In recent years, businesses have realized the potential of marketing on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. Twitter in particular gives businesses a chance to interact with consumers directly and get their messages out to a large number of people with a minimal investment. Here are some of the basics of marketing on the popular micro-blogging platform.

Trending Topics
One way that companies can take advantage of this platform is to benefit from trending topics. When a lot of different users on the network are talking about a particular topic, it can turn into a trending topic. Trending topics are listed on the site for other users to see. When someone clicks on one of these topics, it searches through the network and provides a list of Tweets that include this phrase. If a company can get one of its products or some other topic related to its offerings trending, it could reach millions of different people for free. It can be very difficult to get a topic trending. The key is to create some kind of marketing campaign that people want to talk about and get it out to the masses.

Promotional Tweets
Businesses can also advertise directly on Twitter by paying for promotional Tweets. This works in much the same way as advertising on the side of Facebook or Google. One option is to pay for inclusion in the trending topics list. A promotional trending topic can be included at the top of the list of topics. This helps create a discussion among users about that particular topic and can get quite a bit of exposure.

Another option to consider is paying for promotional Tweets from prominent users. Users who have thousands or millions of followers sometimes take money in exchange for posting a promotional message to their accounts. With this strategy, it is possible to get a message out there about a business or product without seeming overly promotional in nature.

Developing Relationships
Many businesses use this medium as a way to reach customers because it is a good way to develop relationships. With this platform, customers can not only receive marketing messages, but they can also talk back directly to the companies that issue them. This makes it possible for businesses to pick up on what customers are thinking and implement some changes in their marketing methods and offerings.

Large Reach
When using the social network, developing a large list of followers is critical. Once a large follower list has been built, the company can essentially send out free messages to all of them. This is often much more effective than sending out messages through mass marketing mediums.