The top 10 ways to make the most of Twitter:
1. Create a valuable news service
If you want people to follow you, create a useful feed to follow. That may be
announcements or news and links about your industry or field and can help
position you as an expert. It might be original tips you write yourself. A daily tip
on your area of expertise can be a powerful way to build a following. But just
keeping an eye on tweets in your area of interest, and retweeting them is in itself
useful and a low-maintenance way to keep your tweets regular.
2. Include relevant links
Tweets are most useful when they include a relevant link to something useful or
interesting. This may be a blog post, a news item, a press release, a YouTube
video almost anything. And to make sure you don’t take up too much valuable
space in your allocated 140 characters, use a free URL shortening service.
because you can use it with multiple Twitter
accounts, and it comes with plenty of analytics that can give you an insight into
how many people are clicking on your links.
You can also add the “shorten with bit.ly” toolbar to your browser: simply click
on Tools, then drag the Shorten with bit.ly link to your browser’s toolbar. Go to a
web page you want to share on Twitter, click the Shorten with bit.ly button that
now appears on your toolbar and tweet it with your message to whichever
Twitter account(s) you want.
Once you start including links in your tweets, they become more useful to your
followers, and your Twitter feed becomes full of information that your
community will value.
3. Tweet your blog
The best way to generate web traffic based on relevant, contextual links is to
tweet your blog. You can set up an account with www.twitterfeed.com to link
any blog to a Twitter account. Whenever you publish a new post, it will
automatically tweet to your account with a link back to your blog post.
Remember to include your own tweets as well as simply dumping links to your
blog to maintain engagement with your audience and increase your followers.
You might consider asking a question relevant to a blog post that has recently
tweeted.
4. Link to pictures, audio and video
You can enhance your content by including links to the three other Internet
content types: images, video and audio. Use http://twitpic.com,
http://tweetphoto.com or http://yfrog.com to upload a picture with your tweet.
Use www.twitvid.com or www.twiddeo.com to upload video. Tweet audio with
http://audioboo.fm, such as quick client testimonials, short interviews at trade
shows, or simply to speak directly to your customers.
5. Use Twitter as a search engine
Twitter can be a valuable source of market intelligence when used as a “listening
tool” to find out what people are saying about you or your business sector.
Twitter has a powerful, integrated search function in the sidebar on your page.
You can also go to http://search.twitter.com. Both of these display the latest
“trending topics.” Most importantly, you can use it to find and follow people
whose tweets include your keywords—search terms that are relevant to the
community you’re trying to reach.
6. Special offers and freebies
You can encourage followers by offering something for free to new followers—
such as an e-book. Explain the offer in your biography or graphical sidebar, as
well as on your website and anywhere else you want to attract people who are
not yet on Twitter. You can set up an automatic welcome DM to new followers at
www.tweetlater.com and include a link to the download. I’m not a fan of
automatic DMs, even when you’re giving something away—but not everyone
objects. Another way to organize a giveaway is to use http://twiveaway.com to
run a contest. Ask people to retweet a specific message over a given time period,
and then pull, say, six names out of a hat to receive a free gift, all managed for
you by Twiveaway. Another approach is to tweet regular time-limited discount
codes—something that South African T-shirt store Spring Leap (@Springleap)
have used successfully. For people who are interested in their products, it pays to
follow them on Twitter since they’ll have access to discounts. They also engage
their community with competitions.
7. Organize a tweet-up
Twitterers don’t just sit in front of their computer screens all day—they like to
get together at real-life meet-ups, or “tweet-ups.” If you have a loyal following
of people who are united by a common interest, consider organizing a get-
together. It doesn’t have to be a big event—a few drinks in a bar after work
would do. You could provide free drinks by sponsoring the event yourself or
even finding an external sponsor to put a tab behind the bar. And it’s very easy to
organize through Twitter using http://twtvite.com. If your business serves a local
community, you might consider organizing and sponsoring a local tweet-up.
Twestival (http://twestival.com) has raised half a million dollars for charity
primarily through local tweet-ups throughout the world. The focus doesn’t have
to be purely social: You could also arrange a guest speaker or speak yourself on
the topic of interest to your community. You might even consider charging for
events that provide significant value to your followers.
“Twitterers like to get together at real-life meet-ups, or ‘tweet-
ups’”
8. Conduct market research
Social media enables you to stay close to your community, and this is useful for
ad hoc market research. Ask your community what they think about a new
product, service, or website. Create an online survey using
www.surveymonkey.com and promote it via Twitter, do a poll with
http://twtpoll.com, or simply ask a question with a tweet. When Rude Health
Cereals owner Camilla Barnard (@rudehealth) wants some feedback on a new
idea for a porridge flavor, she simply asks. And because it’s not a focus group
where people feel worried to speak up, she gets direct and honest feedback.
9. Ask for help
People are very willing to help out on Twitter. I offer advice where I can, but I
also ask for it. Sometimes I ask for geek help such as “Do you know of a
WordPress plugin that does X?” But because publishers and authors are also part
of my community of interest, I also follow a lot of writers. A couple of months
ago I tweeted “I want to go away for a week to focus on writing. Any
suggestions?” I had several suggestions within the hour, including from a writer
friend called Katharine (@kreeve), who I only know from Twitter: “@jonreed—
suggest Alf Rescos in Dartmouth—top flat—excellent breakfasts and coffee; big
table, mini kitchen, overlooking sea and Dart.” And that is exactly where I am
writing from—somewhere I would never have discovered without Twitter!
10. Improve customer service
Use the real-time web to respond to customers and even to take orders. Small,
independent Houston-based coffee shop CoffeeGroundz (@CoffeeGroundz) is
credited with taking the first “to-go” order on Twitter, from one of their regular
customers, Sean Stoner (@maslowbeer). Because general manager J.R. Cohen is
an avid tweeter, he quickly replied and this started a trend: “to-go” orders, table
reservations and event bookings are now regularly taken from all their followers
via Direct Message (DM). Together with free wi-fi, this has made the coffee
shop a firm favorite of the local Twitterati, as well as gaining the business wider
publicity.
Build your followers
Now that you’re on Twitter with a nice branded profile, tweeting appropriately
and engagingly and following key people in your community, it’s time to build
your followers. Why do you want to do this? Because building followers on
Twitter is like building up your email list. Once you have a sizable list, you can
announce your latest product, service, or event—as long as it is genuinely of
interest to your followers and you’re not doing a hard sell. Like an email list,
you don’t want people on there who are not interested in what you’re offering.
You don’t want to randomly broadcast a wasted marketing message—you want
to engage your fan base of followers who are actually interested in what you do.
“building followers on Twitter is like building up your email
list”
The big secret is simply: Follow more people. About half will follow you back.
OK, there is a bit more to it, and a few caveats. Here is my Five-Point Exploding
Twitter Technique, for significantly increasing your followers while maintaining
.
1. Only follow people who are in your community of interest
Follow people who are likely to be interested in you and follow you back. Where
do you find them? One way is to do a keyword search for people who are
tweeting about your topic, or look at who is tweeting from a conference within
your industry by following the hashtag. A more efficient way is to find people
like yourself, who are tweeting in your subject area—and follow their followers.
Their followers are also likely to be interested in your tweets, if they’re already
following someone who is your “competition” in the Twitterverse. To find these
people, look at some of the Twitter directories that sort people according to
industry or topic, such as www.wefollow.com or www.twellow.com.
2. Stay within the Twitter follow limit
There is a limit—you can’t just follow everyone. Twitter will stop you from
following any new people once you hit the limit. However, that limit increases
the more followers you have. Anyone can follow 2,000 people. After that, you
can follow 10 percent more people than are following you. So, if you have 5,000
followers, you can follow 5,500 people.
3. Unfollow people who don’t follow you back
Does that seem harsh? Not really. If people don’t follow you back, they’re
clearly not that interested in what you have to say. Just like you don’t want
random, uninterested, disengaged people clogging up your email list, you don’t
want uninterested people taking up valuable space in your allowance of people
you can follow. In this way you can free up space for new people to follow. You
can find those people who you follow but who don’t follow you by using
http://friendorfollow.com.
4. Create content that people actually want to read
Finding followers is easy. Keeping them is harder. In the same way people can
stop subscribing to your email newsletters, they can stop following you on
Twitter. If you stay focused on engaging your followers with useful, interesting,
regular content, you will not only keep your followers but also attract new ones.
There’s no real substitute for creating a useful news service.
5. Create community by using hashtags (#), retweets (RT) and replies (@)
By using Twitter in a social way, rather than treating it as a one-way broadcast
medium, you increase the interest and value in your tweets, which will make you
more interesting to follow. Hashtags are keywords that start with the # symbol
and become hotlinks to a timeline of everyone tweeting with that hashtag in their
tweets. They are popular at conferences, where delegates frequently tweet.
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