Lately, the social media network evolved quickly and managed to find a place between the most used marketing strategies of promoting a business.

If you’re finding it hard to promote your business by traditional means, then you will find my advice on internet marketing very useful. Besides social platforms like Facebook or Google Plus, there are other popular ways to promote your company – I’m talking about blogging and micro blogging.

More specifically: I’m talking about Twitter. Twitter is a micro blogging platform that became known thanks to Hollywood stars that are using it non-stop. Stars like Ashton Kutcher and Neil Patrick Harris.

Twitter is the easiest way to share a photo, a video or a status update. If you’re not used to it, at first it can seem a little bit complicated, but with a little practice, you’ll realize that it’s a friendly social network and very simple to use.

There are many companies that are promoting their business on social media networks. You have to know that is not as simple as having your personal account. There are some steps that you should follow in order to make sure to keep people interested on your profile and activity.

Here are the steps you should follow when you want to promote your business on Twitter:

First – create an account. This is free and it will take a couple of minutes. Be sure you filled up all the fields both required and optional.

Second – After you finished signing up, you will want to personalize your profile. There are a lot of themes you can find by searching the web. Choose one that fits with your product and the ideas that your company is promoting.

Third – On twitter you don’t make “friends” .On this micro-blogging platform there are followers (people who are following you) and the people you follow. You have to create a grid of followers – people that are interested in your company and the ideas that you’re promoting.

Fourth – Do some research about how to get followers on Twitter and how to keep their interest . On this social network, it is very important to keep in touch with people. You have to write Tweets periodically. They must be interesting tweets; be careful not to spam! Also, you should answer to other tweets, comment and be friendly. Be subtle when you’re promoting your products and be careful not to go overboard and tweet every 5 minutes because it’s really annoying for the people who are following you.

Fifth – Build your own community. This is the main secret of Twitter and the key to success when it comes to promoting your business. Follow people, be followed, post interesting tweets. On every blog that you have, you must place a Twitter button. And afterwards, whenever you’re promoting your business, put your Twitter URL as a contact and ask people to follow you on Twitter.

Sixth -Take it slow with your followers and the people that you’re following. Don’t follow 100 persons at once from the first day. They will think that you are a spammer and this won’t get you any followers. Take it slow and just follow people that you’re interested in. Or people that you think will like your page or your product. You can find some experienced users with thousands of followers and learn from them. See their Tweets and see how they do it. Before you post a tweet, ask yourself if you like it and if it you would you find it interesting if you were to see it posted by someone else? If the answer is no, then rethink it, make it friendly, witty and catchy. If you like it, go ahead and hit the Tweet button and wait to see how people respond to it.

Social media is an efficient and fun way to promote your business. And Twitter is one of the most simple social media networks once you get the hang of it. And if you take into consideration that over 100 million people are using it, I guess that you can be optimistic about the way your business can benefit by it. If you’re going to follow these steps, you will most likely gain visibility and success.

The most important thing is that you must know your business and how to promote it. Especially if you’re not used to using Twitter constantly, then it’s going to take a little time for you to get used to it. Or you can save yourself the trouble and hire a social media outsourcing team to do it for you.

Using Twitter to promote your business or services may be one of the best marketing and sales techniques you can implement in 2012. Maybe you don’t know this, but you’ll be amazed to find out that big companies like Pepsi, Kodak, Starbucks, Dell and many others already use Twitter accounts to promote their products and create visibility and they are very popular on Twitter. So why don’t you give it a try? And who knows, maybe staring this year, the name of your company could be next in the list of big companies on Twitter.