Piggybacking Twitter on other marketing efforts
Twitter can and should be used in conjunction with other marketing and business building efforts.
For instance, whenever I send out a broadcast email to one of my own mailing lists, the mail vendor has options for automatically sending out Twitter notifications and updating my Facebook page.
The Twitter option will search Twitter for anyone who has a Twitter account with the same email address as on your mailing list, plus anyone who follows you on Twitter, and will send those people a tweet about the recently sent email.
Another writer I know specifically writes her articles with retweets in mind; kind of like I did on this website and in my book. (More on retweets in a moment.) Although her blog imposes no limits on article length, format or content, she deliberately laces her articles with short, pithy “sound bites” of 140 characters or less. She’ll even go so far as to include a summary listing of them at the end of her articles in order to encourage readers to pick them up and retweet them. (Exactly like I’ve done on most of the articles posted on this site.)