The rise of micro-blogging in the past two years has sparked a craze that has spread around the world and has helped to spread movements from the furthest reaches of the globe to our very own computer screen. From presidential elections to a pop star’s death, Twitter has risen to become one of the most used social media sites, informing its users in real time of events happening around the world.

Twitter at its beginning set out to do what no other social media site had done before. They kept it short and sweet. Only limited information can be posted about yourself in your profile, and tweets are kept at no more than 140 characters. This forces the user to cut to the nitty gritty point, making all other information irrelevant. Since its emergence, businesses have been quick to jump on the Twitter band wagon and have begun creating customized profiles and have posted tweets that can potentially be read by millions of people. As the number of tweets continue to grow, standing out amongst the millions is a hard thing to do. In order to get noticed on twitter, it is important to have a plan, to stay relevant , be transparent, provide useful information, and to tweet often.

Creating a plan for your social media marketing campaigns such as Twitter profiles includes planning. In this phase you will want to determine who you are going to target with your tweets. Are you going to target fans, critics, industry experts, or potential clients? Determining this will be the first step in your twitter plan and will set the tone for all of your future tweets. The next step in this process is finding out how you will be supplying the information for your tweets. Will you supply original content, will you rely on others’ expert forums, will you mostly re-tweet relevant information, or will you use a mixture of them all? Figuring this out will be important because you must have a way to come up with content to tweet about. If you choose to be an innovator and supply original content, you may need to begin on the back end by creating a blog. A blog will allow you to add information daily. You can then proceed to promote your blog on Twitter. This will be done by first creating content that your target market will want to read. Then begin posting tweets that will be keyword friendly. You can supplement your tweets with a link to your blog or website. If your URL fits, do not shrink it with a URL shrinking service to try and maintain your URL’s brand recognition. If you are going to be posting links to your website, be sure your website is ready to convert your followers into customers (if conversion is your goal). This can be done with making a viewer friendly website with easy navigation, an SEO friendly structure, and an easy to find direct call to action. Your call to action may be a “request a quote” button or “download our newsletter” button. Without a good website that draws an action from the viewer, your Twitter followers will likely bounce off your site as quickly as they found it.

I recommend to stay natural and avoid automatic friend finders, or following everyone possible. Only follow your target market in order to stay on plan and increase your odds of being found relevant and thus converting. After all, it really depends on who follows you, not who you follow because those that follow you are the ones that can read what you are typing.  As industry professionals, we choose to market ourselves as authorities in the Search Engine Marketing field. This is why we choose the plan of providing useful information to other website developers and business owners. We provide daily tips that will help other professionals see our company as legitimate and will likely follow our tweets back to our blog, which in turn has links that will take a visitor to our optimized website. If we are able to convince a Tweeter to read our blog, and they are interested in seeing our website, they are more likely to convert into a paying customer than if they had simply stumbled upon our site. We also try to remain transparent to gain trust, we do not try to sell ad space, ask for memberships to comment, or have any annoying pop-ups on our site. These actions can be seen as a red flags and are not signs of a professional company.

Lastly, we always stay on point. We speak about website optimization and internet marketing. We do not stray away from the subject in order to keep our following. If we took another plan of action in our tweets, we would loose recognition and it would mark a downward turn for our Twitter campaign. In order to change the tone of a conversation an new plan is needed.

As you can see, a lot of thought has to go into a Twitter campaign for it to be successful. So much work in fact, that many companies with the resources consider hiring a full time tweeter to their payroll to keep the tweets coming on a consistent basis. If the funds for a full time employee are not available, a Social Media Marketing company such as  Saba SEO could be the answer. We are a San Diego Social Media Optimization Company skilled in creating social media campaigns that make each tweet count. By staying on point, and providing relevant information, your company can too take advantage of this great social media tool.

Please feel free to comment if you find this blog useful and please feel free to follow us on Twitter for daily tips and tricks that help you create and maintain better websites.