Launched back in 2006 and seized upon by tech geeks everywhere, Twitter has grown in to the darling of the web due to its ultra clean interface, zero ads and complete openness with allowing other businesses to leverage its user base. It’s become so big that it has even got giants like MySpace and Facebook running scared.
For such a simple concept it’s quite mind boggling that it has become such a huge success. You are given just 140 characters to tell people ‘what you are doing’. You can then follow other people and they can follow you back.
The jury is still very much out on whether it’s common courtesy to follow back anyone that starts to follow you. Many people still do this though so if you start following people, you will get many followers in return. The downside is that unless you choose to follow people who are interested in your chosen niche they will probably not click on any links that you share.
The ideal scenario is that you put your twitter address on your website and forum signatures and people begin to follow you automatically because they are interested in what you have to say. Remember, there is no requirement to follow someone if they follow you but do have a look and see if what they are tweeting is of any interest to you.
Once you have started to build up your gang of followers remember to treat them with a lot of respect, just like on a social network or forum, if you are constantly bombarding them with sales talk or links then you’ll find that your followers get reduced very quickly!
It’s important to come across as a person and to be yourself, share interesting information about yourself, tell people what you are up to or going to get up to and mix in promotions and marketing for your website amongst the other tweets. Also share links to other websites that you found genuinely useful because if people start to build up a trust that you are giving them great information they are much more likely to click on the links you provide.
When you post a link, use a service like bit.ly to shortern the URL, that way you’ve got space to tell people why they should click a link. Just like on social networking, giving people a personal comment will increase the click through rates.
You should also engage in a two way conversation as well, if people are posting useful information, go ahead and retweet it, if they see you are retweeting their posts, they will be much more inclined to go ahead and retweet whatever you are saying. It also builds up the relationship between you and your followers.
I like to think of twitter as the public version of my mailing list; you have to treat it with respect, share information and contribute but when needed it can be like your personal cash machine when you do promote something.
Please feel free to follow us on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/plrnetmarketing
About Warren
We’ve just setup our blog but its not as nice as this one!
Hi there to every body, it