How to Use Twitter to Market a Home Business

Twitter can be useful to home business owners.

To tweet or not to tweet - that is the question facing many home business owners. Participating in social media sites such as Twitter to market a home business appears too time consuming to many owners. Often a home business is comprised of one person who does everything from marketing and accounting to product and service development and more, leaving little time to socialize. But in actuality, the amount of time needed to help grow a home business using Twitter is flexible. It is to any ambitious business owner's advantage to see if Twitter is a good fit for their needs.

Instructions

1. Look for people to follow on Twitter, including industry experts, fellow home business owners, collaborators, partners, customers and potential customers. Start by searching for keywords that relate to your business.

2. Ask people to follow your Twitter account. Start with your current clients and the people you are now following.

3. Start tweeting. It's vital to keep followers interested in following you and the best way to do that is to tweet business information, great deals, other business references, training you are taking or conferences and events that you are attending. Some good rules for tweeting to remember are to tweet often, tweet original content only and tweet with controversial or informational content.

4. Remain diligent and persistent. It can take several months to build an effective group of followers.

5. Promote products and services sparingly. The intent is to grow your business, but not by always tweeting about your own products and services. That's spammy.

6. Build goodwill that will convert to sales by tweeting expert advice or technical support. Re-tweet anything you think your followers will enjoy or benefit from.

7. Strengthen credibility and build a good reputation with your tweets by keeping all messages professional and honest. Keep in mind that what you tweet will be seen by many, many people and cannot be taken back.

8. Use Twitter as a public relations tool and tweet all of the charitable acts or community events that you are actively involved. For example, if you donate used computers or cell phones to a local charity, tweet about the need of the charity and see if any of your followers will donate as well.

9. Respond to tweets. When people you are following ask for input or participation, do so.

Resources

• Twitter
• Twitter Add-ons