Thursday, 21 January 2010 14:59
Welcome to part 3 in a series of articles about marketing on Twitter. In this article I'll discuss how to grow your followers on Twitter.
As mentioned in my earlier articles, on Twitter you can only communicate directly with users who "follow" your updates. When you post an update on Twitter (an update is a short message of up to 140 characters), your message appears on your followers' Twitter home page. You can also send direct messages to your followers via Twitter's messaging system.
Without followers, you can still publish updates and hope someone finds your messages via a keyword search. But you will be missing out on the essential conversational nature of Twitter. Therefore, especially for online marketers, growing your followers list is your primary task.
At first glance, it seems pretty straightforward: the more followers, the better, right? Things are not that simple though. As with a brick and mortar store, you don't just want traffic -- you want the right kind of traffic.
Growing your followers list is easy. Follow a bunch of people, and many of them will follow you back (a common practice, called "re-following" on Twitter). Follow ten thousand people, and three or four thousand of them will probably follow you back. There are a number of applications developed to help Twitter users manage their follower lists. One app of note is Refollow (http://refollow.com/refollow/index.html), which helps with batch following and unfollowing. Be sure to familiarize yourself with Twitter's terms of service and especially The Twitter Rules (http://twitter.zendesk.com/forums/26257/entries/18311) before using Refollow or any third-party app.
Another online Twitter tool of note is Feald, http://feald.com/index/tweethunter. Feald lets you batch follow users by keyword. Be sure to use narrowly targeted search terms with this tool. Twitter discourages use of automated follow and unfollow tools as they tend to dilute the personal networking experience.
If you are an online merchant, you'll probably want to disassociate yourself from Web opportunists and pornographers who may follow you just to get free advertising. Other Twitterers post blatant spam. Prune those followers from your Twitter marketing account regularly, using the Block tool.
Unless you are a celebrity, your best approach to marketing on Twitter is to build a small "word-of-mouth" network of followers who will recommend your product to their friends. Online networking makes this super-easy because everyone can mail all of their friends by "retweeting" your updates! You can cross-post your messages to Facebook and give an RSS feed or podcast. Keep your network updated by posting friendly notes, links to pages of interest, ideas, news stories, personal updates, company news and new business promotions.
Hint: When you post links to articles online, sometimes the URL is very long. Use a URL-shortening service like TinyURL (www.tinyurl.com) to create a shortened url. You can customize your Tiny URL and even install their widget on your Bookmarks toolbar. The link http://tinyurl.com/foothillweb points to Foothill Web Design.
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