As social media grows in popularity, often the barrier a company faces isn’t believing in the power of Twitter, but making it work for their particular offering.

Here are ten Twitter techniques that you can start using today to begin promoting your training business and building a community around your brand.

Being useful is the cornerstone of a good Twitter profile. Take a little time everyday to ‘tweet’ (post) the best of the web, and be willing to share far more than just your own material. This is about turning your profile into a useful resource, not just self-promotion.

You don’t always need to link to another web page in your tweets; pithy snippets of advice (such as “Don’t present to your PPT slides. Look at the audience, not your notes.”) can be very retweetable (re-sharable) and serve to highlight your expertise. You can use a service such as Hootsuite to prepare several tips in one sitting, scheduled to go out automatically over time.

As you draw near to a big training event, you could try generating interest by tweeting out countdown reminders, with teasers about what will be learned there. For example, “Just 5 days until we put 50 CEOs through their presentation paces at our [COURSE NAME] event: [LINK].”

Think about what you can give away at low or no cost to your business. For example, you might take some workshop training materials and trim them down into a 5-page eBook or checklist covering the main points. The aim here is to create something that is attractive and valuable to clients, without revealing so much that it negates the value of your training sessions.

If you can afford to give away a free training session or course place in the name of marketing, you might consider launching a competition. Ask users to tweet about your event for a chance to win e.g. “I’m tweeting to win a free place on @[USERNAME]’s [TITLE] course: [LINK]. RT for your chance to win.”

If you can’t afford to give a place away for free, you might instead opt for a discount scheme e.g. “10% off all [USERNAME’s] training courses booked today using code TWIT1. RT and visit here [LINK] to claim your discount.”

It’s generally unwise to use Twitter as a medium to blurt out a one-way stream of information; it’s a conversation platform, so use its full functionality to interact with your followers. This might include adding your thoughts to the end of a ‘retweeted’ post, replying to other’s questions, and generally networking as you would in the real world.

Offering to answer questions via Twitter on your area of expertise can jump start your engagement with other Twitter users and help position you as an authority in your field. To really create buzz, set a specific date and time for the session (usually 60 to 90 minutes) and let your followers know in advance so that they can make time to join in.

It might be possible to attempt to bring talk around your area of expertise with a ‘hashtag’ e.g. #SALESCHAT. In Twitter, clicking on a hashtag automatically brings up any and all tweets tagged in this way. You might choose a particular time each week to hold a chat session using your tag of choice, and invite other trainers, as well as clients, to join in.

Another use of hashtags might be to tweet live during a training event. Assign a specific hashtag to the event e.g. #bizgrowthevent and encourage participants to tweet about their experiences to create a sense of immediacy and buzz around the event. This is often an effective way to generate real-time testimonials for your courses that can be clipped and reused in future (with the user’s permission).

Of course, the path to success on Twitter will be slightly different for everyone, so not all tips will work for every business but by getting creative, it’s a lot easier than you think to start building your profile and driving new business through Twitter.