Corporate Web StrategyWeb Marketing ideas, tactics, trends and more….

I get a lot of people excitedly telling me how Twitter is hot, and that Twitter should be incorporated into web marketing. However, stopping short of using Twitter on a personal basis, most people have hardly any ideas on how to integrate twitter into their web strategy.

Furthermore, in Asia, while there are like 1 million Twitter users in Malaysia alone (I’m not sure how many of these are active), most users are still using Twitter on a personal basis. Nevertheless, with iPhones and Blackberries fast gaining ground here, it won’t be long before Twitter will catch on.

Thus, we need to ready for Twitter when its popularity catches on, and we need to plan for it within our web marketing strategy.

If you are self-employed, then getting started should be quite easy. Start to build a following by connecting with your friends, and then your friend’s friends. Choose a focus area and tweet around the topic of your interest. Share links that you find related to your niche, and share your comments, thoughts and links on topics of interest.

Corporations need to integrate Twitter with their other social media channels. Ensure that the Facebook page has links to Twitter, and use Twitter to reference your Facebook postings too. Ensure that all your corporate blogs, or blogs maintained by key personnel in your company has links to your Twitter feed.

Send the word out to your business partners and employees about your new Twitter account, and hopefully they will follow you. The administrator of your Twitter account should have a rough media plan for Twitter – Does he announce your company’s press releases? Is there are steady stream of new product releases that you announce on a consistent basis? How about offers? To build followers, you need to provide content that are relevant to what your followers are interested in.

Apart from that, running Twitter polls could help to encourage your followers to interact with you. Or you may post a question to your followers on what they think about your latest product or solutions?

At the end of the day, corporations need to view Twitter as an alternate channel to communicate with their customers and potential customers. In fact, many companies, such as Dell and Wal-Mart set up their own social media team to manage multiple Twitter accounts, each dealing with a specific product. Some companies may even take a step further and use Twitter to manage customer support issues .

Finally, with Social CRM seen as one of the upcoming trends relating to the holistic incorporation of social media deployed, used and measured across multiple functions in a company, Twitter is really just one of the tools that needs to be integrated within this ecosystem.