Twitter Guide Part #2: Socialising with Twitter
Twitter is a social service - you will not get much benefit from it whilst trying to use it alone. In this guide I talk about interacting with other people on Twitter.
Is This Business or Personal?
I would urge you to stop and think for a moment before you even sign up to Twitter, whether you want to use it for business or personal use or some kind of combination. Twitter was originally used mostly as a fun little tool to just keep up with friends but it has now evolved into so much more than that. If that’s the way you intend to use it and that’s all you want to use it for then just go ahead and sign up and get started.
However, if you have a business or some other online presence then you may be able to use Twitter as a way of communicating with your customers / readers / members etc. If this is the case you need to ask yourself whether you would rather be represented by your business name or your own name.
Consider for example, whether you might want multiple people to use the same account to post updates. For example, several news services are now using Twitter to broadcast the latest headlines (I’ll link to some of these cool things later) and in these cases the Twitter account is under the name of the news service rather than an individual.
As this is a blog about Internet marketing, I think its a safe assumption that a good chunk of people reading this are individuals who are trying to make money by selling things online. To use myself as example, I am branching into niche markets trying to sell affiliate products. I currently have a Twitter account in my own name where I talk about Internet marketing related topics but I don’t post about my niches as I don’t want to reveal what they are and I don’t think my followers would be interested anyway.
How Can Twitter Help My Business?
A lot of people just don’t get Twitter, they don’t see any value in it. Now if you are using it from a purely personal perspective then really, it is nothing more than a time consuming distraction.
The value comes if you have some kind of business / service / organisation that you want to promote. For example, you might have a standard online or offline business, or perhaps you are an artist, musician etc and want to get your work out into the community… Maybe you work for a charity and would like to gain more public awareness of it. There are many reasons why you might want to go looking for an audience beyond just your own friends and family.
It is well known that the more contact you make with a customer, the more likely you are to make a sale. These days it is much more ‘in vogue’ to sell by not selling, rather than doing the hard-push sales pitch. Twitter is a way of doing that. With Twitter you can chat to people in a friendly way and give them nudges and hints about what you’re doing in your world. Look at the benefits:
- It reminds them that you exist
- It shows them that you are human
- It allows you to mention new offers immediately
- It allows you to form a more casual relationship
In Part 3 I talk more about just how to use Twitter properly to cultivate these relationships.
How to Get Twitter Followers
When you first join Twitter you will have no followers. You can send updates but the only people likely to see them are the people who are currently surfing the public timeline on the Twitter homepage and that moves pretty fast. You aren’t going to get many followers from there! How then, should you get followers?
Ask For Them Directly
If you are creating a personal account just email your friends, tell them about Twitter and encourage them to sign up and then follow you. If you have a business and you have an email list then you could email the list and do a similar thing. If you have some kind of website, access to a forum etc then post a message about it - write a blog post etc.
One word of warning though - if you are approaching this from a purely business perspective then you need to have something to offer your customers. What I mean is, if you use your Twitter account to just pitch, pitch, pitch, you will not get many followers. Twitter is not something that can be effectively used as a direct selling medium without adding extra benefits and I’ll explain more about why that is in Part 3.
Stalk Your Targets!
When you start following somebody on Twitter they will get an email telling them of the fact and in that email is a link to your profile. This notification can be turned off but it is on by default and most people leave it on because it is nice to know when somebody starts following you. Human curiosity will result in many of those people checking out your profile and possibly following you back.
This is rather like the strategy of linking to other bloggers if you want them to notice you. You link to them, they see it in their stats and they are curious as to who is talking about them so they check out the link. If they like what they see, they may turn into another reader. The principle is the same with Twitter but there is a caveat here - when they click on your profile, they will see a transcript of your most recent updates. If those updates don’t look interesting or there are none there then not many people will follow you.
This is a tricky situation to get around in the beginning because you have no followers so you feel as though you are talking to yourself. However I’ll show you how you can get your word out there even without followers!
Networking in Your Niche
Unless you are using Twitter just to hook up with your friends, you probably have some kind of niche that you relate to. So for me, that niche is Internet marketing. A musician would have his own niche within the music industry, a charity would also have some kind of niche. You get the picture.
The key is to get out there into your niche and network. To use myself as an example again, I gained most of my initial followers on Twitter via the Thirty Day Challenge. I was a frequent user of the forums (I still am, I am a moderator now) and in my signature I put a link to my Twitter account. When people read my posts on the forums they might click the links in my signature to check me out and maybe follow me.
I’m going to assume that you have some kind of online presence - whether that is a blog, some other website, an account on Facebook etc. If you don’t, then now is the time to create one! Wherever you present yourself on the Internet you should make your Twitter profile known. This also applies to other social networks.
The idea is to participate in the communities within your niche which naturally draws people to you. There is usually some kind of profile feature - whether its just a link in a blog comment, a forum signature of a fully blown profile such as that on Facebook. Everywhere you go online you have the opportunity to say who you are and when you do so, make sure you tell people where they can find you.
Useful Twitter Accounts to Follow
I’ve talked a lot about how you can get other people to follow you but of course let’s not forget the other side of Twitter - finding interesting people for you to follow. Obviously I don’t need to tell you to start following your friends and interesting people from your niche if you have one but these days there are more and more interesting Twitter accounts popping up.
Popular Blogs
Lifehacker / TechCrunch / Slashdot /Engadget / BoingBoing
News Services
Sky News - UK, World, Politics, Business, Strange News
BBC News - Business, Politics, Health, Education, Technology, Entertainment, Sport
Others
Woot - Woot sell cool stuff, one item per day until stocks are sold. Get all the deals as tweets.
Keeping the Noise Down
The biggest complaint that people have about Twitter is that it produces too much noise. There are two simple ways to deal with this:
1. Ignore it completely
2. Purge the noisy people
As I mentioned in Part 1, you don’t have to read the incoming tweets. There are a whole range of different Twitter clients and tools (covered later in the guide) that allow you to send and receive tweets in a wide variety of ways. You can choose to be notified via email. But doing this transforms Twitter from a fly on the wall conversion into a direct, invasive communication.
The downside of ignoring the noise is that you risk throwing the baby out with the bath water. There are some people who I follow who I really want to listen to and others are more of a casual interest for me. It would be nice if Twitter added some extra options allowing you to group people perhaps and then apply different settings to different groups.
Alas, it’s not there yet so personally I feel the best option is the second one - to regularly purge noisy people. You can tell who the noisy people are - there are suddenly a dozen new tweets from that one person all in the space of a few minutes. If that happens a lot, I stop following them. Another feature that Twitter need to incorporate is a way of doing a report on those people who have stopped updating in a long time - purge these keys too because they simply clog up your following list and are no longer using the service.
This post is just one part of the larger Big Juicy Twitter Guide. There is reader discussion post and you might also want to follow Caroline on Twitter.
