If you’ve just started your social media marketing campaign, you might be feeling a bit lost. In this article, I’m going to share five quick, easy things that you can put into place straight away to get you started with your Twitter marketing. They are great if you’re just getting started, or you haven’t got started just yet, or perhaps you’ve even got an existing campaign but it’s not really working for you and you’re looking to improve it.

The first tip is, if you’re not doing this already, go out and follow people in your industry. Follow your competitors and watch what they’re doing. Really try to find the people that are doing it well, and watch what they’re doing, and learn from it. Take the time to spend a few weeks, a few months even, really understanding their social media strategy and then you can start to formulate your own.

Tip number two is to do the same thing with your customers. You should search out and follow your customers, or your potential customers. That might be people of a certain age within a certain location, or it might be businesses of a certain type, again within a certain location or a certain sector. So how do you find them? Twitter has lots of add-on tools that you can use for these purposes, for example there’s a service called Twellow, which you can use look up, for example, graphic designers in the London area, and it will return Twitter users which match that profile. The second thing that I recommend is a service called TweetDeck. This allows you to monitor the conversations on Twitter for certain keywords, so if people are talking about your business, or they’re talking about problems that you know how to solve, then you can be alerted and then are able to converse and chat to these people. So, an important part of using Twitter is to make the most of its ability to let you monitor your customers and your potential customers.

Third strategy is, and this underpins everything you do on Twitter, is to give value. Don’t talk about your breakfast this morning, don’t talk about what’s frustrating you the day. Give value to the people that are following you. Offer them stuff that’s going to be interesting to them, or useful, or even better, entertaining.

Fourth strategy is to communicate regularly. Twitter works best when you’re there and you’re using it on a regular basis, posting stuff and answering questions and asking questions. You don’t have to let it consume your day, but you can do it with just five minutes, three times a day, for example. But it must be regular.

Our final point is to be yourself and to put your personality through it. Don’t sell to your followers, don’t be boring. Be yourself and show your human side, and you’ll get better value from what you’re doing with Twitter.