4 Tips for Driving Sales on Twitter

2. Find your influencers. You can tell your followers to buy a product all you want, but the message will resonate more strongly if it comes from a third-party influencer that your audience trusts. Do the research to determine which Twitter users have the strongest pull with your various target audiences, then reach out to those influencers to engage them with your product and encourage (or pay) them to share with their followers.

3. Identify buying patterns. One of the best ways to drive sales on Twitter is to get in front of your audience when it's already thinking about making a purchase. Of course, that's easier said than done. To gain a better understanding of when your customers might be ready to buy, listen to social data and use some good-old common sense.

For example, if you sell athletic apparel, pay attention to the times that your audience tweets about trips to the gym. If you sell to tweens who love music, analyze the days of the week that this demographic is mostly likely to tweet about the songs they're downloading. Spending time finding patterns about how and when your audience is more likely to be thinking about a purchase will pay off in the long run.

4. Test, test, test. Whatever you do, don't forget to monitor the results of your efforts. Set up a dashboard before you start any campaign so you can have a clear sense of what you're testing and measuring. Test different days, messages, influencers and offers to see what's resonating with your audience and what's falling flat. And don't just look at how many times your link is getting clicked; pay attention to how frequently that click results in a user actually making a purchase. Collect the data, analyze it and optimize accordingly.