Want to market your website on Twitter? Today Jonathan Thomas from WebinerCentral.net (follow him at @jonathanwthomas) shows you how.
Many people have pondered the question: how can Twitter be used as a marketing tool? Twitter is becoming a powerful tool to market your websites, content and products. If you’re running a niche website, Twitter is an indispensible tool in your marketing arsenal.
When I launched Webinar Central last fall, a directory and calendar of upcoming webinars, I was faced with a dilemma. I needed to market my site to as wide an audience as possible with no budget other than the cost of spending my time. I decided to turn to Twitter and it has become a key tool for building readership and interacting with my readers. Not only have a I built a strong readership, but networking with other professionals has created partnership opportunities that have been very exciting.
Since Webinar Central was launched in October, 2008, I’ve gotten almost 25% of my traffic solely from Twitter. During the early launch days, it was responsible for most of my traffic until the site rose in it’s search rankings and I started generating traffic the old fashioned way. So, it’s great for creating quality traffic, when your site would otherwise be inactive, while it waits for indexing from the Google Gods.
Setting Up Your Twitter Backbone
I recommend being methodical when you go about initiating a Twitter Marketing campaign. It will save you time, which is your most valuable asset. Here’s a guide to the back end you’ll need for marketing a niche site on Twitter.
Setting up Accounts
I would advise against using your personal Twitter account to market your niche website, especially if you post about personal topics on your Twitter feed. It will look more professional in the long run to have a dedicated feed. There are exceptions to this; like if you’re building a personal brand. For Webinar Central, I simply setup @webinarcentral.
Customize Your Profile
I chose a cute logo as my avatar to draw attention to it, and it’s proved popular. I also matched the color scheme of the profile to the logo and filled in all the sidebar information about the website. You don’t have much room to say a lot, so be sure to get your point across as succinctly as possible.
Badges on your website
So visitors to your site know they can follow your feeds on Twitter, I recommend putting a Twitter Counter badge as well a Twitter Grader badge near the top of your website, usually in the sidebars. I would not recommend putting your Twitter feed directly on your site; you will run the risk of being redundant.
Set-up Feeds to Monitor
Twitter’s search function is incredibly powerful and perfect for monitoring the entire network for what your site is targeted at. Think about the key phrases that your website targets. Once you run a search, Twitter makes it really easy to turn it into an RSS feed that you can throw into your RSS feedreader of choice. As an example, I monitor the phrases ‘webinar,’ ‘webinarcentral,’ ‘gotomeeting,’ etc. For my Anglophile blog, Anglotopia.net, I monitor for the word Anglophile and follow anyone that mentions it.
Setting up these feeds serves several purposes. The first is you can immediately follow people discussing the topic your website is based on. If someone talks about a webinar, chances are they are interested in learning about more of them, so they are worth a follow. Another reason to have these feeds set-up is so you can monitor the mood and trends for your topics, especially if there is a #hashtag for it.
Seek Followers
The most important aspect of Twitter Marketing is to gain followers. Not just any follower you can get your hands on but quality followers who will value your content and what you have to offer.
The first step is to monitor the Twitter feeds. Next, you can find people in your industry/niche and follow them. Follow their followers and so on. You can also use tools like Twitter Grader to recommend users that you should follow.
How do you measure success in this regard? If they follow you back, then they are a quality follower. If they don’t follow you back, you can weed them out later.
Twitter has limits for most new accounts. You can only follow up to 2,000 people at any one time. So, if you start reaching the limit, then it’s time to weed out the people who aren’t following you back.
I spent several days following as many people as I could until I hit the limits. Once I hit the limits I started cleaning out the account, to the point where my follower/follow ratio is very similar. This has left me with over 1,300 followers and growing by about 5% a day, without any further effort.
Working Smart – Twitter Tools to Use for Niche Marketing
Using Tweet Later
I’m not a fan of totally automating your Twitter activities, but I think it’s perfectly all right to automate parts of it. I’ve avoided having auto-replies and auto-follows set up, I think it’s important to screen who’s following you and to actually engage with them instead of sending them a DM that goes to your website or a product you’re pushing.
That being said, I use tools like Tweetlater lightly. For Webinar Central, I set up daily Tweets to go out in the mornings with a summary of that day’s webinars. If I have a new poll out, I’ll schedule a Tweet to go out in the afternoon to catch the bored in the afternoon crowd who may be looking for something to do. You can find out more about Tweetlater in this TwiTip Post about TweetLater.
Using Twitterfeed
Once you have a good following, you need to leverage that audience by making sure your site’s RSS feed is being posted on Twitter. You can use great free tools like Twitterfeed. Twitterfeed is a fantastic tool to automatically have your RSS feed posted on your Twitter Stream every time it’s updated. It’s free and very customizable. You’ll need to sign up for an account and set everything up. Everytime someone posts a new webinar to Webianr Central, it goes into the RSS feed and shortly thereafter onto the Twitter Feed. You can read more about Twitterfeed in this TwiTip Post.
That’s the extent of my Twitter automation.
Don’t Forget to Engage
Twitter marketing takes a huge investment of time to setup, but once you have it going, you should not stop. You always need to be looking for new followers and talking directly with your followers. To succesfully market your niche site on Twitter, engaging in the ‘grand conversation’ with your users is so very key. Don’t set everything up on auto-pilot and expect success to come your way.
The Golden Rules
My four golden rules for niche marketing on Twitter are: Be Useful. Be Timely. Be Willing to Engage. Don’t be Spammer.
Good Luck!
When Jonathan Thomas isn’t seeking the latest Webinars for WebinerCentral.net he’s taking a breather on his popular Anglophile Blog Anglotopia.net. You can follow him on Twitter: @jonathanwthomas or @webinarcentral
@jawar
This is an awesome read. Clear, concise and to the point thank you for sharing. The information here is fundamental and will seem to be relevant for sometime to come.
“THINK, PLAN, EXECUTE!” -JaWar
@dfitnessguy
Thanks for the great tips. You always deliver the goods in a practical and easy to understand fashion.
You da’ man!!!
Donovan “DFitnessguy” Owens
@sizzler_chetan
Good post, showing how some good tools of twitter can be used to market a niche website
And the usage of hashtag sometimes comes into good use, for particular keywords being searched and being in trends of twitter.
Tweetlater is another good one mentioned.
@twintoddlersdad
Great post, thanks for your tips.
Is there a way to post a RSS feed of comments to my blog?
@xequals
This is a great starting point plan for getting up and running and with the proper tools and approach.
Aside form all of this I was fanatical about branding my profile beyond the avatar and color customizations that Twitter offers ‘out-of-the-box”. A custom Twitter background was crucial as well. There are numerous services out there that will do it for you online.
If you want to maintain fine control over the look of the background I offer up a free template and step-by-step for that since we did this early on in our profile.
http://x-equals.com/blog/?p=1092
If you just want the template:
http://x-equals.com/blog/wp-content/plugins/download-monitor/download.php?id=3
@custommarketing
Great post and helpful to see the combination of tools you use. Using many of them, but will be checking the rest out today. Realized that I needed to add a biz account and stop using the personal one as the only tweets.
@thebrewclub
Good post – thanks! As a new user of Twitter, its good to get some basics down abuot promoting a niche site (like mine!) To the noob like me, Twitter takes some time to figure out. Its important that one should not become a spammer by being overzealous in its use!
@bicyclefrenzy
Great post. I haven’t been using twitter very long and I’m working through ways to increase my blog traffic with it. I’ll be putting this post to use for sure.
@jonathanwthomas
Thanks for all your kind comments. Glad you guys found the article useful.
@TwinToddlersDad – If you have a separate RSS feed for your blog comments, I don’t see why you couldn’t put it on Twitter with Twitterfeed.
@lethalbv01
I think the point you make about engaging is probably the most important. I noticed that I lost 7 followers overnight last night because I haven’t really engaged in a few days. Since my blog posts do autopost to Twitter I probably look like a spammer for my new followers. I have just been busy offline networking a lot lately and I don’t want to get addicted to cell phone tweeting just yet!
You really don’t even need to mention your site or blog on Twitter unless someone asks about it. If you spend a lot of time just conversing with people about whatever you will see action to your site.
I noticed that many people just go on there and link to tons of different material and RT things all the time. Some respond when asked questions but many do not. It is kind of a turn off, but then again I think it is a matter of finding the right people to follow.
@MarianSparks
Jonathan –
Yours is one of the most valuable posts I’ve read on Twitip b/c it focuses on some issues I’ve been grappling with myself…I can relate a lot to Ben Moreno’s comments (@lethalbv01) about engaging people.
What drives me bonkers (okay maybe I’m exaggerating) are people who see that I’m engaged in a conversation on topic X and then they decide to follow me. Yet they miss an opportunity to engage me at THAT moment. They just wait to see if I follow them back. It’s as if they were simply just trying to get my attention. Well guess what? I don’t follow because you’ve just “told” me that you’re not interested in me. By all means jump into the conversation right there and believe me, I’ll follow you. Why? Because you’re engaging me.
Still working on my own Twitter “engagement” rhythm with a focus on quality over quantity. There are a few things you’ve listed that I can improve upon. And I’ve got them on my list.
Thanks again for sharing!
@davinic
Be careful on following too many people!
Your account can actually be marked as spam, which is an insane policy, given that people have no obligation to follow you back.
See my writeup on this here:
http://nickdavis.tumblr.com/post/63283343/unjustly-suspended-by-twitter
From the Twitter TOS:
@ecomind
Another great article here.
Guess I need to consider removing the Twitter feed on my blog. Beside that I am pretty much following all the advices here.
Cheers..
@hectorhenry17
Hi this its stuff and easy and hard to do, because sometime they take any thing like spam, but i guess the real work its make they don’t take its like that.
Nice post.
@ScottWilliams
Tweetlater rocks and I have thought about setting up a twitter follower badge… I will do so. Still debating on the redundancy aspect of having twitter stream on the front page!
@jackmo
Very insightful post, nice one.
You are totally right about engaging people, it’s great to see in action people wrapping their heads around micro-blogging, I know I still am.
@hendrylee
Good plan for starting with twitter marketing.
A lot of what you recommend can be done with TweetDeck, which became my favorite Twitter client after getting annoyed by Digsby.
For instance, you can track search for specific terms and also replies, retweets, and others right in the same interface.
I have the same point of view regarding TweetLater. Like any newbie, I used to enable auto welcome message but now I use it very lightly on a few select tweets. Basically the rule of thumb is, make it appear as if the tweets are from me personally instead of from robots.
@jonathanwthomas
Thank you for all your kind words and follows on Twitter. If you have any questions feel free to ask me on Twitter. Have a great weekend!
Hi,
Can specific locations such as stadiums and arenas use Twitter, if so how?
@flikteoh
great post, thanks for sharing! I’ve finally found these kind of guides i’ve been looking for.
Regards,
flikteoh
@amisuggests
Agree with you that twitter has the possibility of taking your niche marketing business up a botch or two
But it has to be done right. It after all is a networking site, so it’s about building relationships. It really does take time and patience but I am coming round to thinking that maybe twitter does work
Great article, thankyou!
One Question!
I run totallytheatre.com a UK based Theatre club. We film a lot of action and stars behind the scenes so i have an interesting question before i set up out twitter id. Should it be totallytheatre or Richard Hardwick? I believe the personal id would allow me to reveal more of the interesting things but is it still promoting our brand enough?
I appreciate your answers!
@edteck
“How to Stay Home and Use Twitter Tools to Network a Major Conference”
I figured out how to network a major educational conference (ASCD 09) remotely with Twitter tools / a live WordCloud.
I have metrics on expanded contacts and blog traffic.
@durianz
Thank you very much for the great info. I just found out about twitter recently and plan to use it wisely. Thank you so much
@vb2010
Excellent tips about twitter and marketing tools, thanks for this nice post
well i agree with most of the points here but his twitter account is horrible for someone who is supposed to voice how to use tweeting his so called professional twitter account looks yuck.. take the advice but have a nicer taste in design
@misskitty
Jonathan, thanks for the timely and useful information.