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Most marketers are still using social media tools for in-platform branding, which translates to lost opportunity. According to the latest survey by MarketingSherpa, 78 percent of respondents are participating on company branded or managed social networks, such as Facebook or LinkedIn, with another 63 percent using microblogging tools (e.g., Twitter). Content sharing, blogging and social media news releases also receive a considerable amount of attention, at 63 percent, 59 percent and 48 percent of respondents, respectively.

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Unless you’ve spent a lot of time sifting through the minutiae of social media marketing, you’d probably think that having a story retweeted dozens of times will translate to a hefty increase in pageviews and exposure for your corporate blog. Well, as you’re planning your social media marketing strategy – as with any marketing effort – it pays to think about the people you’re actually targeting.

I’ve always been stunned by the disparity between the action a story gets on Twitter and the actual amount of blog traffic to which it translates. It seems that one really doesn’t have much to do with the other, and a recent study shows why.

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Twitter recently announced that it’s not letting users push their own advertisements and sponsored tweets through Twitter. While this is a rather specific act on Twitter’s part, it’s clear how any marketer may seem concerned. Could advertising be at the top of a slippery slope? If you’re worried … don’t. If anything, the Twitter prohibition on tweeted ads (except its own, of course), will help B2B marketers and others who use insights, expertise and experience as the meat in their communications with the market.

Twitter’s Big Change
For Twitter, marketing and advertising have evolved since its inception. What began with self-promotion turned into business promotion, ongoing marketing and then eh ale of space in your own tweet stream (i.e., advertising). For much of its existence, of course, Twitter had virtually no revenue and didn’t seem to have any prospects (or even interest) in changing that.

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The dialogue on Twitter is fast-paced and has close to 60 million participants. So, it’s at once high-value and highly frustrating. How can you make your voice heard above so many others? Rather than delve into the “focused community” spiel that you’ve probably read hundreds of times on Mashable, here are five tips to help you with the basic blocking and tackling of marketing your IT product or service on Twitter:

1. Leave room at the end
You have 140 characters at your disposal … just like everyone else. So, if someone wants to retweet you, you’ll need to leave enough room for RT @[your name]. Some users may be willing to edit your tweet to make room for the additional characters entailed by retweeting, but you may miss opportunities when someone isn’t in the mood to work a little harder to help you out.

Note: With the retweet button on Twitter.com, you can’t edit when retweeting, so you’d have to expect someone to manually copy and paste your tweet before editing and retweeting. That’s a lot to expect from a perfect stranger!

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