Twitter is the Internet social phenomenon of the decade par excellence and is one of the most popular social networking and communication sites on the web. It is rapidly changing traditional sales and marketing techniques by providing the savvy marketer with unmatched tools for relationship marketing and an opportunity to create customer bonding and cement loyalty. The Internet has already demonstrated that speed and scale of change that it can induce calls for quick reaction and reflexes in order to capitalize on market opportunities.

Many experts believe that Twitter can serve as an unparalleled platform for creating a base of potential customers who can be presold on your products or services with the help of tweets. The SPARKS theory says that just as a tiny spark can cause a forest fire, a well worded tweet can cause a huge upsurge in whatever you are marketing. What converts a prospect into a customer, and eventually a missionary for your niche are well chosen messages that appear to him, because of the benefits they offer. A well worded tweet will virtually guarantee a click through response and create a long term fan for your tweets. And, of course, nothing stops you from sending out thousands of tweets.

These secret to making this work effectively is to establish what your potential customers are looking for and to tweet them over and over again with precisely targeted messages. This will enable you to multiply the social influence that you exert on your followers.

A useful analytical ally is the website Twittersheep.com which will inform you of what your followers are discussing. People do not tire of hearing about their interests repeatedly and respond well to messages. It is up to you to devise interesting and entertaining tweets that push your products or services in their areas of interest.

The trouble with Twittersheep is that it can, at best, only indicate fairly general areas of interest. Ideally of course, you would like as much, detailed information as possible on what interests your followers have. This will create a very powerful database that you can use to custom tailor your tweets. Send out random bits of information or other tidbits with the intention of tracking the response from your Twitter stream. Check to see how many of your tweets get responses or get re tweeted and what has been the click through rate. If your rate is high, it means that interest in your content is building and more and more people are getting attracted to you. You can, therefore, retain their loyalty and your share of their spending on a long-term basis simply by repeating this successful approach. It is also possible to automate your process so that selected content is automatically tweeted to your followers.

It has long been a cherished tenet of marketing that word of mouth publicity is the best form of publicity. All we are doing with this approach is taking it to the next level by using Twitter to disseminate this word of mouth material.