Everything about Web and Network Monitoring
Everything about Web and Network Monitoring
We’ve spent some time in this series focusing on jumpstarting our community building efforts through Twitter. As you recall from an earlier post, we likened Twitter to setting up a new company on a busy street. There are opportunities all around you and so now that you’re open for business you want to go out and meet your neighbors and potential new customers, listen to their challenges and issues, and to help them find solutions to pressing problems. When people come to trust you and your brand and perceive you as a thought leader in your vertical, then they will trust you with their business.
In this final part of the series we want to turn our focus to strategies for monetizing your business. Ultimately, all of community building efforts should keep in mind the goal of helping your business and brand to gain new customers and revenue.
Market and Sell Your Products
As we mentioned in the first post of this series, the Twitter economy is booming and in order to get in on this new opportunity you’ll want to learn the ropes of Twitter marketing, ad campaigns, and selling. Take a lesson from Woot, one of the first online retailers on Twitter that leverages the platform to sell a daily deal, ranging from headsets to T-shirts. Tweets go out at midnight to its 1.5 million followers and when the inventory is exhausted, the next deal is posted.
If you’re in the retail space then you can use Twitter to provide special offers or daily discounts to your Twitter audience. One suggestion is to establish creative Twitter promotions like the next 30 Twitter Followers will receive a free T-shirt or a 50% off coupon. There is no limit to the possibilities that you can try out to reach your Twitter followers in new ways.
Twitter itself has a ton of useful advice and strategies around the basics of business marketing, ads, selling, and more. Leverage their insights. Here’s a blurb from their website:
Plan your campaign on Twitter several weeks before your product launch. Set a calendar and schedule your Tweets to maximize interest ahead of time. For example, you may want to tweet hints about an upcoming announcement the week before your launch. Pay close attention to the engagement on your Tweets and reply back to your followers. For an extra kick, use Twitter Ads leading up to the launch to amplify your impact.
Use Your Business Account to Become an Affiliate Marketer
There are many opportunities out there to become an affiliate for other companies that are also seeking to promote their products and gain new clients. Affiliate marketing allows people who advertise their products on a website to get the portion of a product’s sales. It’s a win-win because the developer of the product gains valuable advertising, while the affiliate marketer can expect a monthly check for a percentage of sales.
As you grow your community of followers you’ll become more familiar with the kinds of products and services that they’re interested in. Do some research and locate relevant companies and then get an affiliate link to put on your website. Every 10 to 50 tweets, include the affiliate link in a Tweet along with a high recommendation of the product. In the process you’ll be adding value to your own customer base while extending your network and earning some extra revenue on the side.
Develop A Twitter Application
If you really want to get serious about using Twitter to create value for your brand and business, consider developing your own Twitter application. Do some brainstorming and find a gap or need in the Twitter community that has not been filled. Find a way to extend and optimize Twitter ads for business and in the process help to make the Twittersphere more agile and user friendly. Consider the enormous amounts of Big Data opportunities on Twitter. Perhaps you can figure out a creative way to help ad buyers leverage Twitter leads and data they collect. There are constantly new Twitter apps entering the market. And you don’t have to be a software developer to go down this path. Find someone with the development skills who can help your vision into reality. If you do have some technical background there are all kinds of online tutorials to help you create your own Twitter app.
The lesson here, and throughout this series, is that the sky is the limit when it comes to building value and business opportunities on Twitter. We’ve offered some guidelines that should help you along on this journey. Get started today and discover your own path to Twitter success!
