How do you use twitter as a successful tool in your marketing plan? If you think twitter is there just for you to constantly send sales messages out to people, you need to think again. No-one goes on twitter to read about what other people are selling all the time. Hard sell just doesn’t work and there’s a fine line between promoting your business and being seen as too salesy. Making twitter work for your business means tweeting interesting content and bringing your own personality into your tweets.

You should aim to build yourself up as an expert in your subject matter, so send out tweets with little nuggets of information or links to interesting articles. But remember to show your followers that there’s more to you than just work. Inject some personality into your tweets. Talk about what interests you and who you follow. Also take an interest in your followers and what they are tweeting about too.

Two people who use twitter really well for business are Paul from Wobblybridge Gallery (@WobblybridgeTW) who uses it to promote new artists, and Samantha Jones, a house doctor (@thehometruths) who dishes out her bite sized pieces of advice for people selling their homes. They have struck up that great balance between demonstrating expertise in their field and developing relationships with people.

The 5 minute marketing plan: Here’s some hints and tips on how to master twitter.

Time management: I’m sure we all have sat there and said we’ll only have a quick look on twitter, then wondered later where all the time went. It’s easy to get carried away so be strict with yourself. Set a reminder in your calendar for specific times in the day to check your account. Treat it like you would a meeting – start on time and finish when you said you would. You’ll find it focuses you on what you want to get out of it on that day and stops it eating into your working time.

Get organised: Organise your tweeting using tools like Hootsuite or Tweetdeck. These help you manage twitter lists, pre-schedule tweets and measure success. They also make it easy to manage multiple twitter accounts as well.

Virtual assistant: If you’re business is growing and you need to spend more time running it and less time tweeting, you can always hire a virtual assistant. Much as it may seem odd at first to get someone else to do this for you – if your time is better spent meeting clients or making products then a virtual assistant can help with answering direct tweets during the day while you are busy.

Promotions: After saying you shouldn’t bombard people with sales messages, twitter is a great way of promoting your company and generating new business. As part of your marketing plan, you should have a clear twitter strategy. I would recommend you have one promotion per month which you can tweet about. That way it incentivises people to click through to your site and gives them a reason to buy. You can also tweet regularly in the countdown to the close of the offer.

Look out for our next blog post: Networking works