In part one, Basics of Twitter Marketing Part One: The Followers, we discussed followers and how to manage them and also how to avoid Twitter follower limits as you grow your following.  In this part we are going to mostly focus on something that we call hash tags and how they can be useful.  Twitter hash tags (#'s) are not only an excellent tool for finding your target audience, but they are also great for distributing your brand and in some cases can achieve the holy grail of Twitter marketing which is having a tweet go viral.

A Twitter hash tag is simply a way of labeling a tweet to make it easier to track and it is denoted with a little tic tac toe symbol (number sign) # proceeding the word or tag.  As an author, a very useful hash tag for me is #writing.  If I search for that particular hash tag on Twitter, it will return to me all the recent tweets where that tag was used.  Basically, I would then have a list of people who are involved in writing in some way shape or form.  They would not all necessarily be authors but there would be a good representation of them.

In my above example, I narrowed my audience down and moved closer to my target audience if I was looking to market to writers.  I could have further narrowed this done if I done a search on two hash tags like #writers #paranormal.  Yes you can search on multiple hash tags!  Now my results would be more refined and as you can see it narrows your audience down further.  I would have moved much closer to finding my target audience which is really important for marketing.  I recently wrote a blog post on this called Take Aim: Finding Your Target Audience.

Hash tags are excellent for finding your target audience and new followers as you may very well want to follow the people you narrow down in these searches.  In addition, to finding new followers, you can also use these hash tags to bring people to your selling platform.  In my case that would be this blog and you may very well be one of these people I moved here using hash tags.  Obviously, the best way to introduce a new person to what you are marketing is to provide them with free content that is useful to them.  For authors, it is usually a blog with various articles that will be of interest to the people you use your hash tags to bring in for a closer introduction.  When I begin to promote this post, I will most likely query folks using the #marketing hash tags.

You can also search without hash tags and I usually recommend that you put your terms in quotations marks.  A search on Candace Mountain without quotes will return any mention of a Candace with a mountain, while a search on "Candace Mountain" will return actual mentions of me or other girls that share my name.  You can, of course combine hash tags with none hash tags.  The possibilities are truly endless which makes it an idea tool for sifting through Twitter to locate your target audience.  These same concepts can be used to go after that quest for the holy grail of marketing that I mentioned earlier.

The first thing you need if you have any hope of going viral is something that is worthy of going viral.  In all honesty, that is much easier to say than to actually accomplish.  It is really hard to figure out just what will catch people's attention and make them want to retweet it to their followers.  To date my most successful blog post was A Hero Named Freddie Mercury which was a chance for me to connect with people on a deeper level.  Emotional pieces tend to have a better chance at making a viral impact than straight up informational ones.  For example, this post will, in all likelihood, not go viral though it will get shared amongst the marketing people as I intended it to.

With the Freddie Mercury post, I wrote it with the intention of reaching as many people as I could.  Once I published it, I then sent out tweets to folks using the #freddiemercury hash tag and also just "Freddie Mercury" and the response was moderate but impressive.  It did a little better than my previous posts had, which was fine even though there was some disappointment as I had hoped to go viral.  However, the Freddie Mercury post did not die, it fared well for the next week and even now it still makes little surprise visits in my statistics.  In some ways it went into a slow burn viral which is awesome.  The point though is that you never know what an emotional post will do.  Maybe the next big Twitter viral, is the story you have yet to write.

It all eventually comes back to marketing which should be your goal.  In the end you want to sell your product or service so that you can put food on your table or keep the lights on.  There is an art to how you should entice your readers to take a more detailed look at your wares.  In my case, I hope you liked what you have read and my writing personality was enticing enough for you to take a look at my novel.  I will kindly request for you to check out my current paranormal thriller, The Daughter of Man, as it is an awesome and very fun thrill ride of a story.  The good folks over at Amazon will let you read a free sample that is quite addictive from what I hear.  Anyway, I hope you check it out and maybe click on the 'like' button while you are there. Thank you for coming by and reading my article and I look forward to putting more quality posts out in the future so feel free to subscribe to my blog so that you don't miss out.