We all know Twitter can be insanely useful in your online marketing campaigns, but many people aren’t sure how to go about doing it, particularly when it comes to using it for affiliate marketing. I’m not going to claim I’ve got all the answers here, but I do know of a few things that should help you get your Twitter marketing off on the right foot and keep it that way. So that’s what we’re going to talk about tonight.

One of the most important things to always remember about Twitter is that it isn’t yours. If you’re using it in order to boost your sales, you have to be aware that many, many more people are using it – every day – to just do normal people stuff. Talk to friends. Keep in touch with family. Hear the latest news. Have fun. Twitter can absolutely be used effectively to market a brand or product, but the ones that do it well do it by joining in on conversations and being “real people,” not mindless bots blaring the same promotional tweets over and over again all day. As a business coming in to try to tap into the huge amount of potential customers Twitter can represent, you have to be a “real person,” too.

Think of it like telemarketing – no one likes it when telemarketers call during dinner and want to sell you terrible credit card offers or donate to the Who-Knows-What Fund, right? If someone follows you, but all you do is blare at them, then to them, it may feel like you’re just barging into their living room while they’re trying to do something else in order to sell them something.

So, let’s try some Twitter dos and don’ts:

• Don’t tweet the same tweet about your offers or products over and over and over again. That’s not having a conversation, that’s just shouting at people.




• Don’t co-opt a trending topic by adding its hashtag to an irrelevant tweet of your own about the latest thing you’re selling.




• Do co-opt trending topics and their hashtags that are relevant to your stuff, or just to say something witty to join in on the conversation.




• Do be professional – if this is a business Twitter account, treat it like one. Good grammar, spelling and punctuation are still important, even if you only have 140 characters to do it in. Some abbreviations and shortcuts are necessary, and some ‘net speak can be used cleverly, but keep it readable to the average person.




• Do give shout-outs to people that mention you, especially if they say something nice. If they’re not saying something nice, you can still respond, but try to be careful and remain professional.




• Don’t overtweet. Every time you go to tweet something, ask yourself, “Is this something people will care about hearing?” And just as you shouldn’t tweet the same thing over and over, don’t tweet every 5 seconds, either, because then you’re just making noise and cluttering up your followers’ streams.




• Do keep an eye on keywords. If someone tweets about something relevant to one of them, then you can jump into the conversation to offer your thoughts easily and get a conversation of your own going.




• Do fill out your profile the whole way.




• Don’t use those auto-DM-new-followers thingies, because people will know it’s a bot, and they won’t be flattered.

These are just some of the things you can do to make your Twitter experience pleasant and successful for both you and your followers. It takes time to get the hang of it, and it takes time to build up a good base of steady followers, but you can get there by behaving more like a “real person” that has an actual face behind the business facade than a Twitter zombie, mindlessly tweeting things and never actually engaging with anyone. Good luck!