This article is the third in a four-part professional series on how to market yourself online.
In our series about How to Market Yourself On-Line we have already covered marketing yourself through LinkedIn and Facebook. But, what about other avenues? It is important to leverage as many social media avenues as possible to get your “brand” out to as many people as possible. This includes leveraging Twitter.
Complete your Twitter profile
To effectively market yourself through Twitter, it is important to have as complete of profile as possible. The first step to this is to use a professional-looking picture as your profile picture. The next thing that you can do is make sure that you use the entire 160-character bio area to write a well-written and thoughtful summary of who you are. Think of industry keywords that people might search for to find you and follow you. Try to make this more descriptive than just a sales pitch. The third thing that you can do is create a nice looking background for you Twitter account. While this isn’t as effective as it was before Twitter changed its layout to downplay the background image, it can still make for a creative background to your Twitter profile.
Using Twitter Search to Improve Marketing
Like on Facebook, you can actually use the Twitter search feature to see what your Twitter profile looks like to others. You can also use Twitter search to look up your blog URL or your website to see who is 
mentioning your page in their tweets. You can find people who are near you and on Twitter by searching for your City and State in the Twitter search bar. Alternatively, you may also want to search keywords for topics that you are interested in or that are related to your industry. This will help you find people to follow on Twitter and many of these people will then follow your Tweets back. This can help you build a network of people that you can show off your industry expertise to. Build the number of people that you follow a little at a time so that the numbers of people that you follow and the number that follow you are similar. This gives your Twitter account more credibility.
Creating Compelling Twitter Content and Gaining Followers
Don’t just think of Twitter as a sales tool. For instance, don’t Tweet out only offers and sales from your business. Your Twitter content will be much better received if you share interesting stories that relate to your industry and retweet content from other industry leaders. For instance, if you run a fitness business, share stories from other sources about proper running techniques, etc. Also try to create interesting content for your website or blog that can be Tweeted and that people will be interested in enough to retweet. Think content that is interesting, funny, or useful.
Don’t post mundane posts, post too frequently, or complain in your Tweets. This will often turn off followers, instead of gain you followers. Another good tip is to use hashtags in your tweets. In our fitness example above, maybe this could mean to using the hastag #running at the end of your tweet.
When should you post to Twitter to get the maximum amount of people to see your Tweets and thus build yourself as a brand? Research has shown that the best time to Tweet is Monday through Thursday, between the hours of 1 p.m. and 3 p.m. The worst time to post is after 8 p.m. through the night until 9 a.m. in the morning.
Follow us on Twitter and all of the time on our website Eric Wagner Marketing to learn more.
