According to Twibs, a business directory which helps you find brands on Twitter, 18000 businesses are now using Twitter as part of their social media marketing.

So, just how does a brand use Twitter to achieve its marketing objectives? Here are some examples…

Dell, Whole Foods, Starbucks are doing it.

Brands ranging from Starbucks to Dell to Whole Foods have Twitter accounts boasting tens of thousands of followers. Dell has 1.1 million followers, Whole Foods has 1.3 million and Starbucks has about 295K followers. This large membership allows these brands to communicate instantly with their most avid customers. Whole Foods leads discussions on their brand, their operating philosophies, recipe sharing, etc. (I just learned from Twitter that Dell acquired Perot Systems for $3.9bn.)

JetBlue has 1.2 million followers and they tweet a variety of messages to them providing solutions or suggestions about any queries they may have. Simply amazing, a million dollar B2C brand is now talking directly to its customers. This is a situation where customer support and interaction has been taken to a new level and from reports, JetBlue seems to be doing rather well. Ditto with Southwest, even though they have half of JetBlue’s followers or even United Airlines who has 35ooo followers. According to a Twitter analysis by Compete.com, 1 in 5 visitors to these airline websites also visited Twitter. By July 2009, between 17-22% of all visitors to these company websites visited Twitter and interacted with the brands there.

Google has 1.6 million followers, Yahoo has 21000 followers and Bing has 30000 followers. No guesses about who’s winning the browser wars. Google dispenses tips about all its products as well as uses Twitter to drive traffic to blogs penned by its employees like Matt Cutts. The New York Times has 1.8million followers, CNN has 2.7 million followers and the Economist has 68000 followers. These media firms use their accounts to provide their followers with the latest news on their networks. It’s almost like Twitter was made for news media companies.

Finally, Zappos has 1.3 million followers, Oprah has 2.2 million and the White House has 1.2 million followers.  These astronomical figures have become a reality for these brands ( I haven’t even see their Facebook pages yet) and for now, it seems that Twitter is the medium of choice for direct communication with brands and their audiences.

So, these brands have followers. What should I do?

For a start, if you don’t have a plan for including Twitter as part of your social media, start working on one pronto. I’ve written a post on how you can get familiar with Twitter as well as how to use Twitter to promote your business. Use these posts as a starting point.

Some critical questions need to be answered.

1. What do you hope to accomplish with Twitter? State goals in the forms of actual sales, actual leads and email sign-ups. Front end goals could be # of followers and # of daily tweets. If your goal is to merely observe customer conversations about your brand, then the number of brand mentions is another metric in line with your awareness goals.
2. Will your Twitter account be an overtly corporate-sponsored initiative with a see/hear/speak-no-evil philosophy or will the account act as an objectively positioned brand ambassador?
3. Will you establish personalities associated with your brand to interact with your customers a la JetBlue or will you  use your account functionally to distribute deals or tips related to your products? Too much self-promotion is a turn-off, but everybody loves a deal.

Your goals with Twitter can range from simply listening to the dialog around your brand to supporting a particular promotion to guiding customers. Every business needs to approach Twitter differently so ensure that you spend some time studying the medium as well as experimenting with the kind of messaging that works for your brand.

Finally, follow the basic principles of branding when you tweet; honesty, relevancy, transparency and respect. It will be sure to hold you in good stead.

1. Select an optimal handle : Using the same technique that you utilize to choose a url for a website (with the most relevant keyword in it), ensure that you choose a handle that’s relevant to your brand or campaign and easy to remember. Do your keyword research to gauge your brand’s (or the keywords related to your brand) popularity. Your handle or your username is then your customized Twitter URL such as twitter.com/yoursite or twitter.com/yourkeyword. This creates a strong static address for future search indexing and is is also strategically relevant when you se the same for online cross-channel marketing.

2. Fill out your profile : Optimize your Twitter page’s “Bio” line so it includes the most important, keyword-rich words to describe your brand’s attributes or benefits. Take advantage of all 160 characters to describe your brand. The search engines index the contents of your profile so ensure that its completed.

3. Add your URL : In the account settings, add your website’s URL to drive traffic back to your website.  Bear in mind that any inbound links to your website from Twitter do not boost your search rankings since Twitter has a “Nofollow” attribute in place.

4. Tweet cleverly : Here’s the good news about the search engines. They will index your entire tweet so make sure you use it to your advantage. Ensure that the beginning of your tweet has the strongest keywords possible. It’s 140 characters so make sure that your message is succinct, clever, enticing and relevant. Now, you cant do this with every tweet as Twitter’s about conversations and if you promote your brand incessantly, you’ll lose some followers and even worse, get negative buzz on Twitter. So, tweet sensibly.

5. Allow for retweet possibilities : This means that you should make sure your tweet’s character limits allow for optimal “retweetability.” Keep your message under 120 characters, if possible,  so that your followers can easily add RT @YourName in front of the tweet without having to truncate the end of your message.

6. Use a linking strategy : Use outbound links from Twitter to your website to redirect users back to your content. Twitter does drive traffic and bloggers and other website owners have used this to the fullest extent. To share links, use a URL shortener like TinyURL . There’s also Bit.ly which also provides real time tracking of who’s visited your website through the shortened link. This is a neat tool and bit.ly, a small startup who usurped TinyURL from the No.1 position is is now the defacto URL shortener tool for Twitter.

7. Market your brand online : Now that you’re part of the Twitter social network, work on ways to build the online reputation of your Twitter account. Start with your website; Make sure that you have a call-to-action button on your website asking your customers and visitors to follow you on Twitter. Ensure that you have a list of social networks where folks can connect with you (Facebook, del.ic.io.us, LinkedIn are some other icons that you can add). Ensure that this list is present on all the pages of your website. This presents an option to your website’s visitors to become followers of your Twitter feeds and help drive your Twitter URL up in the search engines.

8. Manage your tweets strategically : For this, use some of the Twitter tools that have proliferated the landscape. Start with TweetDeck. It has a powerful dashboard that allows you to view your tweets as well as capture any tweets that mention your brand.  Or you can use Twhirl, which allows you to monitor multiple twitter accounts. There’s also PeopleBrowsr, a web based twitter amnagement tool (which differs from the desktop based TweetDeck and Twhirl) which has multi-stack views, reporting functions and a feature-rich dashboard.

Create a profile : First things, first. Go to Twitter, hit the “New to Twitter – Sign up now” button and get going. Ensure that a comprehensive profile is created.

Begin tweeting : You have a 140 character limit to write. Begin with posting a link to something of interest to you and comment on the same, link to a news article you liked, something unusual that struck you today  or something. Just write on it and observe what people are doing. This will help you get a feel of what Twitter’s all about.

Add followers : This is easy. Search twitter to see which people are tweeting about something that appeals to you. Once you see tweets that interest you or your company. View the tweeter’s profile and if it’s still interesting to you, follow them. Another way to do this is to visit your favorite blogs or social networks and if you see that the people you’re interested in have a Twitter account, you can begin following them. Also, view the follower list of someone you’re following – that’ll help you get some more folks who you can follow.

Monitor conversations : Twitter’s easy search interface helps you do this. Simply enter your company’s or product’s name and see the string of tweets by folks who have talked about you. You can get an updated version of this search by using RSS. Once you’ve found a list of people who are talking about your company, view the feedback. If there’s a complaint, connect with the right people internally to get it addressed and then tweet the complainer with a solution. A happy user will tweet positively for your brand and if he has a large following, that’s a very good thing for you.  If the user has something positive to say, thank him/her and then ask for suggestions on what your company can do to enhance his product experience.

Connect with opinion leaders : From your searches, you can identify the folks who are opinion leaders in your industry and have a large following. Follow their tweets to see if they’re saying anything about your brand and if so, address it. You can also use them as sounding boards for any new product tweaks, new product launches or other events.

Broadcast (but, with caution) : Feel free to broadcast special offers or deals and monitor the response from people. Use your analytics tool to see if these promotions work i.e. if any meaningful conversions took place. However, do not forget that Twitter is an interactive tool and blindly broadcasting might lose you some followers.

Use Tools to enhance your Twitter experience : There are tons of useful tools that you can use to make your Twitter experience as pleasurable as possible. Here are just a smattering as recommeneded by the folks from SmashingApps.

• Mr. Tweet : Mr. Tweet helps you easily build meaningful relationships by looking through your network and tweets and identifying users that are relevant to you.
• TwitterFriends : TwitterFriends helps to find out the hidden network of Twitter contacts that are really relevant for you. You can also visualize the network of your relevant contacts and their contacts.
• Twitter Grader :Twitter Grader measures the power of a profile. In simple words, you can measure the power and authority of your twitter profile using this service. Very handy.
• TinyURL : TinyURL rakes a long URL and makes it short. Very hand for a tweet if your URL is long.