Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

Great advice for sure. Some more tips:

1) Find out who the influencers are

Engage with Influencers in your industry. If you don't know how to find them use the site http://weflollow.com We Follow is a twitter directory that displays influential Twitter users by keywords. I suggest that you also list your own business in there for up to 3 of your main keywords as well. Follow the influencers in your field and engage them in convo every once in a while. It can help with your credibility among other users

2) ONLY TWEET VALUE

Had to put that one in all caps. One of the problems with Twitter is one of the best parts of Twitter. That is the fact that anyone can blast anything that they want in an open forum setting. This has enabled legions of spammer everywhere to push their products all day long. So you should do the opposite. Rather than push your product with every Tweet, you should tweet valuable content that your target audience can benefit from. If you have a blog (which you should) you can syndicate your posts very nicely on Twitter. After you prove that you are a value tweeter, then you can slip in a product promotion every now and again. Trust on Twitter is hard to get and easy to lose so don't blow it by being so quick to promote yourself off the bat

3) Use URL shortners to track effective tweets

When you tweet out a link to your site or another site, you should use a URL shortner like bit.ly. Bit.ly is great because of how much data they let you track. You are able to see metrics like the amount of clicks each URL you post gets. This allows you to start to see what type of content that your followers like to see. You can then post that type of content more often and bring more value to your followers.

4) Be consistent

Twitter is one of those tools that is easy to forget about for a few days and not use that often. Fight off the urge to skip days and be consistent with your posting. It really doesn't take that long to be effective on Twitter. You can manage a successful account in as little as 15 minutes per day.

5) Find Your Target Audience

If you are using Twitter for business then you want to make sure that no tweet gets wasted. You are a busy person. Use tools like Twitter Search and Social Mention to find out what your audience is looking talking about.

In Twitter Search you can enter a keyword term like "small business marketing" into the search bar. To go more in depth you can also see who on Twitter is asking a question about your keywords by adding a question mark at the end of your search "small business marketing ?" This search will bring up only results that are questions that are being asked about small business marketing. To get even more in depth, you can filter out any results with links attached by entering a minus sign (-) http. For example "small business marketing ? -http" Now you will only see results for people asking questions about small business. This is VERY powerful. It allows you to see the questions that your target audience is asking NOW.

Social Mention is a social media search and analysis platform that aggregates user generated content from across the universe into a single stream of information. It allows you to easily track and measure what people are saying about you, your company, a new product, or any topic across the web's social media landscape in real-time. Social Mention monitors 100+ social media properties directly including: Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google etc.

Enter in your search query, then select "Microblogs" and hit "search." You will be get  info about who is tweeting using the terms you entered. Check them out - some may be people in your industry you may want to network with, or loyal customers you want to thank. You can also use it as a customer service tool to respond quickly to people who are saying negative things about your busine

Hope this helps!