Recently Guy Kawasaki has been getting flamed for his twitter promotion of his new book "Enchantment"  Guy uses a twitter aggregator to schedule his tweets and the same "tweet" was running just a bit too often for some of his followers.  In their eyes it was just  too much self promotion.

In many ways the Twitter wall rolls like a stock ticker. If you're not watching right now you may miss the message.  As a result, many individuals and companies schedule the same tweet over and over.  Followers get bored with the same message and ask "What's the Value?" "Where's the interaction?" 

So, what the right balance if you want to promote something?

Rule #1: It doesn't start with Twitter

If you want to to drive traffic to your landing page, and subsequent "call to action",  your Twitter tactics start with your landing page strategy.  When developing your landing page ask yourself:

• Who is my target audience?
• Who are the end users, the consumers, of this product or service?
• Who are the "thought leaders" on this topic?
• Will this product or service 'compliment' someone else's product or service?

Your Twitter strategy is derived from your landing page content strategy. Make the assumption that you are going to tweet about the landing page many times over a given period of time, say the next six months. However, you don't want the message to appear the EXACT SAME WAY each time.  In other words, just like when you watch television commercials, the same commercial may have several different "edit" versions, some of which you like more than others. The same applies to Twitter. What captures one person's attention may not be the same thing that captures someone else's.  

As you compose your content, be thinking about who your target audience in going to be.  If your company has an affiliation with another company then you can talk about them in the content of the landing page.  Each one you talk about becomes a potential target for a 'retweet' of your message, which in turns drives more traffic to your site as well as engaging with your customers (or your customer's customers whom you both share.)

An example

Here's an example: Let's pretend that you manufacture high performance brakes for a variety of cars.  Your target audience is the owner's of specific brands, makes and models.  You can mention those brands, makes and models in your content and then schedule a specific targeted "tweet mention" to those companies. 

But, it doesn't end there. Since you are in the automotive sector, there are other companies that make non-competing accessories, like turbo chargers for example. Perhaps one of your tweets is "@turbochargercoolpeople we love your new turbobooster bit.ly.link but if ur customers gotta stop, we got these bit.ly.brakes"  Of course that may be preceded with some engagement with @turbochargercoolpeople and knowing more about what THEIR new product does.  Is it really a good marriage for your stuff?

The real point of all of this is "don't send a sales message" and certainly "don't send the same thing over and over"  With Twitter you've got to look a bit different than everyone else.  Remember, in real life human-to-human contact when you engage in conversation with someone have you ever noticed that it attracts more people. That old trade show marketing 101 technique of "A crowd attracts a Crowd" applies aptly to Twitter.

So how does it work?

Let pretend that you are participating in a trade show in 6 weeks and you know that XYZ company is also going there but you've had no engagement with them on Twitter.  You write your content of your landing page and are prepared to talk about their new product.

Timeline:

Step 1:

• Research OEM new products
• Research Twitter and how well the OEM engages
• What products have just been released by the OEM that parallel yours?
• Develop your landing page content
• Schedule your content to post in 2 1/2 weeks

Step 2: 

• This week: engage with them: RT their new products; Mention how impressed you are about some aspect (be honest)
• Next week: #FF them if they've begun talking to you.
• Week 2.5: Launch your blog
• Week 3: Start "targeting" this ONE OEM company with a mention about how things might fit
• Week 4: Mention that you look forward to visiting the OEM at their booth
• Week 5: Does the OEM need any help with last minute display stuff? 
• SHOW: Put them in the cycle of mentions

You've probably noticed that this can involve quite a bit of work just for ONE target.  No one said that Social Media was going to be easy. It's about building and cultivating relationships.  Twitter permits you to target very precisely whom you want to engage with and it requires both an overall strategy and some pretty specific tactical implementation. As with any "plan" it will need to change and adapt to changing circumstances. Remember that you don't get the big trophy on a wall with a shotgun. It's one shot one kill. Plan your shot. Execute. Once you've got one targeted, go back and do it for each company that you mentioned.