The Escalating Importance of Twitter to Marketers

There have been many available articles on why Twitter should be used, and we've certainly published our fair share of them. However, the online terrain is continually changing. New trends, ideas, applications, and features come out many times a day everyday, and they further stress out Twitter's place in said terrain. What follows are some reasons why Twitter’s importance to marketers is ever escalating.

1. Twitter Listings

Twitter Listings are altering the game. We lately looked at quite a few reasons why. Note that with the Lists gadget, in the event that you do get onto lists your tweets may appear all over the web. They will appear on sites and blogs, which are most probably going to be related to the niche you are in. This is advantageous especially if you have the appropriate audience on Twitter.

2. The Vast Audience Reach of Twitter

The openness of Twitter, social media and the web in general, means that your messages on Twitter won't be restricted to your Twitter audience. Facebook and other social networks will get tweets in. People will share them, screenshot them, link to them on blogs, etc. Twitter is a means of spreading your message to even more people!

3. Building Priceless Relationships

Laura Fitton, the author of Twitter for Dummies, summarizes success on Twitter to four fundamental concepts: listen, learn, care, and serve. Essentially, if you listen to the community, you will learn, and if you show that you care, you are more likely to get more out of your hard work. Serving means giving something of use to the community. If you you are not doing that, you may be setting yourself up to fail, as Fitton discussed in her interview with WebProNews.

The Secret To Success On Twitter

4. Traffic That Matters

Twitter can not only bring about random traffic, but traffic from people who are actually interested on the niche that you are a part of as well. Retweets are enormous in this regard. Guy Kawasaki calls retweeting a genuine form of flattery. He has a point. He notes that people are prepared to risk their reputations by retweeting your content.

Is There A Wrong Way To Use Twitter

5. Staying Updated

Being found on Twitter searches (not to mention real time search in general, which is starting to become a main focus for all of the big search engines, not to mention all of the standalone real-time search sites) opens windows of opportunity for publicity. We talked about this here and gave tips on how to be found on real-time searches.

6. Linking with Local Customers

There are a variety of ways you can hook up with local customers and customers that use Twitter and Twitter-related tools. There are tools like our own TwellowHood, which let you locate Twitterers in your area, for example. Another thing to look out for is Google's new Social Search. It's presently just a lab experiment, but has potential to become more than that. It certainly has promise.
A recent Search Engine Land article made some good arguments about the promise of local marketing with this tool, which conveys Google search results based on the communities you are a member of. It draws from Google profiles, which contain the networks that people are associated to (based on what any person puts in that profile). If you're not accustomed to this feature, watch the following video clip, and you'll know what we mean.

Social Search demonstration

7. Going Global and Multi-lingual

Twitter is including more languages. If you thought Twitter was vital to marketing already, think that for the majority of its existence, it has only been available in a couple of languages. Now it's already in Spanish, and many more languages will follow. That's not only going to be great for international and multi-lingual marketing efforts, it's going to be great for Twitter's development, and the more Twitter grows, the more prospect customers are out there are going to be able to reach you.

8. It's Still Quite New

Consider that Twitter is just in the first stages of progress in the grand scheme of things. It's still quite new. There are no doubts that there is going to be a lot more features added in the future. And don't forget about the thousands of Twitter apps that are already available that can make Twitter useful in various ways to different people and businesses. Take some time and explore them. Fitton's site OneForty.com, which is similar to Yelp for Twitter apps, is great for that. It has reviews, and people tell YOU why certain apps have helped their businesses.