How To Make Money Using Twitter in Your Business

Making money online has been one of way for passive income. From late 1990s, pay-per-click programs and online advertising have been successful at helping some individuals realize this dream. However, monetary success at these programs depends heavily on web traffic and popularity, and requires extremely heavy traffic just to make a few hundred dollars in monthly revenue. But today these programs have been replaced by the intelligent Google AdSense program, which has been widely adopted by companies and individuals as well.

Let’s take a look at the more modern alternative – Twitter, the number one micro-blogging site. Most of the people use Twitter as a news feed to follow online magazines, celebrities and friends, and its fast moving news feed often informs its users of world events in seconds, long before official news outlets such as the Associated Press can report them. Also Twitter has made its status updates popular than Facebook. Twitter has popularized the use of IRC terms such as “@”, which sends messages to other users, and “#”, which trends topics to spread among other users. Its limit of using 140 characters is a special feature which can be distributed to traditional cell phones, smart phones and computers, also keeps status updates simple and its servers unclogged. Now let’s see how can one tap Twitter’s viral marketing abilities to their own advantage? Here are three simple examples illustrating three very different lessons.

Tweet Deals with Customers:

As the first lesson, let’s take “Woot” as an example. Woot is an online retailer based in Carrolton, Texas, they used a simple approach like — wine would sold in http://wine.woot.com  with an offer of a single deep discount product at midnight, every night to Twitter followers, who could purchase it immediately. Since then Woot’s 1.5 million users begin re-tweeting the message to their friends, which gave them a cascading viral effect, increasing sales volume drastically. Woot’s success illustrates a key lesson for Twitter success –Same way you can use daily updates and the use of re-tweeting for your business too. Try it, it would work out.

Large or Small Tweet about Your Business:

Don’t think that this would work out only for large scale, our next example is with a Kogi Korean BBQ, a small business of four roving food carts teaches another valuable Twitter lesson. Remember the size whether large or small doesn’t matters when you have followers. Roving food trucks might generate regular sales, but once when they change their locations, regular customers might never find them again. But Alice Shin the co-founder started informing their customers by its Twitter feed, the food carts have gone virally, attracting over 50,000 followers who followed Shin’s updates for the latest location of Kogi’s food carts. As followers re tweeted Kogi’s feed, the company’s popularity grew up exponentially. Since using Twitter, Kogi went from using 30 pounds of meat daily to over 1,000! Can you imagine it? You can also bring a change in your business in the same way.

Use Twitter’s Search Engine to find out New Customers:

Here is the last & important lesson you have to learn. Rose Associates, a real-estate marketing and management company in New York City, found another way to use Twitter as a replacement for Google. Since the entire micro-blogosphere of Twitter can be searched from its search box, Rose Associates decided to get proactive, looking for apartment hunters rather than wait to be contacted. The company used ten primary search terms, such as “New York apartments” or “no fee rentals” to filter out possible candidates looking for an apartment. The company then contacts the Twitter user with a reply using the @ feature in an attempt to land a rental. Although only half of these unsolicited ads lead to real rentals, but the company was able to save money.  Otherwise it has to spend on online and physical advertising search services. The lesson here is don’t underestimate the power of Twitter’s search box and its ability to invade people’s lives, even sometimes creepy ways may benefit you.

These are just some ways to make money with Twitter. Viral marketing campaigns often require creativity far outside the traditional box. However, once you find a plan that works, a solid Twitter marketing plan can save your company lots of advertising expenses.

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