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Twitter for Business Building and Lead Generation (or as I prefer to call it, relationship building) - Part 1 of 2, Follow and Be Followed

Guest post by: Toni Taylor

Article Overview: In response to requests from readers on how to use Twitter to market their businesses, large and small, a few thoughts on the matter, over the course of two articles. The first will be how to build and manage your following/followers lists. The second will be how to interact with that group to build the relationships that will benefit you and your business by focusing on what your followers are interested in.

Twitter for Business Building and Lead Generation (or as I prefer to call it, relationship building) - Part 1 of 2, Follow and Be Followed

If you're reading this, you are likely already using Twitter as a way to keep in touch with friends, colleagues, current events and interest groups. You might also be using it to drive traffic to your website, thus marketing your business offering, be it goods and/or services for your online or bricks & mortar type of businesses. I would argue that in addition to traffic building, you use the social aspect of Twitter to actually get in genuine conversation via the Direct Message section of the site with as many of your followers as possible. This allows you to build better relationships with your followers, whose business and social interests and goals you genuinely share.

Follow and Be Followed From a marketing perspective, volume of followers is the ticket, but because Twitter is a social medium, you will want to consider the quality and interests of those followers. There are many ways to build followers in any combination of manual or any number of automated means. If you are looking to build a high volume following quickly, automated is the way to go. Hummingbird2, Buzzom, and Twello are a few to consider. If automated tools are used to build a large list quickly, manage them well as you want to keep the number of those you are following to no more than 10% greater than those following you. This is especially important when you are in the neighborhood of following 2,000 people. If you stray too far beyond this percentage, there is a risk Twitter will shut down your account. Ideally, everyone you are following are returning the favor and following you as well. Automated tools can be very useful in synching this up for you and keeping your following/follower difference in the 10% range. Using automated tools to build your group of followers does not preclude you from adding to your group manually. Depending up how hard you work at this, the manual approach allows you to increase the percentage of followers with whom you genuinely know you want to work and be in regular, two-way communication with. There are several ways to manually search for people to follow whose interests match yours. Two of my favorites are:

1. Follow the followers of the leaders in your field. As your professional interests already overlap and they are more likely to be at a comparable level of success as yourself, they are more likely to follow you in return. If you're into network marketing, the followers of Mike Dillard, Ann Seig, and Dani Johnson are already interested in your market. Also note that many of those following industry leaders are likely also very well placed in your industry, so follow their followers as well.
   
   
2. Follow those whose other interests you share. On the Find People page of your Twitter home page, plug in some of your other interests and see who comes up. If you're interested in personal development, gardening, or music, plug that into the search bar and see who comes up. As you want to follow and be followed by people that you can interact with, avoid following businesses, unless you're genuinely interested their offerings. You can also search on keywords for your particular market. Again, follow the followers of those who share your other interests.

As you will hopefully be spending quality time with those you connect with, connect with people who genuinely interest you. If you've set your automated tools well, this will happen, but following people manually helps you remember that business success at its best is really dependent upon high quality personal relationships.

Next Up Now that your lists of those you are following and followers is growing nicely using automated and manual means, the next article in this series will be suggestions on how to interact with your lists of fascinating folks doing great work.

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Article Tags: business building, relationships, social media marketing, traffic generation
Referred by: http://jaykubassek.com



Related Forum Posts
Re: Twitter vs Facebook - [quote="KH_Global":3e2sd4ss]Twitter: Twitter is a good for traffic building. But how do we build the traffic using twitter. I am still at novice to use twitter. So, have not seen any perfect step to this. I also heard about twitter can be monetized. But how? Could anyone share about this? [/quote:3e2sd4ss] First, imho, if you focus on 'monetizing Twitter', you are going for the wrong goal. Twitter is a relationship-building tool (and so is Facebook for that matter). If you try to sell things, or put ads in your Twitter stream, you will generally turn people off. Build relationships first, and those relationships will lead to potential clients and lucrative off-Twitter joint ventures. To build traffic using Twitter: Provide useful, valuable information on your website, and then post about that info on Twitter. The easiest way is to have a blog where you solve some problem that people are looking for solutions to. Then you tweet your posts and this drives traffic to your website. However it's also important to provide comprehensive value by tweeting to other sources of the kind of info your followers will be looking for. If you provide value, folks will follow you, they'll read your tweets, and they'll 'follow' you to your site eventually.
Type of business with building - If you owned a building and Wal-Mart was opening its doors across the street in a previously unoccupied area (along with 12-14 small shops), what type of business would you start? Here are the considerations: 1. Money is a non-factor 2. Building is fairly large (10,000) square feet 3. Building is on the corner of a busy intersection (about to get much busier)
Re: Social Media Effectively? - Seem like everyone is created some form of products to get your followers, what am I missing, I dont see the value of Twitter, the limitation of 2000 until other are are following you, how to communication in 140 characters or less, where is the relationship building, where are the spam filters?
Re: Google Places Review | How to Get a Review on Google Places? - Hi Evan, Yes, I am planning more. I have multiple videos coming out this year on: Social media marketing Email marketing Lead Generation Organic search marketing Conversion rate optimization Analytics Content marketing Paid search marketing I am looking for SEO / Internet Marketing questions people have. I enjoy producing videos answer tuff SEO questions. Let me know if you are any of your members have any they want answered. Jeff
Re: I thought social sites were a waste of time. How wrong I was - Social Media has only really been understood this last year or two. Before that I didn’t really understand or like Facebook for example because of the problems separating Family and Friends from Business. Twitter seemed a total waste of my time and a lot of people seemed to spend all their time building up their followers to brag about how many they have got. Now I understand the basics a bit more I can appreciate the value particularly of Twitter in building up relationships with others in your niche with a view to doing business later. If people follow me and are active in the general Internet world or marketing in particularly then I follow back immediately otherwise I don’t see the point. You could argue I suppose that someone who breeds dogs and enjoys painting for example might suddenly become an Internet Marketer and I am missing out on not following them but I tend to stick within my niche. regards, Mal.


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