Guy Kawasaki, co-creator of aggregator juggernaut Alltop.com, has created an incredibly informative post on how to leverage twitter as a marketing tool. He goes in depth with specific tricks to maximizing “tweet” visibility, and discusses his successes using twitter for alltop, as well as highlighting the ways companies like Amazon and Wholefoods utilize twitter to maximize customer interaction.

For small businesses trying to reach consumers, Twitter, if used correctly, is undoubtedly one of the best tools available, and it’s free. For those unfamiliar with Twitter, it is essentially a mini-blogging tool, that allows users to create posts up to 140 characters in length. As a user one can post “tweets” as well as follow the posts of others in the twitter community. The value of this relational tool for marketing is really quite extraordinary, due to the exponential connectivity of Twitter followers.  Here is the most poignant example of Guy’s usage in numbers:

177 people agreed to repost all Alltop news as their own tweets. This took automated tweeting to a historical new high—or low depending on who you asked.

Then my new book, Reality Check , came out, and I made an offer of a free copy of it to anyone who signed up for the Alltop Twitterfeed. Another 280 people signed up—bringing the total to approximately 450 people.

We counted, and these 450 people had a total of 140,000 followers. This meant that whenever we announced a new topic, the 140,000 followers of 450 people received notification. These 450 people had followers in common, so their tweets didn’t reach 140,000 different people (see next section), but this was the Mother of Retweeting.

The post explains how to find followers, how to build a profile, everything you need to know about getting started with Twitter.

Social Networking, Web 2.0 Social Networking, Web 2.0