So now you have an account on Twitter and you think it would be cool to use social media to help your business. But you have only 34 followers, so when you post a “tweet” it’s not going to have much impact.
The goal is to build up lots of followers, so when you post something, lots of people will see it.
I realize that some people just want to use Twitter as a way to communicate with personal friends, and that’s fine. This is about using Twitter as a business generation tool.
The trick with Twitter is to build up your followers to the thousands, so that when you tweet something about your business, a lot of people see it.
I used to use a service called Tweet Spinner, which was free, but now their free service has been reduced down to three actions per day and you can’t do much with it. Their paid service is $35 a month. I now use software called Tweet Adder, and I bought the 5 profile package for $74 (one time fee). So I can use it on 5 different Twitter accounts. For one account it is $55.
With Tweet Adder you can automatically follow a bunch of people that fit a certain criteria, such as:
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They posted something with certain words in it
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They have certain words in their bio
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They live in a certain area
The idea is that you follow them, and a certain percentage, not all, will follow you back.
Let me explain how each of the three points above are useful. Let’s say you want to target business owners, nationally. You find people who include the words “business owner” or “entrepreneur” in their profile bio. Then you follow a bunch each day and a certain percentage will follow you back.
Or let’s say you are a local dance school. So you target people who posted something with your keywords in it “dance,” “dance class,” etc., AND that live in a certain geographical area.
Or let’s say you have a home improvement company. You might target all people that live in a certain geographical area, with the idea that many of them are home owners.
Twitter has rules about adding too many people in a day. You should keep it down to 10% of your total of people you are following, per day. In the beginning when you don’t have many, you can probably get away with 20%.
So you start doing this for a week or so and now you have way more people you are following than are following you back. Tweet Adder will locate those curmudgeons who didn’t follow you back, and remove them. It waits three days after they were added (to give them time to see who is going to follow you back) and then displays how many there are to be removed. So you can then enter that amount in the “Unfollow” window, and press “Start” and away it goes.
So the trick is to develop a strategy for your business of locating who to follow, then following new people, up to 10% of the total people you are following, per day. Let’s say you have 500 people you are following. Follow 50 new ones per day. Then after a few days when Tweet Adder starts displaying a number of people who have not followed you back, have the software delete them. So you just jockey those two factors back and forth, following new people, then removing the ones that didn’t follow you.
Engagement
The next trick in using Twitter as a business generation tool is to start posting things about your business on Twitter. I follow a strategy of posting things several times a day, saying what I am doing at the time, such as “I am working on a new web design project,” or “I am reviewing my client pay per click advertising accounts.” I have found this strategy works for me, and I use Ping.fm and have it hooked up to my Twitter account, as well as my Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn accounts, so when I post something on Ping.fm, it goes out to all.
You have to observe what other people post and get a feel for what would be good for your business. My advice is not to post “Buy my stuff!” messages all day long because it will just annoy people and they will “un-follow” you.
So as you post things about your business, now you will get people starting to follow you. They will find you using the Twitter search feature, or they will be using Tweet Adder or some other software. They will be searching for people posting certain keywords, just like I talked about you doing, above.
So when I post things I will think about keywords and what keywords other people might be searching for, and I will try to include those. I also notice that when I link to something in my tweets, like a new video I have put up on YouTube or a new offer I have like a new white paper I have written, it tends to increase the number of people following me from that.
Follow-Backs
So now that you have people following you, you probably want to follow them back. Otherwise they will probably un-follow you in a few days (if they are following this type of strategy which many are). So Tweet Adder will show you the number to follow back, and you just press a button and will automatically follow them back.
The Email Traffic
So now as people start to follow you back because you followed them originally, or as people start to follow you because you tweeted something of interest to them, you will now get emails telling you that so and so followed you. I believe you can turn off this function but I like to get those emails as it allows me to track what’s going on. But you don’t want all that cluttering up your email inbox. So start an email rule so that everything coming from “postmaster.twitter.com” gets dumped into a folder in your email. That allows you monitor the flow but keeps your inbox free.
Good luck with Twitter.
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