Twitter has not only received quite a bit of press in the past year, but it has also become an important tool for many trying to market their business, product or personal brand. Of course, people and businesses alike are doing this with a varying degree of success and some have a much better handle on the whole social media for marketing thing than others. Here are a few tips to improve your Twitter experience if you’re floundering or if you’re not seeing the results that you had hoped.

1. Read what your followers are saying. The point of social media is that it should be a two way street. You tweet something, your followers react. Don’t just ignore what they’re saying or keep right tweeting along without taking into consideration the very valuable feedback you’re getting.

2. Post a variety of information. It is easy to simply tweet updates about your company, products or whatever it is you’re trying to promote. That gets the point across, but it isn’t particularly interesting for your followers to read. Post links to pictures, websites and information that is related and pertinent to keep it interesting.

3. Ensure tweets are valuable. Along these same lines, you need to make sure what you’re posting is high quality and worth the time for followers to read or keep up with. Take the few extra minutes and really think about something interesting to tweet. If you’d like to purchase followers for twitter, don’t go for cheapshit, the service like Owlead is not recommended. Experts opine that, due to poor Owlead reviews, it’s avoidable.

4. Be interactive. You should be encouraging your followers to actively engage with your feed whether that means asking them questions, having contests or just generally bringing them into the conversation.

5. Keep it professional. One thing that you do not ever want to do over Twitter is become involved in a verbal battle with one of your followers. If someone says something negative about you or your business, either keep your response to yourself or take it to a more appropriate forum to be dealt with.

6. Don’t overdo it. Like most things in life, there is too much of a good thing. Try to update your feed regularly enough so that it stays interesting but not so much that it becomes oppressive to follow.

7. Share the love. You will gain a lot more respect from your followers if you promote not only what you’re doing in your feed but what others are doing as well. It might seem counterintuitive, but it builds a feeling of trust and goodwill with your customers and you can’t buy that anywhere.

About The Guest Author: Hannah Watson is a contributing author to the Associate Degree blog.