By now many home business owners has ventured their way onto Twitter to help market their company. Marketing is the key to success for most small businesses and Twitter can indeed be a great, free way to promote any product or service and gain customers.

However, how you “tweet” really determines how successful the microblogging site will be for your home business. Here are some of the things that may get you unfollowed just as quickly as you were followed:

Constant Tweeting about your own business – Sure you are on Twitter to promote your home business but if all you ever tweet is “10% xxx for zz weeks” or “get your xxx here” then people will quickly become bored and hit the unfollow button. There is nothing wrong with promotional tweets but mix them in with actual interesting content people want to read.

Automatic Direct Messages – A bad way to get off on the right foot on a social media site. Someone is interested enough to follow you and all they get in return is a canned response? Not very friendly. With an application like Hootsuite it is easy to keep track of your new followers and it takes less than 30 seconds to just craft and send a quick, but personalized, hi message.

Just Links – Where does that bit.ly link actually lead? In an age where nasty spam and viruses are everywhere no one is going to click a link that may lead anywhere. Take the time to explain what the link is and why your readers should be interested.

Mixing Business with Pleasure in Public – When you make dinner plans on the phone or by email you only contact those who are actually invited. This logic seems to fall apart on Twitter with many people believing any communication on Twitter should be broadcast to the world.