Twitter can be a powerful marketing tool once you discover how to optimize it for your business needs…
Don’t focus on number; focus on quality. Rather than seeing how many thousands of people you can follow in the hopes they will follow you back, focus on finding the highly targeted members who are a good match for what you’re promoting. Read their profiles and follow people who are interested in your niche; whether it’s gardening or race car driving or Internet marketing.
Think of your Twitter followers as you would a mailing list – a thousand highly target people who are truly receptive to your products are worth far more to your business than a 100,000 randomly selected people. That’s why Twitter isn’t about who has the biggest follower count – it’s about making real connections with real people.
Don’t blast links to the exclusion of great content and making real connections. Certainly you want to promote your brand with your latest blog post or product, but you won’t get the results you seek unless you’re also forging connections, developing networks and growing relationships as well.
If you spend too much of your time pushing your products and boosting your own ego, your followers will run for the hills faster than you can say, “Whoops!” Plus, if you’re not interacting with your followers, your followers are forgetting you altogether.
Don’t slave over content. If you’re already producing content elsewhere on the Internet, then Twitter is a breeze. For example, craft 3 or 4 tweets for each blog post that highlight something interesting you covered in your post, and do the same for articles. New product? Pull out some nuggets of information and share it freely with your followers.
Don’t tell your followers what you had for breakfast unless there was something truly interesting about it. Cornflakes or eggs are NOT tweet worthy, fresh alligator is. Some folks on Twitter feel it’s their duty to report every little thing in their lives. Yawn! If you’re on Twitter to market, then leave this mundane stuff out of your tweets.
Do share the latest news in your niche. This is easy – sign up for Google Alerts using terms relevant to your niche to receive the latest news each day, and then write a few tweets from this content. Presto! That took maybe 5 minutes, and you become the informed person people want to follow.
Do offer your Twitter followers sales and coupons. Since the very nature of Twitter is fast response, you can give followers an incentive to follow you by offering them special deals, such as a 50% discount for the next 20 minutes.
Do provide immediate support. Dell Computers has been combining product discounts with customer support and a request for feedback from Twitter users for sometime now – and their efforts have added millions to their bottom line.
Do elicit customer feedback. Ask questions such as, “What’s missing from our latest product?” What’s your toughest challenge?” “What would you like to know concerning how to ____ ?” And so forth. This is a great way to get information on how to improve your current products and what products you should roll out next. Be sure to acknowledge the responses you receive.
Do run contests. People love contests and you can really capture their interest with this. First, make the contests short – no more than an hour in duration. Second, make them fun. You might ask followers to send their best example of a web page with a funny header, or to guess what you did to earn money in junior high, or to write the best headline for toothpaste for elephants. Encourage your followers to retweet your contest and be sure to award prizes to the winners – free copies of an e-product or Amazon coupons work great.
Do retweet. By reposting useful content to your followers, you can build goodwill, increase your followers and get your own content retweeted as well.
Do run polls. You’ll find new people to follow and you’ll collect dynamite tips and insights from your followers. Plus it’s a great opportunity to engage your network and further build your relationships. Not sure how to run a poll? I’ll cover that in tomorrow’s article.
By using these steps you’ll find that Twitter is a great place to build relationships with your customers, find new customers and even enjoy the process of relationship building also.
