I recently wrote a forum post on the ekmCommunity forum, a forum for ekmPowershop customers, about the positives of Twitter in the e-commerce sector, a post which was inspired by a blog post i drafted about 4 months ago. The post is on a private forum which means it benefits no one other than the people inside that group, so i have decided to rewrite the blog post and adapt it to my new Twitter findings here.

This post is about how you can utilise a fast growing community of internet users to hopefully increase your businesses profit. This is based around my research and knowledge of Twitter and obviously ecommerce and will hopefully provide information to help ecommerce website owners drive traffic to their site and increase sales.

Establishing Connections

Before you can begin to even embrace the Twitter community you have to get yourself some connections, in the Twitter world these people are called Followers, these will be the people that see your posts, reply to your posts and hopefully click through to your website via the post.

Your followers obviously need to be related to you and your business, after all this is marketing and marketing is all about aiming your product/service at a specific audience, if you have a selection of people who are interested in different things then you do not really have a good target. So its all about getting those who are interested in your products to follow you.

Gaining followers is not an easy task, however you already have a few good methods to get followers, so why not think of targeting the follow areas to help increase followers…

Current Customers

Send an e-mail to all your current customers telling them you are on Twitter posting updates about new products and new promotions, this will work because people love bargains and if they think they will get one they will go that extra mile.

Target the Website

Your shop is already going to be bringing in visitors and hopefully customers, so a nice banner on your site or even a little icon saying "Follow Me on Twitter" will entice people into following you.

Advertise Twitter Everywhere Possible

Make people aware of your Twitter presence by posting a link to your profile on Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and any other social network you are part of. E-mail signatures are also a brilliant way to target people, people getting your e-mails are interested in you, regardless of how modest you are, and might follow you on Twitter for that reason.

Follow People

A simple search on Twitter for people interested in the same area as your business will kick back some good results, follow some interesting people and in most cases they will follow you back.

Involve Yourself

Look for discussions in the form of hastags (#tags) and get involved, adding the hashtag at the end of your Tweet will broadcast it to people searching for that discussion.

Reply

If people ask questions, answer them by replying, these people are bound to look at your profile and will, in most cases, Follow you.

Bio

Twitter has a feature that allows you to find new people, the feature also displays the Bio of a specific user, so make sure you have your Bio filled in on your profile with information about you.

All of these tips will increase your follow rate and over time will build your target audience into something you can turn into profit or at the very least visitors.

Don't be too formal

Its important to keep your Tweets informal and as personal as possible, people don't want to constantly hear about your latest products, they want to hear about you and what your business is doing because this is the reason they followed YOU.

A good tactic is to use Twitter exactly as you would if it was a personal account, keep people informed on what you are doing, places you are going and any other information you think they may be interested in. Then every now and again its fine to post a Tweet saying "We have just launched a new product, check it out at www…..".

Marketing Techniques

Once you have your followers it's time to make use of them, every now and again take the time out to look at what your visitors are looking at on your site, this will allow you to target promotions appropriately.

Once you have this information setup a promotional code which will be unique to your Twitter followers, something like "TW33T" is good, then send out a Tweet to your followers explaining you have setup a new Promo code for them. People love bargains and if they think they will get something cheaper than it should and something that is popular they will leap on the chance.

I have seen this done and i must admit this has worked on me, i received a Tweet about a new album called "Girl Talk - Feed The Animals" and i went to their site, listened to the album and then downloaded it, that is good marketing because i had never heard of the band prior to the tweet but the nature of it intrigued me and lead me to purchase it.

Word Of Mouth

The best marketing tool is word of mouth, this is something that is hit and miss for even some of the large marketing firms, but because Twitter is a whole site of people's voiced opinions you have already tapped into the right place.

ReTweet is pretty much the same as spreading a story via word of mouth, convincing people to ReTweet isn't hard and if someone likes it they will automatically do it, they then pushes your Tweet out into the big wide world of other Twitters you have never had any connection with, this can effectively increase traffic to your site, but even better can increase your followers.

Don't Expect Instant Results

Like all good marketing it takes time to gain followers and increase traffic to your site but if you follow my steps and keep at it for a few minutes every day you can get yourself a list of people who are interested in you and your products and this is priceless.

So What Has Twitter Done For Me

Well I have been with Twitter for quite some time and have only recently started using it again constantly, since my redesign i have been Tweeting about new blog posts and articles and it has made my traffic spike, increase my followers and allowed me to meet new people who i would have never known existed before now. In such a short time i have already proved that Twitter works as a marketing tool and there is no reason that it shouldn't help you.

Keep Me Updated

I'm really interested in success stories and failure stories, if you have any then please post them in the comment section for everyone to see. Also post your Twitter profile URLs in the comments to spread the word a little more.

Follow Me

Following my own advice i will advertise my own Twitter profile and kindly ask you all to follow me @slaterjohn

Keywords: Twitter, seo, search engine optimisation, ecommerce, ekmpowershop, online, shopping, marketing, free, twitter followers