Twitter As A Marketing Tool, Part 1: How To Build An Army Of Loyal Followers!

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Twitter (http://www.twitter.com) is a communication platform that has exploded into one of the largest social network sites in the world with only Facebook and MySpace serving more users. This may soon change as more and more individuals and businesses alike realize the potential leverage that twitter has to offer over its competition. 10’s or even 100’s of thousands of followers are possible with the right strategy. This is what separates the casual twitter user from the power user..simply put, an action plan! We want to maximize our efficiency and build a following of like minded individuals who are in essence a targeted list of people interested in our niche.

Building the list is only the first step as the whole purpose of social networking is to engage in communication through relationship building. As a result of our efforts, we will also drive traffic back to our blogs and websites where even further relationship building can take place.

Assuming you already have an account set up, there are a number of ways you can tweet your way to twitter glory while simultaneously raising the awareness of your personal brand, product and/or company to your niche market. That brings us to the first and one of the most important decisions you must make for twitter success. Who to follow?! If you have yet to truly define your niche, I suggest you do that right now!

Of course, it only makes sense to network or follow others of like mind whom share similar interests to yourself or businesses core values. In many cases, these individuals or businesses may already be using a product or service that you have to offer! There are a number of resources you can use to find profiles of individuals who are leaders in your field (and whose followers may be potential clients or customers). Specific individuals and/or businesses, even your competitors, provide a viable option to find followers. Look for those individual profiles within your niche as they will be the ones we will focus on to harvest followers of our own.

So where exactly do we find others of like mind that would be interested in the information that we have to share? The most basic method of finding people to follow is through twitter key word search. Simply type in the search term most closely associated with your niche and you’ll find tweets in real time with your keyword in the tweet. You can then either follow those individuals directly and/or follow their followers as well. This may be a bit tedious and time consuming for those looking to maximize their efforts but more on that in a bit. There are a number of twitter directories that have been created and I would like to share of couple of my favorites with you now:

http://www.wefollow.com

http://www.twellow.com

Both of the above sites are twitter directories. With Twellow, the Twitter “Yellow Pages”, you can search for profiles by category, location or keyword. Wefollow uses hashtags. Profiles are generally ranked by the number of followers with the highest being at the top of the list. These are the power users or twitter elite. This is perfect for our needs as these individuals may be considered leaders and experts in their niche and attract large followings of people interested in the value these individuals or businesses have to share. Most of these high ranking profiles have huge followings that can supply endless numbers of people we can network with and follow.

If you’re looking to connect with folks locally, twellow offers a search of your “twellowhood’ narrowing your profile search parameters down to city. If you are looking for local individuals specifically, you may want to try Twitterlocal (http://www.twitterlocal.net), which is a desktop app that provides a twitter stream within a certain zip code radius that you define.

So, once you’re clear on your Niche and are ready to explode your following and leverage twitter as a marketing tool there are auto-followers that allow you to automate your twitter experience. The one I’ve been using is called Hummingbird. This is an amazingly effective tool for maximizing your efficiency. You can learn more by clicking on the picture or the following link: http://fredricschwartz.com/hummingbird

The beauty of this tool is once you find a desired profile, you can then follow either all of that profiles friends and/or followers until you reach your daily following limit. The general rule of thumb for Twitter is that once you follow 2000 people, your following must catch up before you can move on. Thereafter, the ratio to following and followers has a margin of approx. 5-10%. It is also prudent in the beginning to follow no more than 500 people or so per day and not follow 2000 people all at once if you are just setting up a new profile. You don’t want to abuse the system and create any red flags that jeopardize the account.

To further maximize the efficiency of your following efforts and to make room for new followers, every 1-2 days or what ever time you are comfortable with, you must un-follow all of those that haven’t follow you back. This process is also automated using hummingbird. The software allows for complete control over who you un-follow with protect and unprotect settings. This includes users who currently follow you, those you have previously un-followed already and people who have chosen to keep their updates private. There is also a VIP list for special profiles you want to completely protect from un-following no matter what such as celebrities or news channels like CNN.

For a free tool that helps manage your existing friends and followers, check out Twitter Karma: http://dossy.org/twitter/karma/. This is helpful when you are just getting started and have a relatively small number of profiles to manage. Once the application fetches your friends and followers from Twitter, you can then view your friends, followers and mutual followers and bulk follow or un-follow from there.

This concludes part 1 of Twitter As A Marketing Tool. In Part 2, I will cover how to automate your direct messages, drive traffic back to your website, use desktop applications for one or more Twitter accounts (Facebook too!), link tracking as well as what to tweet (content). This will also include ways to engage your followers to deepen your relationship with them. I can almost guarantee you WILL build an army of loyal followers, so with that said my friends, if you found this post of value, please tweet it, facebook it, stumble it, digg it and just plain share it with all your friends and followers! Also, if you’re not on my list yet and you would like to receive my posts directly to your e-mail inbox, don’t forget to include your name and e-mail in the fields below.

You May Find These Posts Of Interest

• October 13, 2009 -- Twitter As A Marketing Tool, Part 3: How To Build An Army Of Loyal Followers! (3)
• November 25, 2009 -- The 7 Deadly Sins Of Social Media Marketing (15)
• October 1, 2009 -- Twitter As A Marketing Tool, Part 2: How To Build An Army Of Loyal Followers! (0)

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