Out of all the social media channels online I feel twitter is one where business should place more
emphasis on first. While G+ Facebook and Linkedin are really good too, I feel that some of them
restrict you purposely so that you will pay for advertising. Facebook being the biggest culprit of
this , as when you create a business page , it’s very difficult to get an initial following.
You can only take the followers that you build up somewhere else like an email list or your blog,
then encourage them to like your page or you can pay for advertising to promote your Facebook
business page. You can’t really go out a follow or like other peoples pages and hope that you can
get a reciprocal like or follow.
Finding the right people to follow
But with twitter you can follow people and a certain percentage will follow you back.
Trust me this is easier said than done. But it will give you confidence when you see some initial
followers following you back. Start following people with in your niche or people who could be
potential clients. Like if you are an accountant start following small business owners profiles.
You can use a tool like mention.net or the twitter’s advanced search tool to find people with in
your niche strategically adding keywords that they would be use in their tweets. Again using my
accountant example , small business owners might say “looking for an accountant in Dublin” or
“accountant Dublin” or “ having trouble with quickbooks”.
Finding people with initial problems, following them and providing them with the help they need.
This makes your company look really good on social media and to all the people who are
following you already.
Dropping in to twitter every day following 20 30 people by the end of the week you should have
a couple of hundred initial followers. You also add your competitions @twitter handle in to the
twitter search and see who is engaging them or mentioning them in tweets. Start going through
their following and see if your business can help them too.
What should I Tweet about ???
Tweeting shouldn’t be over thought. Once you have that initial first few followers on twitter I would
start finding useful content on the web that relates to my business and my followers. Like our
business has done a lot of work with businesses with the Chinese new year. So lately I have
found some interesting articles on the web all about the Chinese new year.
I use a tool called buffer app to social bookmark and syndicate all the content I find on the web
and buffer app will send out these tweets at different intervals of the week.
It is important that when using twitter you don’t go over promoting your own company.
This is a major mistake that businesses do with twitter and wonder why it never works for them.
Bombarding your followers with sales tweets or your own blog articles will land on deaf years. My
strategy includes , for every 1 tweet about our blog posts I add 10 tweets from other useful
sources.
Finding Influencers In Your Niche
Finding the right influencers in your niche and developing relationships with them is a great way
to build a following quicker. Getting a recommendation or just being in conversation with
someone who influences your type of audience will increase your follow much faster also the
quality of the follower will rise too.
A good example of this I seen recently is that of a local coffee shop that engaged with a colleges
students union profile. They went on to sponsor a small event with the students union too. And
many of the students union meetings are held in that coffee shop.
Now that the coffee shops , social media manager has build up a relationship with student union
reps on twitter they actually help promote that business to all the students following the students
union on twitter.
Another example where if your business can help other business may be engaging with
business forum profiles or business directory profiles. Most of their followers will be small
business owners and these are the perfect people to help or follow.
The owners of these types of profiles tend to tweet general news that might be current or topical.
This is your “in” to the conversation with them. A way to get talking to them and their followers.
Final Recap Notes
Twitter is an amazing social media tool to get a message out to a following. But you need to
remember is to use it wisely. Some business claim twitter doesn’t work for them. Most of them
aren’t using twitter to build an audience and tend to be over promotional.
There is nothing wrong with sharing your own content with your followers or to find potential
leads. You just need to remember that twitter is a SOCIAL media channel so engaging with
followers and conversations is very important part too which many tend to forget.
Sharing other useful information that you find on the web from good sources will get people used
to clicking on your tweet links. Including your own blog messages in this content syndication
strategy.
You can also try sending out the same tweet links with different messages associated with the
link to that content. Many tweet will go unread , but you don’t want to sound like a parrot saying
the same thing all day.
Changing up the text in the tweet and having the same link to that piece of content is a good way
of stretching the good content you already have. Obtaining maximum value from the previous
work you have already done. Don’t just read this post and move on take notes and start carrying
out some of the idea’s in this blog for yourself.
This article was written By Danny H. from businessinchina.ie. Business in China is an Irish
marketing company that helps Chinese wholesale and Irish companies come together to do
business.
