Twitter marketing plans should be re-visited by most small businesses. In a recent study by Edison Research, Twitter was found to be increasing in awareness and is now almost equal with Facebook. The study found that 87% of people had heard of Twitter versus 88% for Facebook.

The study also points out that Twitter lags significantly behind Facebook in terms of useage in America. Twitter is only used by about 7% of Americans versus 41% for Facebook.

We believe that increased awareness will ultimately bring increased usage, and for that reason small businesses should include Twitter in their social media marketing plans. Twitter can be a useful for building your brand, as a public relations tool and in driving sales with special promotions. Consider these tips:

• Provide cool and useful feeds
• Tweet your blog posts with a link (can be done automatically)
• Twitter can have SEO benefits so remember keywords
• Use it for focus groups and surveys
• Talk about what your company does - how it solves problems
• Use it for special offers - "follow us by five o'clock and win a gift certificate"
• Great content helps attract followers
• Use monitoring for keywords to find potential followers

Twitter is based on short micro-blog content with a maximum of 140 characters. With this in mind get to the point and remember you have to give to get, so put a lot of attention on special offers and useful content.

If you have a great Twitter promotion that you would like to share, please post it in the comments below.

If you would like help with your social media marketing plans contact Thrust today.