Don't be a fail whale. Image credit: Twitter.

This is a topic that we get asked about a lot.

And boy oh boy, you can definitely screw this up if you don’t know how to appropriately and effectively market your stuff using social media. Here are a few things to keep in mind when promoting down this avenue.

1. Keepin’ it real. First of all, if you’re going to sign up for Twitter as a business or even as yourself, the first rule is people like real people. They don’t like “yourwebsite_dotcom” as a username and they surely know there isn’t a company robot back there behind the scenes pressing “submit” or “tweet this”! If you’re a larger company, you should still put the real tweeter or some sort of real human being somewhere in there so people know who they are talking to. This leads me to my next unspoken rule: Interact!

2. Interact = service. If you tweet every 5 hours Monday through Friday and not one of those tweets is an @soandso talking to or chatting with one of your followers, then you are not doing your job. You need to talk to people. Since you’ve shown them that you are, in fact, a human just like them don’t ignore them; not cool! They know you’re getting their @s and DMs. This will actually have a negative effect on your business because you will be perceived as impersonal, unapproachable, or just rude. You can think of this as customer service. There is this company who got really successful by building their business on customer service, you might have heard of them, Zappos? Yep, they just sold their stock to Amazon for $847 million.

3. Pace yourself. Let’s say you tweet 10 times a week. If all 10 of those are business-related, that is just fine, but you can’t push your product every tweet. I know it seems like a great opportunity to constantly be selling your stuff, but it’s actually perceived as annoying, and can disengage followers. Try coming up with a method, like 40/60 or 25/75 regular versus promotional tweets. This will keep you from going overboard.

4. Be casual. When you tweet a product or blog post, the way in which you say it is probably going to make the most difference. First of all, don’t make it sound like a commercial. You want to appear conversational. You can simply say, “Just added XXXXXX to the shop: this was super fun to make. Wish I’d bought more material to make one for me! LINK”. Or, “I just sold XXXXXX print, and relisted it. Glad to see that people really like them!” Don’t talk prices, quantities, or boring descriptions. There is no need for details when you’ve only got 140 characters. You’ve really got to make them count. Remember, your URL will take up quite a bit, so be sure to use a URL shortener like bit.ly or tinyURL. Many Twitter clients already come with these built in to help you out.

5. Retweet. By using the retweeting function, you not only tell the person you’re retweeting that you enjoy their tweets enough to share, but you are telling your audience, “hey, I care enough about you that I think you will enjoy this article/tweet/photo”.

Those are the basics. I hope that this helps you get started! Don’t forget to follow @thinkBAKERY on Twitter!