stripe Ltd. offers a new bespoke service…’
DO: ‘We have a new tailoring service – get 10% off today’

4. Offer exclusive deals and discounts

Not many people can go past a fabulous offer. Give these discounts exclusively to your twitter followers. This makes them feel special and appreciated.

You can encourage your users to retweet the message in order to receive promotional discounts. It’s a sure-fire way to increase awareness of your brand among new potential customers.

Be sure to check out my post on five great ways to increase your social following through the use of deals and discounts post.

5. Insert Twitter buttons on your website

Make sure you take full advantage of the resources offered on Twitter, such as widgets, follow and tweet buttons.

Use different colors to set these apart on your website. People are more likely to use these if they are prominently displayed, encouraging more customers to get involved in promoting your business through twitter.

6. Incorporate Calls to Action (CTA’s) in your tweets

You need to rouse your customers through a ‘call to action’. Whether it’s to retweet your tweets, purchase your product, call you or subscribe to your email – you need to be direct and tell them.

Use incentives and be creative. There’s nothing worse than a boring tweet.

Following these steps and building out a quality online ecommerce store is an excellent way to bring long term value and growth to not only your brand and business, but also to all of the followers on your social network as well. Get creative and keep your followers happy, and they will do the viral marketing for you!

Twitter is awesome! You can meet new people, keep up to date with old friends, join in Twitter Chats, create your own hashtag, follow celebrities, network, share stories and promote your blog. To top it off, all of this is done in only 140 characters.

You may be thinking “What has Twitter got to do with my blog?” The answer is Twitter is one of your best promotional tools!

Here are 10 surefire ways to promote your blog using Twitter:

1. Make an Announcement – Announce your new blog post is live. It’s exciting your hard work is finally available for viewing. Let people know about it! Artem Altman always makes sure to let his followers know about his new posts as shown below.

Bonus Tip: Post links on other social media sites as well, to help drive traffic to your blog.

2. Quote Yourself – Grab an important or shocking part of the blog post and quote it in a tweet, provide a link to the post and schedule for later that day. You can share your blog link more than once!

3. From the Archives – Share old posts this will help drive traffic to your blog. Your old content was good when you wrote it chances are if it wasn’t time sensitive it is still good content. So share it again. Thom Rainer does a good job of this.

4. Show Off your Link – Have a link to your blog in the bio section on Twitter. This is good for SEO and every time people look at your bio they will be reminded of your blog.  Crosby Noricks, Founder of PR Couture sets a great example in her bio.

5. Retweet – When people mention or link to your blog post make sure you retweet them. This way not only will their followers see, but all of yours will as well. As you can see below, Nicole Glass retweeted my tweet stating that her new article was great.

6. Get Followed – The more followers you have the more people that will see your tweets and the link to your new blog posts. Focus on providing quality content and you will see the numbers of followers you have start to rise. Also, it helps if you thank people for following, this can be a good way to get the conversation going with new followers.

7. Let People Know – Mention people and companies who are in the article with a link to the post. Most people enjoy reading about themselves and will respond to the article.

8. Favorite – Utilize the favorite button. It’s a good idea to favorite tweets sent by other people that link to your blog post. It shows you appreciate them and it will then show up under the favorites tab. I made sure to favorite this tweet when Dudepins shared a link to my blog post.

9. Engage Your Audience – If you only tweet about your blog people will not find you engaging. Provide relevant material from other sources, it shouldn’t be all about you all the time.

10. Direct Message (DM) – Know the people you follow. If someone is interested in a specific niche  topic you just wrote about, feel free to send the a DM and recommend the post. You can even recommend posts that weren’t written by you to begin fostering a relationship. If you provide content that is interesting to them they will begin to trust you. Make sure you send on topic links.

We want to hear from you: Do you have other suggestions on how to promote your blog on Twitter? Do you currently use any of these suggestions? Do you know anyone who successfully implements these 10 tips?

This guest post was written by Jenny Kay Pollock, who is the social media specialist at Four51. She assists with social media for FanTools including updating @FanTools, Facebook, and the company blog. She likes classy things and clever words. Connect with her business accounts or her personal Twitter @Jennykaypollock or Pinterest either way, she’s happy to hear new ideas and feedback!