Tweet

How to Use Twitter to Build Your Contact Lists

Guest post by: Janet Houghton

Article Overview: Twitter is a free social networking site which enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are messages of up to 140 characters displayed on the author's home page and delivered to the author's followers. Twitter's Alexa rank is #12, which makes it a very powerful platform for making contacts, but there are certain tricks to making it work for you. It is used by different people for diverse purposes; it was initially set up in 2006, and used in a similar fashion to SMS messages. Nowadays it is not only a social network but an information network and is a major way of getting your name known to a global community.

How to Use Twitter to Build Your Contact Lists

Twitter is a free social networking site which enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are messages of up to 140 characters displayed on the author's home page and delivered to the author's followers. Twitter's Alexa rank is #12, which makes it a very powerful platform for making contacts, but there are certain tricks to making it work for you.

It is used by different people for diverse purposes; it was initially set up in 2006, and used in a similar fashion to SMS messages. Nowadays it is not only a social network but an information network and is a major way of getting your name known to a global community.

How It Works

There are the people that you follow, then there are the people who follow you, and after you have set up your Twitter account, on your home page you will see the icons for "Following" and "Followers". To get started pick out some people who have posted any interesting 'Tweets' and follow them, or you could search for people you know. You will find that most people will follow you back, and there are several websites around that will allow you to do this automatically. The idea is that you keep the numbers of following and followers within 10% of each other, the reason for this is that if you follow a lot more people than you have followers, Twitter may suspend your account, as they think you may be spamming.

Building Your Followers

You need to try and do this every day - again, it can be automated, but I personally prefer to pick out say 3 of my followers, and follow about 5 pages of their contacts. It takes a bit longer this way, but it means you have the ability to pick and choose who you are following.

Next I go through my Direct Message box, and choose who I want to start building up a relationship with, then send a 'DM' back to them, addressing them by name, perhaps inviting them to also contact me on Facebook; the rest of the messages I delete.

The other thing you need to do every day is delete those people who you previously followed, but who haven't followed you back; again, this can be automated. By doing this it generally keeps the balance down to 10%.

What to Tweet About

It is important to understand, that Twitter is not a sales platform. This is where many people get it wrong. If you immediately start pitching your product, business or service you will lose your following and your friends quickly. You first need to establish credibility and cultivate a relationship with your followers by posting newsworthy items, interesting quotes, funny quips etc. You can also retweet any tweets which you particularly like, simply by typing in RT and then the @ symbol followed directly by the person's username.

I normally post around 10 Tweets a day, of these 5 would be quips or quotes, the other five would be made up of links either to articles I've written, which have the link to my website embedded in them, or a direct sales pitch. I find this is a good balance, and with persistence you should start getting some leads for your business.

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Article Tags: contact lists, Facebook, global community, information network, social networking site
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.
Outlook Business Contact Manager - I've just installed the new Outlook 2007 with Business Contact Manager and am testing it out to see how good of a CRM system it is. I like the concept because it works right within your Outlook and I already have all my contacts and emails here. Does anybody have any experience with Business Contact Manager for Outlook?
Re: Using Twitter To Double Your Traffic? - I'm sure in many cases Twitter sends more traffic than Search Engines because most people don't have good enough SE rankings to get SE traffic. But anyone can get Twitter traffic. The problem is that Twitter traffic won't convert for the most part and SE traffic will. I'd venture to say that 98% of the time getting just 100 visitors from search is better than getting 2000+ from Twitter.
How to Use Twitter to Market Products? - How do you use Twitter to market products? Has the Twitter route given you good results? Please share your experience and ideas on how to use Twitter to take a product to the customers. Thank you in advance.
Re: Great start, but no finish - My advise is FOCUS on your business. Focusing is the main factor to succeed on business. If you have a great idea, then follow it only, don't look anywhere else. It is especially essential in an online business. Because there are a lot of mind blowing sales letters promising millions dolllars or overnight success, people find it difficult to concentrate on one business and they lose their energy. Concept is simple. 1- Have a good idea; 2- Build your business on it; 3- Monetize your business; 4- Promote it; 5- Build list of responsive customers; 6- Maintain You Business. Focusing and not fearing from competition (instead you can learn from competitiors) are main tips of billionaires ,BTW. Orxan


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