Twitter and Promoting your Website

I've been playing with Twitter to promote a couple of my websites, with varying success, but I think I see huge potential from tweeting that most website owners could probably take advantage of.

Twitter is a micro-blogging service that restricts the number of characters per message to 140, this allows them to piggy back off mobile phone SMS services as well, and after the initial shock of only writing 140 characters most users soon become quite adept at using the service.

For my own experiments I used Twitter for two sites, one of which is a business site all about Spain, and the other a blog with entertainment stuff on it, not news, just videos, gossip, pictures that sort of thing. I found that each required a different approach on Twitter if I was going to increase traffic to the website.

The entertainment blog only needed me to follow as many people as I could, thousands if possible, and wait for them to follow me back. Then I'd post regular updates with links to the blog for the latest videos etc. This Twitter account worked really well, and referred a lot of traffic to the blog, and increased blog feed subscriber numbers. The potential for doing this is almost unlimited when you consider the number of people who Tweet.

The business website was completely different, it isn't as simple as just following and tweeting, I think a smarter, more thoughtful approach is preferable. To begin with I simply tweeted about the website, linking to my Spain pages, and followed all the other twitterers I could find who tweeted about Spain or learning Spanish.

But that doesn't work, following everyone else in your industry doesn't actually help drive traffic to your site. It might help with exposure amongst peers, but what are you more interested in, reaching your peers, or reaching your customers?

This is probably one of the biggest failings for business tweeting. How do you let a potential customer or at least someone who is interested in your product know that you tweet? I use both of Twitter's search engines, the topic search and also the name search, but to really make the most of Twitter I make sure I reply to conversations that have even the smallest connection to my topic.

Of course if you're a business and decide to tweet, be sure to make sure you tweet or message helpful advice or comments. Nobody likes a spammer and you'll get blocked pretty quickly.

Tweeting for many business owners seems like a waste of time, but I've noticed an increase in traffic to my website, not just from referrals, but also from search engines. I'm not sure why, but it seems like my own website has improved it's SERP since I started tweeting, and I winder if the nofollow on a Twitter profile page is being ignored by Google?