This is the second installment of the Twitter series. As I’ve mentioned on previous posts, before embarking on a Twitter campaign, I highly recommend that you have the follwing systems in place:
- A website that’s keyword optimized and looks professional
- A blog that’s updated regularly
- An autoresponder to capture names and email addresses
If you read the first post on Twitter, you know the basics of Twitter and how to set up an account. Now, you need to get people to follow you. If you don’t have followers, you can’t make money.
However, there’s quantity of followers and there’s also quality. Having people follow you that aren’t in your target market won’t help you either.
When you first get your Twitter set up, you will need to proactively go out and get followers. Once you get to about 100 followers, people will find you and you can focus more of your attention on keeping your followers.
The first thing you should do is find out if you have any friends or family already on Twitter. As of right now, you cannot upload any kind of list. The only thing you can do is get names uploaded into a free email account like Yahoo Mail or Gmail and then have Twitter link into that account. Once that’s done, it’s quite easy to see who is and who isn’t already on Twitter. If they are there, go ahead and follow them and most likely they will follow you back.
Once that’s done, you will need to start finding people in your target market. Follow them and many will follow you as well. Think about the kinds of places your target market hangs out. For example, my target market is small business owners in the Dayton market, so the first two organizations that I followed were Dayton Business Journal and Dayton Chamber of Commerce. Then, I went into the list of people on their follower list and followed them as well. Keep doing this until you are following a couple hundred people.
Next read the tweets you are getting from the people you are following. Are they interesting? Are they spamming? If you are getting spammy tweets, then it’s time to unfollow them so you can find new people to follow.
Next, increase your Twitter visibility. There are a few places online that you can post your Twitter profile and get more followers. The most popular one that I highly recommend is a free site called Twellow, the Twitter Yellow Pages. It’s also a good idea to link to your Twitter profile from your website or blog and any other social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn. It’s a good idea to also add your Twitter address on your offline advertising like newspapers and television.
As you learn more about Twitter, you will be tempted to take shortcuts in building your follower list. There are several software packages on the market for this purpose. For the most part, these packages are junk and could even get your Twitter account banned. Don’t give in to the temptation.
You will also see these free things called “Twitter trains” that promise to get you a lot of followers in a short period of time. You could get some followers, but they are often spammers. Even worse, these programs will start sending spammy messages in your account. Again, don’t do it!
I hope you learned a lot from these simple tips and if you need more help with Twitter, send us an email and we will be happy to assist you.
Dayton SEO Services is owned and operated by Carlos Scarpero, a West Carrollton, Ohio based internet marketer. Carlos has over 10 years experience in building websites, blogs and pay per click campaigns. Put his internet marketing expertise to work for you today!
