How to Gain Real Followers on Twitter
Posted on 28. Sep, 2009 by Trond in Twitter
If you have used Twitter for any length of time then you are most likely familiar with the following scenario. You sign up, you send out a few “tweets,” you follow a few people you are interested in, and then a funny thing happens. Your email inbox gets clogged up with notifications of several new people suddenly “following” you.
For a split second you think that these people are really interested in what you have to say and want to have genuine conversation with you. Then you click through and see the Twitter home pages of these individuals and realize they’re just spamming you and hoping that you will follow them back and buy whatever digital product they’re selling. This is the most annoying thing about Twitter, and it’s something you will learn to deal with. If you want to be successful on Twitter, you should do the opposite of what these people do.
This article is about how to gain real followers who are genuinely interested in whatever it is you have to say or whatever message you are trying to send out about your business. This advice can be used for a personal Twitter account or for your business Twitter account. Increasingly, for many people these account are one and the same, so if you are doing any kind of business online and want to use Twitter to disseminate your message, this article is for you.
The very first thing you need to realize is that Twitter is just a tool. And like any tool, it will only work if you know how to use it. Imagine picking up a baseball bat or a tennis racket for the first time. You are not going to hit a homerun at your first at-bat, nor are you going to slam an ace right down the centerline of the tennis court the first time you pick up a tennis racket. You need to familiarize yourself with Twitter and understand what it really is and how it works. Twitter and FaceBook will not all of a sudden bring your business incredible exposure and make you tons of money. But that being said, if you know how to use Twitter effectively, it can help you drive traffic to your website and create a successful online business.
The beautiful thing about Twitter is that you can send out your message to hundreds or thousands of people at a time. And you can also find very targeted Twitter users to send your message out to. In other words, you can easily find people who are interested in what you write about or may be interested in your product or service—which is sort of the point.
A good way to start is to find users who you are interested in on Twitter and follow them. Whatever business it is that you do, people who know you are going to more likely to be interested in working with you, buying your product, or visiting your blog. So get to know people by interacting with them on Twitter. Be genuinely interested in other people, and they will be interested in you. There’s a saying that being interested is interesting. This is true on Twitter.
A good way to find people who either are in the same business or may be potential customers is to use the Twitter search function. You can search by keywords for people you may be interested in communicating with. For example, if you blog about prepaid cell phones or have an ecommerce site selling this kind of merchandise, you can search for those specific keywords and see what comes up. You will find Twitter accounts with names that contain those keywords and which may be worth a follow if they turn out to be relevant. The key here is finding some synchronicity, so that when you follow someone they will also want to follow you.
In your search, you may come across Twitter users who are tweeting about cell phones. Maybe they are looking for a good deal and want some feedback on particular companies or plans. You can step in and respond with some advice at this point—the more selfless the advice is, the more likely it is that the person will respond well to you. Helping people solve their particular problems is a great way to get a genuine, dedicated follower. The person you help may become a follower and may even become regular reader of your blog or a shopper on your site.
It may seem rather time-consuming to find targeted Twitter followers, and it can be. Bu the truth is that one genuine follower is a valuable commodity. Think of it as making a friend. If you start sending out affiliate links or other tweets that annoy people, you will lose these followers.
Treat Twitter as a centralized point of contact. You may have a FaceBook account, a MySpace account, a blog, and a LinkedIn account. Every time you update one of these accounts, you can send out a tweet updating your followers to what you are doing. By revealing some of your true self—although you don’t really have to tell other THAT much about your private affairs—you humanize yourself and make yourself that much more “follow-able.” At the end of the day, people want to buy from other people and work with other people. The second your Twitter account starts to look like merely an extension of your blog or business, the sooner your followers will stop following you.
Create real authority on Twitter. One of the best ways to get new people to follow you on Twitter is to make it worth people’s time to keep an eye on what you are up to. The quickest way to do this is to help people or provide resources for them. You can do this by having authority. Say you are an expert web designer and you sell your design services to people via your website. You may want to attach a blog to your site and start writing free informational articles about web design. You can tweet out these links and people will start to see you as an authority on the subject—that is, if you actually share some valuable knowledge. You can also take a short cut and link to other existing articles out there that may be of interest to your followers and tell them why you think the link is valuable. If people on Twitter see you as a good “taste-maker” who provides good links, they will most likely follow you.
One thing that you should not do if you want to entice people to follow you on Twitter is constantly barrage them with self-interested links back to your site. Once you get a follower, respect the fact that they are interested in what you have to say or the service you provide. You have earned the follow, now it is up to you to keep it. If you want to link to your sales page, your product page, or the new sale on your ecommerce store, don’t overdo it. Keep the ratio of your own “business” tweets to a reasonable level. You will be able to drive decent amounts of traffic to your websites once you do the hard work of “earning” followers and keeping them.
If you are genuine and have something of value to say—in other words, if you make your experience on Twitter worthwhile—you will have no problem finding followers on the extremely popular social networking site.
Related posts:
Power Social Media Marketing!
Recent Comments