Twitter is a beast! For the past 18 months or so, I sat on the sidelines and watched as this social phenomenon skyrocketed to the forefront of the web. I actually registered back in the day, followed 2 people and sent 2 tweets. Then I let my profile sit idle for a long time because I just didn't get it. I didn't see the big picture or really the value that Twitter could bring to my business. A host of new software and websites dedicated to educating you and automating your Twitter experience, I was excited to jump back into the game. Armed with a powerful strategy, my intention now is to use Twitter in a very big way to gain profit for my business.
To start off with, in case you've just heard of the word twitter but don't actually know what it is, here is my take. Imagine Facebook's “status update” box at the top where you can tell your friends what you're doing, thinking, or whatever is on your mind. So Twitter is basically just that status update box, linked to many other people that they call “followers”. See you follow others (following) and others follow you (followers). You can send out a message to them called a tweet, and they'll get an automatic feed on their twitter homepage or even their mobile device. Savvy business owners and entrepreneurs have jumped onto Twitter because they see the power in being able to instantaneously communicating with thousands of people who may eventually have an interest in buying a product or service from them. There is a certain way that Twitter needs to be used if your plan is to use it for business. Otherwise, your tweets will be quickly deleted and you'll be “unfollowed” by people if they think you are misusing the site.
See, Twitter can be an amazing business tool if used properly. I was a little shocked at how many people I received messages from in the first week that were basically spam. Poorly written or designed tweets that were blatentley self-promotional. Without even saying hello, nice to meet you, they would send out a link telling me that they could help me with some product or service. On Facebook, there is a limit to the number of friends you can add. They cap you at 5,000. On Twitter, I know some people who have 10 times that number of followers. There are some celebrities with 100 times that! For my marketing, I've decided to keep my Facebook profile pretty “quiet” in terms of placing status updates that are self-promotional, or ones with links to a site that I would profit. Since most of my Facebook friends are truly just my friends and family, and I have no interest in bombarding them with advertisements everyday, let alone 50 times per day. With Twitter, there is a way to add thousands of followers and systematically send them dozens of messages everyday and the crazy thing is, most of them will welcome these messages!
With Twitter, a powerful phenomenon comes into play called leverage. The concept of leverage in business has one basic meaning: Using as little of something as possible to gain financially as much as possible. A good example that most can relate to would be in the real estate industry. See investors use leverage by putting down as little cash as possible out of their pocket in order to secure ownership in a property that they will eventually rent out for positive cash flow or flip and sell for a profit in the future. On Twitter, the concept of leverage is soooo cool. See if I have only 500 followers, but one of my followers has 5000 followers, I can actually get my message out to all of their 5000 followers. It's simple! All I need to do is to post a tweet that the person with 5000 followers thinks is great, and he/she will likely then “re-tweet” or forward if you will that same tweet from me to all THEIR followers. So instead of only getting my message (or advertisement) to 500 people, it has the possibility to get to 5500! Imagine how many people would get one of my tweets if every single one of my 500 followers re-tweeted my message to ALL of their followers! It would be massive viral exposure! Practice the Golden Rule though with re-tweets, treat others as you would like to be treated, or in this case tweeted. Re-tweet others content if you feel that it is good stuff. They will appreciate it and be more likely to reciprocate and re-tweet your good stuff.
Here are a few of the simple steps I took to make sure my first week was awesome.
First, I updated my profile and made sure it was completely filled out. I used my paint program to design a simple but very effective “custom background”. This custom background offers a couple benefits, it provides more information to people who are checking out my profile to see if I am a real person, one that they would like to follow back. Plus, it gives my profile and more polished and professional look, more so than if I had no background configured at all.
Next, I searched Twitter for people in my industry that have a big name, are “gurus” or who have a huge following, as well as people who have similar interests to me by searching using keywords. I then requested to follow these people. I went through each of their followers lists, and requested to be able to follow many of them. See if one of the experts was “home business” expert, I can reasonably assume that person is putting out great messages (or tweets, or content) to all of their followers who likely are interested in a Home Business. Either they have one or are looking for one. As a rule of thumb, as long as your profile page is set up properly (discussed above), then approximately 60% of those people should “follow” you back. This is how you begin to build your follower list and get your message and ads out to them.
Next, I searched for some great “content” or messages that I could send out as tweets. My tweets fall into 3 categories – enlighten, entertain, or educate. If all of my tweets fall into one of these categories, then likely the people following me will welcome my tweets as something useful. A lot of people on Twitter uunfortunatley are just spamming in their tweets, and although the info is educational, it is done in poor taste. Twitter is first and foremost a social network, and people really do want to connect with you first as a real person, before being blasted with ads claiming how “great” their business opportunity or product or service is. I used sites like “Popurls.com” “stufftotweet.com” and “alltop.com” all which contain the most popular stories, articles, blogs, photos, and videos on the web currently. All I need to do copy the URLs (web addresses) to this content, and presto – I have stuff that most others will find enlightening, entertaining, and educational.
As a rule of thumb, if I send out 10 tweets, 9 of them are going to be to someone else's content using the method described above. 1 of the 10, will be my own, personal, disguised content on my blog. So I am not sending out 1 message at a time telling people how I can help them, only 10% of what I am sending out leads people back to my blog. Yes, of course the blog is self-promotional, but only in that small links down in the content lead back to my lead capture page. I each and every tweet, I use a site like “budurl.com” or something similar to shorten the amount of characters in the URLs that I'm sending. Twitter only allows tweets that are 140 characters or shorter, so sites like budurl.com can take a URL that is 100 characters long and shorten them up to 20 or less. You must be able to get your message out in a clear and concise manner, and shortening URLs helps, and makes your tweets easier to read.
There are even ways to automate sending out several tweets at a time, and even ways to pre-schedule tweets to go out at some point in the future. Twitter is so popular that if you just send out one tweet at a time, that tweet is likely to be lost in the noise of everyone else tweeting. So a better strategy is to send out a “mass” of tweets all within a very short amount of time. Say 10 tweets within 5-7 minutes or so. Seeing your name and tweet appear on their homepage that many times within that short a time period will definitely get people's attention. Don't over do it though and be a spammer. People HATE spammers and Twitter is no exception. I'd say one batch of tweets in the morning, one in the afternoon and one in the evening is plenty to start. Just like anything else, Twitter also has it's peak times of usage and you want to be able to take advantage of that when you have the most exposure.
After less than one week on Twitter, I am following 1529 people and have 799 followers and have sent out 31 tweets...my blog has seen new traffic this week and my lead flow is up. Not bad for someone who had no clue just 7 days ago! If you follow the methods I've described here in this article, as well as put into practice many other useful strategies found in different software packages and on marketing education sites, you'll be well on your way to more profits using one of the web's most powerful weapons – Twitter!
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