You see brands building their reputations online all the time, they seem to have millions of followers and are really connecting with their audience. This is obviously a great thing to get people talking about your brand, but this doesn’t necessarily equate to money for your business. Here are the best ways to create a presence and market your company on Twitter, with more than 140 characters!

Here are the best ways to market your brand using the outlet of Twitter.

Don’t rely too heavily on “influentials”, the Twitter users that have the most followers, retweets and favourite, as due to the ever-changing nature of the internet, they can’t possibly know as much as you think they do.

That said, it isn’t wise to ignore them completely, as they can be a great link for you to future important thinkers, who may not be famous yet, who you can get to know more easily. If you get enough followers, then eventually, influencers will begin to follow you.

You don’t need to specifically focus your tweets, you should use this outlet as an area to address a wide range of followers, as opposed to a small amount of niche followers, which is how you would conduct your traditional marketing.

There is no more effective way to de-focus and target mass audiences than through Twitter.

Get as many followers as you can!

Although people will tell you its quality, not quantity, where Twitter is concerned, this is wrong. There are only two types of people on Twitter, those who want more followers, and those who claim that they don’t (but really do).

The more followers that you get, the more people will listen to you.

Having two Twitter accounts can be beneficial as it allows you to set up one using your personal name (particularly helpful if you are well known in your business) and another with your business name. Having these two allows you to tweet your opinions and claim your business name, before someone else does. Remember that in general, people prefer to follow other people and not a business.

Acquiring your business name, stops others from stealing it, and then charging you to buy it back. When the internet first came about this was common practise and users would buy up important addresses such as www.westyorkshire.police.co.uk forcing others to pay them money to have the url that they need.  So make sure that you get your name, before anyone else.

You can monitor, what people are saying about you through searching specific terms that you can save, so that you can go back and visit it again. Address all issues, from good comments (thank them, and ask them to spread the word) to negative or confusion (giving you the opportunity to advise and solve problems).

If you use Twitter to monitor what is being said about you, you are already using Twitter better than 95% of other businesses on Twitter.

As well as your actual written tweets, set up a feed from either a search term, your website or your blog. This way, any new blog posts will automatically appear as Tweet.

Offer people incentives to help you out with re-tweets or subscriptions.

Build a community around your brand, somewhere that people can go to chat, ask questions and advice. Having this arena, gives your fans somewhere they feel that they can connect with similar people who like same products/services.

Use promoted tweets or trends to publicise something that you are doing. Promoted tweets and trends, are placed at the top of the search lists, drawing special attention to your promotion.

People are interested in what is trending and, this similarly to start with is what people are interested in. Promoted tweets yield engagement rates between 3% and 10% on average. Volks Swagen saw a 52% engagement figures in April.

Using hashtags effectively can be great promotion for you. Audi used #progressis, and dominated the world wide trending list for a week and Radio shack used #youneedanewphone in April, similarly effectively.

If you can use an open-ended tweet like #weirdthingsmyparentsdo from radio 1 or  Audi’s #progressis, you can get real attention on your business through hashtags.

The key is follow through, if you have a twitter, create a competition and give people the incentive to follow you. Don’t forget to announce the winner, so that the competition doesn’t look fake! Kraft Mac ‘n’ Cheese managed to get 2,700 followers in their competitive recipe campaign.