Can you attract customers on Twitter?

Yes, absolutely you can.

But you have to understand that the people who will follow you are not in buying mode. You need to show them that you're an authority in your niche. You need to expose them to your brand over and over again without marketing to them.

What you want to do is provide quality content (surprise!) so that they will think of you when they do need to buy something. You can do this one of two ways: curate content or create your own. If you're merely tweeting links to other people's content you need to make sure that the content is viral, high-quality and useful.

There are many free sites that rank content by their number of social shares. (hint-hint)

If you're creating your own content, you need to make sure that you link to other people's content more than your own. Why? Because if you don't, you'll look like a marketer. This is true even if your content doesn't have AdSense or affiliate links on it. People will see you as selfish if you only link to yourself.

I suggest a 1:5 ratio, where you link to your own stuff 1 out of 5 times.

To find people who might be interested in your hypothetical gift shop you could tweat to the hashtag #novelties, #gaggifts, #mother'sday, #gift, etc. These are the people you want to follow you. This is where you post links to that great content I was talking about.

You want to make sure whatever hashtag you use is active. You can use sites like www.hashtags.org and www.hashtagify.me to determine this.

That's really all there is to it. There are several great free tools you can use to find, reach and engage these people. You don't really need to buy any specialized software unless you want to.

Yes you can. Avoid posting selling, discount or prices.

3 things:


1.) Eye catching image
You need an eye catching image. If i'll ask you, what images that catches your eyes? Avoid brown, black white colors. Create a simple, eye catching image related to your product.

2.) headline (most likely a question: "Baseball player?" "Not getting enough traffic?", "Getting tired of your local business"?)

3.) Body: Promise something. Offer a freebies. ("Click here and i'll show you..", "I'll show you how this thing works..")

yes but it's very time consuming. You really have to focus on building relationships and the moment you rush things and try push sales/traffic, that's when you're relationships will start to suffer.

It depends on what basis you consider them your target market, there may be a very small percentage of people who will actually buy anything from you.
Engaging with them is not easy it's time consuming task, instead you can spend some money on social media ads.

Posting good content and stories goes a long ways on Twitter. Additionally, if you find people talking about a topic and have the opportunity to promote your business, then you can benefit from using Twitter.