Or, put another way, how much would you pay?

This isn’t a test, just something to think about. If your answer is ‘nothing’ and you use Twitter to market your small business website, then read on…

Hopefully you already have lots of followers and they read and retweet your tweets (if you’re not sure about this then it’s time to start measuring these). A percentage of these people should turn into leads by direct messaging you or by visiting your website and triggering your conversion goals (again, if this concept is confusing, by all means ask for help)

How valuable are those Twitter leads? If you lost those leads what would that cost your business?

So now how much would you pay for Twitter? The sensible answer here would have to be ‘less than the value of the leads it brings you’ – but definitely more than nothing.

Again, this isn’t a test, but it is intended to help you think about whether you’re getting real value from Twitter as a marketing channel for your website. If after all these questions you still think it’s worthless then it might be worth re-thinking your tweeting (or your tracking, or your website and products).

PS. I wonder how many people out of the 0% used Twitter actively for business promotion?

More interesting articles:

Squeeze Your Twitter Lists

Are Your Tweets Search-Engine Friendly?

Link shorteners like bit.ly are great because (a) they let you fit long links into the tiny space allowed for Twitter updates and (b) most services allow you to track clicks on the links, giving you valuable insight into who’s interested in your updates. I wrote about shorteners in a recent infinite42 newsletter.

Until now, you had to go to an external service to do this if you were using Twitter direct – not a huge problem, but every step counts in the social marketing game, so I like this update.  Many Twitter client tools have their own shorteners already, so Twitter is really just filling an obvious gap in their product.

In this new guide, Squeeze Your Twitter Lists, I’ll show you how to create lists on Twitter, promote them and then squeeze the most out of them in terms of followers and value.

This is a free download and I hope you’ll read the guide and share it with a fellow owner of a small business website.

Twitter lists are a powerful new way to focus your life on Twitter, which has to be a good thing.

To download, just click on the image. To download and save, just right-click and select ‘Save As’.

What this means for your small business website is that your customers are probably (*) spending a decent slice of their time searching for stuff (hopefully your stuff) on Twitter, rather than the traditional search engines.

So -  it’s important to keep your tweets as search-friendly as possible. This comes down to using keywords in your tweets and tweeting often about useful stuff.

Drilling down into the numbers a bit, it seems that a lot of the searches are not done at Twitter at all but by Twitter clients like Tweetdeck and Seesmic. There’s also a decent number of searches from widgets on web pages that do continuous search of keywords, users, and so on. This doesn’t change things though and it’s definitely time to start thinking about how search-friendly your tweets are.

(*) Of course your customers may not be on Twitter at all!

• Newsletter popups (sign up for my free newsletter) as soon as I arrive at a site
• Newsletter popups when I try to leave the same site (will I ever escape?). Do I click ‘OK’ to get rid of it or will this take me to yet another page?
• Add this, share this, tweet this – popups appearing in headers, in footers, all over the place
• Fixed position highlights that stay on the page even if you try to scroll away (‘have you checked out the latest news?’)
• Finally, the worst offender, when I try to click out to another site I’m informed that my exit click has been tracked, would I like to use the service on my site and by the way, would I like to visit the site I was trying to get to in the first place?

Some of these appear when you click your mouse. For others, all you have to do is float your mouse over a dangerous area of the web page.

I think this all contributes to a new syndrome and I’m going to call it click stress. The things you click on don’t do what you expect. You can’t get to the information and the pages that you do want. You can’t escape from annoying pages without clicking close 3 times (this might even open up some new popups for you if you’re really unlucky). It makes web surfing difficult and stressful.

If you use some (or all) of these techniques, it doesn’t make you a bad person. It’s tempting to add a few of these widgets because they are easy to install, free and carry the promise of more visitors (or more tweets, or more friends, etc). It’s important to make sure your website does the right thing and actually helps your readers. Is it gently educating them and then maybe, just maybe offering them some related information? This is the way to build trust, teach your readers and encourage them to come back for more another day.

Popups are like interruption marketing at it’s worst – unwelcome, unrelated, usually irrelevant and badly timed.

Now I’m not going to go on here about how you started using Twitter and immediately got sick of hearing about what people ate for breakfast. I’m assuming (hoping?) you’ve got over this stage already.

People join Twitter because they’ve seen other people using it. It’s a great story and this is certainly true around vacation rental owners. Once you’ve joined though, how do you actually use it to generate bookings?

Most people try the direct approach first:  ‘my vacation rental is available on 15th December’. Where are the inquiries though? Why doesn’t it work?

The problem is that your customers may not be using Twitter,  so they’ll never get to see your direct Tweets. Even if they are on Twitter, do they use it to look for your vacation rental?

Maybe.

Maybe there’s a small slice of people who search for info about your area. You might be able to pick up some interest that way, but may find that they are just looking for tourist info.

The best approach is to use something a little less direct, much like other forms of marketing. Here’s the plan:

Phase 1: Seek out relevant travel writers and tourist info websites with Twitter accounts – if they are savvy Twitterers they’ve probably published their address on their website or blog, so you can easily follow them. If not try the Twitter search facility (it works).

Phase 2: By following these people they should follow you in return and start paying attention to your work. It’s a pleasant surprise to see how many people follow you back, and it’s not all from auto-follow tools. If you are creating interesting and relevant Tweets then they may pay enough interest to retweet you, reply in public, or even write a blog post or article about you. If you’re feeling really brave, ask them!

Phase 3: This will increase your profile a little bit. If you do this enough you’ll start getting more attention. This is the best kind of attention – when other people start talking about you (and your wonderful vacation place of course)

These are just small steps, and don’t expect success overnight. The key is to start on the right path and take a long term approach.

PS. You can follow me @DrRichard42