It's important to remember that Twitter is a social network. Droves of people use it every day to communicate with their friends and search for items of interest.
Like other social networks, your best selling strategy is actually not to sell, but to engage. Unlike wedding engagements, your social media engagement starts with someone becoming interested in the product or service you are offering. Interest initiates search, and in the search results, you need to somehow attract attention.
Like all internet advertising endeavors, you need to do or say something interesting while your audience is listening. But when is your audience listening?
In late 2009, Hubspot.com published research data about Twitter. One of their interesting findings stated that the best way to attract your correct audience is to tweet on average 24 times in a day. That is an interesting number in that there are 24 hours in a day, in other words once per hour.
You should take a few minutes and watch the Twitter.com home page. They have a scroll that refreshes every few seconds with random live posted tweets. This is the best way to see and appreciate how fast an individual tweet will get lost by newer ones. So, unless you are tweeting at least once an hour, it's not likely your message will be seen when someone local searches.
Hopefully, you can build a list of "Listeners" rather than just "Followers" when you use the ideas listed below. Once you have people actually listening to your tweets, you can occasionally provide a special offer, but as a general rule do not tweet "20% off sale for our Twitter Followers" several times a month. Instead, only do that once a month, if that.
But what should you tweet about? Our recommendation is to take the educational approach. Educational information should be on your website but via Twitter you can expand upon it or simply lead people back to your website.
Here are our guidelines:
1. Create sets of 50 or 100 tweets all on the same topic.
2. Create sets of 5 tweets answering the standard questions Who? What? Where? When? Why?
Even though you have educational information on your website, the Twitter users are not engaging you initially, so you have to put the same information in front of them. Review your educational pages and split each one down into very small pieces. You could say "December #Birthstone: #Turquoise-Treasured for its beauty within jewelry since prehistoric times. See more at http://jewelerystore.com"
The #birthstone and #turquoise hashtags will get the attention of anyone actually searching for this information. Your website address will lead them back to you. Take each sentence from your educational page and rewrite them in a usable, quippy way.
Here's an example of the next tweet: " December #Birthstone: #Turquoise-Persians believed reflections of the moon on turquoise was good luck. See more at http://jewelerystore.com"
With this method you should be able to easily create sets of 100 - 200 tweets
The second guideline listed above is to answer the standard 5 W questions. This is the method you would use to announce an event, or arrival of new inventory.
For example:
#Jewelry Event: Holiday celebration party serving cocktails, snacks and #diamonds. http://jewelerystore.com
#Jewelry Event: December 11, 2010 - Holiday Party. We're serving cocktails and showing off our stones. http://jewelrystore.com
#Jewelry Event: Main St. in #Centerville-Holiday #Diamond & cocktail party on Dec 11th. http://jewelrystore.com
#Jewelry Event: Celebrate the holiday season with #diamond and other #gems of beauty. Dec 11th http://jewelrystore.com
#Jewelry Event: Follower Holiday Party-Come enjoy cocktails while modeling the latest #diamond jewelry. Dec 11th http://jewelrystore.com
Generally speaking, unless you are actually advertising an event, you should not include a specific date in your tweets. It's okay to mention the name of the month, like December, or the week of the month like "this week only" or "second week of the month." Avoiding a specific date will allow you to reuse the tweets again next year, or even in 90 days.
Although Twitter saves all your tweets forever, only the recent tweets will show in search results. This allows you to continually reuse your tweets, which is especially good for the birthstone information.
Our bonus guideline for today is to tweet a few times each day randomly using the phrase "#engagement #rings." Since this is a popular search phrase, you have the chance to appear in the Google Buzz area of the Google search results page. Be creative without a sales pitch.
Another similar idea would be to tweet about any similar style jewelry mentioned in pop culture and entertainment news. Recently you could have pushed your tweets into Google Buzz easily with "Stop in today to see similar sapphires like the #Princess #Diana #Sapphire ring. http://jewelrystore.com"
Twitter provides instant Q&A to the world. Information and rumors spread like wildfire, and you can use it to your advantage.
