Twitter is one of those social media outlets many home businesses avoid. The question often arises, “How do you use Twitter for a business?” because it doesn’t seem like much can be accomplished in just 140 characters. This line of thinking, however, is keeping business owners from a veritable marketing force. Your customers and potential customers are on Twitter and your missing out on the opportunity to have a two-way conversation – which is virtually impossible with traditional marketing.

So, how do you use Twitter for business? Check out the answer to these six common business-related Twitter questions:

How Do You Use Twitter To Monitor Your Existing and Potential Customers?

You can identify keywords that are important to your business, track those using a Twitter tool, and have a digest of those keyword mentions emailed directly to you. Why would this be useful? Obviously your product or service meets a consumer need. If you track conversations mentioning this need, you may find an opportunity to reach out and do a direct promotion with a follower. For example, perhaps you run a house cleaning business. One of your followers sends a tweet out about how dirty her house is and how little time she has to clean it. You could catch her tweet by monitoring the keyword “dirty house” or “clean” and send her a tweet back telling her she deserves a break and give her a 25% discount using your house cleaning services. Pretty cool stuff.

Another reason to track keywords is to capture the buzz in your marketplace.

It will help you identify what the current hot topics and trends are, so you can plan accordingly. This also helps in product development or in producing more interesting website, article or social media content.

How Do You Use Twitter To Have A Conversation With Your Customer?

Once you have identified a follower who has mentioned your product or a keyword you are monitoring, definitely tweet them back. Provide them a link to a coupon or promotion or just thank them for the mention. Everyone loves to be surprised and delighted with unexpected spiffs or recognition from a business. This also can result in word-of-mouth praise, a very lucrative form of marketing.

How Do You Use Twitter Hastags?

A hashtag is the pound sign # followed by a tag that explains what the topic is that you’re writing about. To sort through the clutter of Twitter, users will search Twitter using hastags. For instance, #homebiz for anything relating to home business or #sales for sale items. If you are using Twitter for business, it is imperative to start incorporating hastags into your tweets so that you can rope in more relevant and targeted followers and readers. This will increase clicks on your links and retweets.

Searching twitter and researching existing hastag categories will help you find the best ones for your business.

How Do You Use Twitter To Get More Website Traffic?

No matter the scope of the business, every website wants more traffic. Either to sell more products or get more clicks for increased advertising revenue. Greater website traffic will also improve your search engine rankings – which is an art form referred to as search engine optimization (SEO).

In order to get Twitter followers over to your website, you simply need to have interesting tweets. This could be in the form of sales, coupons, wacky promotions or excellent article or blog content. You have to catch people’s attention in 140 characters or less.

How Do You Use Twitter To Promote Products or Sales?

If you are a retailer or anyone who often has special offers, you can use Twitter to announce these deals instantly to a large audience. Using Twitter, your business can begin promoting “daily deals” which are exclusive to your Twitter followers. Or you can establish creative Twitter promotions like the next 30 Twitter Followers will receive a free t-shirt or a 50% off coupon. The skies the limit with promotions, and Twitter allows you to expand your audience reach even further.

How Do You Use Twitter To Get More Followers, Fast?

In many ways, Twitter is a lot like taking a big handful of stuff and throwing it against the wall to see what sticks. The more followers a Twitter account has, the greater likelihood a tweet will actually be read and clicked, or retweeted - which is word-of-mouth marketing at its best.

There are essentially three ways you can get followers fast:

1. Start following a lot of people. The best way for a business to do this is to search by relevant categories. If you sell crafty items, search craft Twitter accounts. If you provide web design services, search for businesses or other web designers.
   
   
2. Use #hastags in your tweets. As was mentioned earlier in the article, if you are targeting your tweets in the proper way and to the proper group, you will find those followers who are interested in following you.
   
   
3. Use a third party Twitter tool provider to help you find and follow individuals. One of the best in the marketplace for quickly adding up to 150 followers in a day is the software TweetAdder.