If you are not tweeting your leaving cash on the table!

These days Twitter is going wild. Are you keeping up? Do you know how to use Twitter effectively?

How many Twitter accounts do you have?

If you said one, that is the wrong answer unless you are just starting out. You should have a twitter account for every niche at least. Use your name to help brand yourself.

Should I buy followers?

There really is no need to buy followers. Many people will follow you if you follow them. There is software that can be set to auto follow followers which accounts for some of this reciprocity. However, most people will manually follow you back as a way to say thank you regardless if they use soft ware or not. If you buy follows your account could be deleted. When all the followers come through on the same day, twitter will think you are a bot. If you find someone who will space them out make sure they do not go over 250 per day to avoid being shut down. When getting bought followers do not plan on marketing to them. Many if not all will be bots. This will open you up to lots of spam which makes you look like a bot yourself or a newbie. Credibility is what you are after so I do not recommend purchasing follows. If you do get some real ones, most likely they will have no interest in what you have to offer.

How do I follow effectively?

You should follow about 200 accounts at a time for each of your accounts. I recommend doing this every 2-3 days. This may seem overwhelming and it does take time. There are some ways to speed up the process. There are various soft-wares, both free and paid for that you can use. I am in the process of evaluating some popular ones and will be reviewing them in future posts. For now we will stick with the manual process. If you enter keywords for your niche in the search section of your twitter account you will get a list of twitter accounts. Yes you could follow all of these people, however, this will prove very time consuming. What I do is pick a couple of good accounts.

What constitutes a good account?

• A good account tweets regularly.
• A good account never has 0 under following.
• A good account has a lot of followers that should be interested in what you offer.

Once you pick a good account, go to their twitter page. Click on (followers). This will bring up a list of followers but the best thing is that they all have a follow button showing. Go down the line and follow about 200. If you plan to go back to this account again to follow more, follow the first 200 and write down the the last few accounts you followed so you know where to pick up next time. You can repeat this daily for 3-4 days and then un-follow or you can follow 200 wait 2-3 days, un-follow and then repeat the process. I recommend the later for a more natural look. It will keep your following and follower numbers more even and give your following a gradual growth.

How to un-follow easily.

Without software the process of un-following can be very time consuming. I can tell you the quickest way I have found, to do it manually. First you must log into a twitter account of yours. Click on following. This will bring up a list of people you are following. Note you should only do this after you have given at least 3 days since you last followed a bunch of people. You will see the big blue button to the right of each person’s name that says following. To the right of that you will see a small black silhouette with a drop down box. Click on the drop down box. If you see an option to Send a Direct Message you know they have followed you back and you should do nothing or send a direct message to thank them. If you do not see this option they are not following you and you should un-follow them unless they are some high profile person that you want to follow.

Other followers you may want to un-follow.

If you see that they are not following anyone but have a following they could be a bot, or they could be a real person who bought follows to get started. If you get constant spam to buy this and buy that and no valuable information, they are probably a bot. If you get limited tweets to products they may be a newbie. A newbie might very well NEED what you are selling.

Direct Messaging.

A direct message can be sent to an individual only if you are following them and they are following you. This type of message is not visible to the public. You can use this to welcome someone when they first follow you, to send them a custom message meant only for them, or just to grab their attention. You do loss all value of getting your message out there to the masses.

At Mentions.

These can be sent to anyone you follow even if they are not following you. They are basically a shout out to that person, but they also give you more visibility because it is seen on your twitter account as well as theirs. If you send an @ mention to someone with a huge following you get great exposure. Be cautious to make that exposure good. It is not a good idea to try to sell this way. It is meant to be used to build a relationship with that person and maybe with some of their followers as well. The sales will follow later if you play your cards right.

Hash Tags.

Hash tags are used to narrow your audience to a particular niche, or even a specific topic within your niche. You can increase your reach dramatically by using this method, but it is the targeting of a market that is of most value. A hash tag is added to your tweet by putting the # and then the topic of interest. Ex: #internetmarketing. You do not need to have a space after the # but you can. Since tweet size is limited I recommend no space. If you were to enter #internet marketing you would bring up 2 separate hash tags. One would be #internet and the other would be #marketing. If your topic involves more than one word DO NOT LEAVE SPACES BETWEEN THE WORDS!

Twitter takes time but it is well worth it. For those of you who have minimal to no advertising budget it is a great way to get started. You must use it faithfully. If you do not you will never build the momentum you need to drive traffic where you want it to go. 

There are many soft wares out there, both free & paid. I recommend starting manually for two reasons. First you will appreciate how much time you can save with the soft ware and know if you are willing to pay money for it. Second, you will have a better idea of how to use the soft ware. You may not want to automate everything. I recommend that you still do some manually to give yourself credibility. No soft ware can individualize a tweet.

I also do not recommend having your tweets linked to your facebook account or page. Marketing on Twitter is different from marketing on facebook and you will lose something along the way.

Remember anyone can benefit from FREE traffic.

I love feedback. If you found this post helpful or have a question please leave a comment.

~ Karen Karo ~