Plain and simple: Twitter is the ultimate marketing tool. And best of all it’s free. Here are a few suggestions on how to use twitter to your advantage.

1. Market Research

• What do people think about your brand?
  • Search your company’s name and see what people have been saying. Remember that positive comments are great but negative comments are even better. That means you can improve a lot more, get more customers, and ultimately get more money!
• What do people think about the products themselves?
  • If you are barely starting to run your business or have been doing it for a while without much success, this point applies to you. Search the Twittersphere using keywords closely related to your market. For example: If you are in the customized clothing business, search for custom shirts, or customized clothes. Then read up on what people think about this market. This is one of the best ways to make your existing product or service even better.

• Spread the word
  • When starting out using twitter, you should offer a lot of rich media resources to your followers. This could include videos on how to use the product, pictures and links to blogs talking about your product. 
• Hook’em
  • Now that you have a few followers you start the giveaway stage. In this stage your main goal is to use your followers to get even more followers. You can’t get more viral than that. The way you do this is to start a retweet contest or give away coupons.
• Make them love you
  • It is every marketers dream to have loyal customers. To do this you have to tweet interesting and relevant things about your products. If you are a B2B company, tweet about your new whitepaper and where they can download it or tweet about a seminar you are going to hold. If you are a B2C company then tweet about discounts or deals that are exclusive for twitter followers. 
• Rinse and Repeat.
  • Remember that viral marketing is not a sprint, you can’t expect to have thousands of followers just by doing this once. The trick is in doing this over and over again.

• Help them out
  • Remember to always give customer support through twitter. If you give this one-on-one service, your customers will love you for it, and their friends too!
• Help them help you
  • Tweeting a simple question could go a long way. If you ask your followers how the product has worked out for them you will get a lot of feedback. If you get negative feedback make sure to tend to these cases personally. You never know which follower will turn you into yesterday’s news.