Twitter Marketing - 5 Targeted Techniques to Building Partnerships and Generating Leads on Twitter

Twitter is an unprecedented force in business, in marketing, in popular culture.

Oprah has a Twitter account.

John McCain has a Twitter account.

Twitter is a micro-blogging service that enables you to send and read updates, known as tweets.

It is a communication tool built on answering the simple question: "WHAT ARE YOU DOING?"

Twitter's simplicity has been a key to its success. You can contribute to your Twitter status from the Twitter web site, or from one of thousands of 3rd-party web-based tools. You can contribute from your cell phone or PDA.

Twitter's use for business has grown. And 3rd-party tools to facilitate business functions have exploded. But which tools do you use?

To successfully answer that question, let's ask the Twitter question: "What are you doing?"
Or, more directly, "What are you trying to do?"

1. Generate leads: Automatically scheduling your content ahead of time allows you to have a constant participation in the conversations going on on Twitter, without having to check in every day. It ensures that your followers continuously hear from you, and can even follow your links to your content pages, without your constant presence. This automation is critical for business success on Twitter. How does this generate lead for you? Well, you can intersperse tweets about a valuable giveaway on your site. A video, an eBook, some electronic information product. The link in your tweet should point to a lead capture page, where individuals in need of what you're offering will exchange their contact information for what you're offering. Voila! You have a lead generating engine! The larger and more targeted your audience of followers, the more fruitful this can be as a lead engine. Twitter Marketing Tools of Choice: TweetLater and Twittertise are the two best tools to use for this functionality. I think TweetLater is the better of the two. It is richer and easier to use., If you combine the ability to schedule tweets, with the ability to track the clicks on the URLs in those tweets (see URL-shortening services below), you're really cooking on the Twitter Marketing front.
2. Have conversations with people specifically discussing a need I can meet: As you get more and more followers, it simply becomes impossible to follow all the conversations. Rather than trying to keep track of thousands of conversations, or shutting all the conversations out all-together, you can use the following tools to filter out the noise! Envision it as dipping a cup into the stream, for a drink... rather than dunking your head into the river, and trying to drink. Twitter Marketing Tools of Choice:TweetDeck:TweetDeck is a standard tool for power Twitter users. It allows you to pay attention to selected users... and selected types of messages. It's like putting blinders on, and only focusing on the targets right in front of you. Twitter Marketing Tools of Choice: Monitter: Monitter is a browser-based tool that let's you see real-time messages containing whatever keywords you're interested in. While it won't show historical tweets, it will show recent and future tweets for that keyword. You can then jump into conversations with people who are talking about your key subjects . Thus building relationships. Twitter Marketing Tools of Choice: TweetBeep:TweetBeep, like Monitter, will also track the occurrence of particular keywords. But it adds the additional convenience of emailing you those tweets, or conversations, with your keyword. This makes things even more automated for you. You don't even have to visit Twitter, until you get a TweetBeep about someone discussing your topic! Honorable mention: Search.Twitter.com will do what these other tools do, but in a bit more of a simple fashion. However, the advanced search feature in Search.Twitter.com lets you do some crazy cool things. Like look for tweeters in a particular geographical area! So if you want local leads - here's an option for you.
3. Re-using your existing blog content in Twitter: If you already have content online, you want to expose the new audiences on Twitter to it. Feeding your blog into your Tweet stream is easy with TwitterFeed. Twitter Marketing Tools of Choice:TwitterFeed.Twitterfeed will syndicate the blog content that you've worked so hard to create, and disseminate it across Twitter. Bringing back traffic to your site.
4. Find business partners Twitter Marketing Tools of Choice:Twellow, Twitter.grader.com. Twellow and Twitter.grader.com use different algorithms to show you the top Tweeters for any given keyword. You can then follow those individuals, and strike up conversations with them. Even better, you can find out what they're tweeting about, and seek to add value. If you can position yourself as a valuable resource to them FIRST, you will be able to create a mutually beneficial business relationship.
5. Tracking your outbound links: Twitter Marketing Tools of Choice: bit.ly is a URL-shortening tool. Because you're limited to 140- characters in each tweet, long URLs are not practical. While there are many URL-shortening tools out there, TinyURL.com being one of the most popular, bit.ly will keep track of how many clicks you've received for each bit.ly-shortened link. Thus giving you some marketing metrics upon which you can act. Tweetburner is popular in this respect, as well.

So there you have it.

With this particular set of Twitter tools, you can start being an EFFECTIVE Twitter Marketing Guru TODAY. All these tools are 100% free.

Interested in growing your Twitter following, on auto pilot?

In the spirit of automating where possible, the process of getting new followers can be maddeningly manual and time-consuming. Some people will take the initiative to follow you, without prompting. But unless you're a celebrity, or established industry expert already, these numbers won't be enough to feed your marketing funnel.

What you can do to speed that process up, is proactively follow people in your target market. A percentage of them will follow you back. Probably anywhere from 20 - 60%. This is the manual part.

I recently came across a product that automates the process of building your Twitter followers. Automatic Twitter Traffic is a tool you should consider adding to your arsenal... but only after you've exhausted the above free techniques.

You can also learn more about using Social Media Tools to drive your Internet Marketing Strategy in Renegade University.