Microblogging sites offer suitable channels for gathering potential customers. In fact, many e-marketers regard them as tools. Pushing your services or products on microblogging sites can be quite rewarding since it is quite easy to build an audience on them. But remember this: how you go about doing your stuff can make or break your promotion strategy. You might consider it harmless posting links to your latest offers but one by one, your followers may be leaving you or even blocking your updates. So it is good to be careful, friend. The best strategy is to create a balance between sending promotional updates and adopting an easy-going, conversational style at other times.

Tags

Tags are one of the ways you can push your marketing message in microblogging sites. The tagged words are converted into links and usually stand out from the rest of the text. So tuck in some tags into your messages for that particular promotion you are running but match the tags to the message. Also use few tags in your message; a post/tweet/notice/dent/shout containing many tags looks spammy in every way.

You might be assuming that I am only talking about #hashtags but there are group tags too. These tags are usually used in Statusnet sites to post a notice to all members of a certain group. This is like sending a message to all the members of a group. Isn’t that not a powerful marketing too? You can simply target your message to a particular group within that network. That’s cool! But remember: let your message be relevant, balance your promotional updates and the non-promotional ones, and engage the group members in conversations. Do not post your message to many groups all at once. Your message will be full of group tags and users may think that you are using a spambot for your marketing endeavours.

Direct Messages

Another powerful means of putting across your marketing messages. In many microblogging sites you have to be mutual subscribers for you to use this i.e. I have to be your follower and you have to be my follower. You can target right to the individual level or you can push the message to all your mutual subscribers. But it is better if you used this sparingly; most microbloggers value their inboxes much more than their e-mail accounts.

”Retweet/Repeat this” Requests

You can actually let your followers spread the word out for you by asking them to retweet/repeat your promotional messages. Isn’t this one of the ways of making your promotions go viral? But have you communicated any benefit to them in that post you want retweeted/repeated? Have you inserted a link to your landing page in that post? Beware: if you send out any retweet/repeat requests frequently, you will simply bore your followers.

Disclaimer

 The promotional strategies I have outlined here should be used with caution. You should comply with the site’s TOS at all times. And you have to interact, talk with other users much more than running your promotions on the site. The classic salesman tactics cannot work here. I bet you would not want your account to be suspended due to complaints from one of your followers