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Twitter Marketing 101 – Get Followed

Posted on 01. Sep, 2009 by Andrew in Marketing, Twitter

This is part 3 of the Twitter Marketing 101 series. Visit these pages to catch up on the rest of the series.

Twitter Marketing 101 – Introduction
Twitter Marketing 101 – Building Your Business

Twitter revolves around following people. People who interest you. Twitter also revolves around encouraging other people who choose to follow you back by offering value with your tweets.

A message that is considered to be of value could mean being helpful in some way, entertaining, funny, or otherwise useful.

You really don’t want to have to monitor your tweets to stay tuned into who is asking you questions or if there are ongoing discussions in your niche that you should be involved in. So always focus your efforts on building a targeted group of followers within the twitter community.

It’s pretty easy to build up a massive following. Simply add everyone you see. But that’s very time consuming, and worse still is that you just end up filling up your twitter page with pointless tweets, that will destroy your twitter experience. This makes it virtually impossible to market yourself effectively and your business will likely suffer for it.

No doubt, you’ll want a large following but your followers should be people who are actively involved or interested in your market. After all, you’re using twitter to market yourself and your business. Use twitter to communicate with potential buyers, or network with other marketers within your own market.

If your followers are not interested in your market, it doesn’t matter how much effort you put into writing quality tweets or how involved you are within the twitter community, no one will care and even less will pay attention to your tweets.

However if done right, you can easily find targeted people to follow and encourage those people to follow you back.

Here’s how to start:

Mailing Lists
If you already have a mailing list, you could email them with some information about Twitter, ecourage them to join and ask them to follow you, providing your twitter url.

Even though Twitter is growing rapidly, there are still tons of people who know nothing about it. So a little information about how easy it is to use Twitter could be enough to get your subscribers to join.

Twitter Search
If you don’t yet have a list, using the Twitter search tool, you can easily find people that are worth following. Once you log into your account you’ll see a search box at the top of the page. Enter a name or location to find the people you’re looking for. Although if you don’t know what username the person uses on Twitter (since not everyone uses their real name), you can visit websites that serve as a Twitter directory, of sorts. Because there are so many of them I’m not going to list them here.

Blogs
You can also find blogs that will allow people to post their Twitter profile URL. This can make it quite easy to find people in your niche. The Marketing Pilgrim blog has a post that allows people to leave comments with their Twitter account URL.

The Marketing Pilgrim post includes hundreds of Twitter users in the Internet Marketing niche:

http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2008/01/internet-marketing-experts-twitter.html

Following people who are already active in your market is the key to developing a Twitter network that is profitable. Once you have even just a few people in your list of followers, you can easily find even more to follow by looking at all those people that follow them.

Websites
There are also many websites that make it very easy to find people to follow and follow you back. I’ll list just a few of the better ones.

http://www.TwitDir.com
http://www.twitterholic.com
http://www.wefollow.com

As I’ve already mentioned, once you have that first handful of followers, or those you follow, it’s pretty easy to grow a network just by browsing their followers and adding the people you’re interested in, or those who are in the same niche you are targeting.

It’s a faily labor intenive way to follow a ton of people and will take quite a bit of time to achieve big results. It’s for this reason that automation tools are so popular right now

Like anything to do with Internet Marketing or making money online though, there are a lot of really shitty products out there.

Something that I stumbled upon recently which is proving to be worth every cent is TwitterFriendFollower. It’s a fairly lightweight PC application, that even comes with a no bull free trial, that can automate the entire process of finding followers using the same techniques that I’ve described throughout this post.

One of the most annoying parts about Twitter are those people who follow you, wait for you to follow back then stop following you a few days later.

TwitterFriendFollower handles that by simply starting one of the automation processes that scans through your account and unfollows anyone who is not following you.

It includes a white list so that if you follow say, Oprah for instance, (she won’t follow you back) you can add her account so that it will not be unfollowed during the process.

Another great feature is the search tool. Rather than using the manual process from inside Twitter, which can take a lot of time to get through TwitterFriendFollower can search on specific keywords or phrases making it effortless for you to find targeted people to follow, and hopefully get followed back. If not, you can use the unfollow feature to remove them.

Most Twitter automation tools use the API that Twitter provides which is limited to 100 API calls per hour. The TwitterFriendFollower however actually connects to your Twitter profile page thereby not using API calls and allowing far more request than API will allow.

About the only thing I don’t like about the software is that the interface is a little clunky, but for the price I think I can live with it.

A final word on automation.
These automation tools are important if you intend on not wasting years of your life building a following. But like any list building efforts, and lets face it this is still list building, make sure you don’t abuse it.

TwitterFriendFollower, like all automation software and websites allow you to automate the sending of tweets and direct messages at intervals. Abuse this or continuously send out tweets that look spammy and all your work will have been in vain.

I liked the application enough to become an affiliate of the product. If you decide to try out TwitterFriendFollower and use my link, send me an email with your Clickbank receipt number and I’ll send you some great bonuses to go along with it.

I hope you’ve learned some of the basics of Twitter Marketing and how to get the most out of your Twitter experience. In the next couple of entries I’m going to cover some traffic strategies and some of the tools that I use and you might want to use as well.

The more I develop my own Twitter presence, the more I’ll be posting about what I’m learning. If you would like to know anything specific about Twitter Marketing let me know in the comments and I’ll make certain to follow up with a post on it just for you.

Related Posts

  1. Twitter Marketing 101 – Make Them Listen
  2. Twitter Marketing 101 – Building Your Business
  3. Twitter Marketing 101 – Introduction
  4. 5 Twitter SEO Tips
  5. More Twitter SEO Tips – Powerful Hash Tags

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2 Responses to “Twitter Marketing 101 – Get Followed”

  1. Casey Brazeal (North and Clark)

    02. Sep, 2009

    I maintain a twitter account to support my blog, but I wonder how important it is. While I do get a couple visits a day from twitter I can’t help wondering if my time would be better spent generating the kind of content I could put on my website.

    Would you recommend that I use a site like wefollow to seek out the kind of people that I should be available to.

  2. Andrew

    02. Sep, 2009

    Casey I’ll respond to this in 2 parts.
    1. It really depends on what your goals are, and because I know what you want to achieve, it’s my opinion that you should learn as much as you can about leveraging twitter. When done right, you can drive massive amounts of traffic on a daily basis. Plus, once you have a presence with your following your tweets will spread far and wide through retweets. I heard some figures that say every tweet is seen by around 500 people. If 1% make it to your site then it makes sense to build your following. Get retweeted 10 times and well, you do the maths.

    2. Let me honest and say, I’m not a huge fan of twitter, but I know a great opportunity when I see one. Now while there was a blatant pitch at the end of this post, I only pitch products that I use or have at least had an opportunity to review. It’s because twitter is such a big time suck, that I recommend the TwitterFriendFollower product. In the last few days of really using it and putting it to work, I have added more than 500 targeted followers in just the last 2 days. Sites like wefollow are great, but the only problem I found is that you end up getting a lot of spammers following and your twitter experience becomes a real source anguish. However it’s what I used to start out with and did help me to get that first 1000 followers.