How To Deliver The Goods To Your Twitter Followers

Posted by Jason Kienbaum on Feb 16, 2011 in Customer Driven Marketing, Small Business Marketing | 0 comments

Twitter is a gold mine of opportunities for small business owners for it’s variety, zero cost, and low barriers of entering into conversations, it is no wonder why we have grown so fond of this social media tool, and it is definitely my favorite. Even though Twitter has a huge upside there are still many who refuse to go all in with Twitter and give it a serious try, many of those who do try it give a lack luster effort and give up after one month, like I said you need to go all in to get the results you want! The number one thing that many people look at with Twitter is the number of followers people have. Well, although 100,000 followers might be impressive to some individuals, it is better to have quality over quantity. In order to attract and keep the quality Twitter followers, look to use these tips in your 2011 social media plan for Twitter.

Tweet often

Nobody is going to follow you on Twitter or keep following you if you never use the tool. Make sure you are using Twitter often and by often I mean at least once a day. Check everyday to see if anyone has contacted you through a mention or a DM. You never know, it might be a potential lead and wouldn’t that be disappointing if you lost the lead because you took too long to respond. Also make sure to tweet something, anything: a question, quote of the day, or retweet content from one of your favorite bloggers. It would be awesome and ideal for you to tweet between 5-10 times a day, but that is not realistic for everyone especially if you are just starting out.

Provide them with something useful

This all goes back to what it is that you are really tweeting about. Look to have a narrow topic and show your personality in the tweets, no one likes the automated robot tweets! There are many ways that you can make your tweets valuable; by sharing useful content related to your niche topic, providing a few tips and tricks for your followers, or just simply having daily conversations with the followers who are listening to you. After all social media is built on conversations.

Reward them for following you

If someone takes the time to follow you what is going to make them take further interest in you and what you are tweeting about? You could use the strategy of giving something away for free that only your Twitter followers have access to. Most of the time with this strategy it is content usually in the form of an e-book or video series. Providing that free reward for following you isn’t going to do you much good if you craft it for the masses and send it out via automation, yuck! I don’t know about you, but that type of free material I just ignore. Instead I would suggest taking the time to create a personal DM just for each person who followed you and send it out to them that way. Personalizing it makes a much stronger impact and is more likely to stand out.

Get them involved with conversations

Many people make the mistake of sitting back and waiting for people to contact them on social media, when it is actually better for you to make the first point of contact. If you simply sit back and wait for others to come to you, there might be the sound of nothing for a while. Always look to take the proactive approach. With Twitter it is so easy now to find like-minded people with the same interest as you, so starting up a conversation with someone shouldn’t be that difficult to do. Just make sure to take an interest in that person and don’t product pitch them! That’s one of my biggest social media no no’s. If you are chatting with people they will naturally be curious and find out more about you on their own, so when they do have a need for your services you will be at the front of their mind.

We follow people who stand out

This is going back to the idea of being niche online, which in my mind is definitely the way to go. However, in order to be successful here you need to make your Twitter followers know that you are a valuable resource in that area. There are a ton of little things that you can do to make your followers put you in that category of being an expert in your niche. Try to convey what you do in the bio part of Twitter, in the content that you produce and one strategy that I wish more people would use is the Twitter background. In the background there is a lot of space for you to further explain what it is that you do, at least until the change is made for good to the newer version of Twitter. Even when the change is made it still helps you stand out more by having a custom background and not settling for the standard Twitter backgrounds that are provided.