The Marketing Secret About Twitter That Most People Don’t Know

Written by Jeff Bullas - View Comments
Categories: Social Media Marketing, twitter


Twitter is maybe the most misunderstood and under estimated social media marketing tool in the social media top 5 including Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn. Most people still think it is just about superficial conversations, insignificant daily events and news.The Marketing Secret Most People Dont Know About Twitter

The reality is that it is a much sharper tool than Facebook in one very important area and that is creating a large database of followers (subscribers if you like) without having a large marketing budget.  On Facebook you have to drive people to your Facebook page to get them to “like” your page so that you can then provide updates that they will find interesting and engaging.

This requires 2 key elements to really scale

1. You already have a lot of organic traffic to your blog or Facebook page that have heard about you and your business so that you can get a small percentage to click the “like” button on Facebook or click on your “like” button on you blog’s Facebook social plugin.

2. You run an advertising campaign on Facebook to drive people to a landing page that provides an incentive for people to “like” your Facebook page

The challenge with Facebook is that this can cost you a lot of money to run a marketing campaign to grow your fans and this requires budgets that is only available to large companies and that is why you are seeing major brands with tens of million of  ”likes” such as Coca Cola. (view some these companies at “The World’s 20 Most Popular Facebook Pages“)

The Power of  Twitter

The power of Twitter is that you can “pull” people to follow you on Twitter by following them.

Why does this work? ..well there is a largely unknown secret Twitter rule or “etiquette” that most newbies don’t understand and that is when you follow someone that a certain percentage will follow you back. Now that percentage may be only 20%  or it may be 50% but once you have them following you on Twitter your updates will now appear in their Twitter “stream”.

If you follow 100 people then you will find next day or in few hours when you check your follower count that  you will have increased your followers by 20-30 people.

The Challenge

Now the challenge here is not just getting a large quantity of people to follow you whose interests are wide and diverse eg.. there is no reason people who are interested in “cars”  are going to want to read your updates on “wine” if you are a wine retailer or producer. You need to get followers who are interested in your topics and this is the “quality” targeted component of creating a following on Twitter.

So how can you as a businesses or personal brand attract followers that are interested  in your industry so that you can then amaze them with your unique and fascinating insights and news that is relevant to your industry and start engaging with them.

The Twitter Tool To Gain Targeted Quality Followers

One Twitter tool that I have found useful is Twellow.com, a free tool which has 30.5 million  Twitter profiles in its database sorted into a vast range of categories.

Using Twellow you can

1. Search and then

2. Follow people

The Marketing Secret Most People Dont Get With Twitter

Twitter Tactic

This “following” tactic is based upon their interests in their Twitter profile. You can enter a key word such as “wine” and up will come companies and people with large Twitter followings that have indicated their interests when registering on Twitter in their Twitter profile, you can then follow them within the tool by clicking the blue “Follow” button.

This tactic will assist you in starting to build a targeted following on Twitter that is interested in your Tweets and content.

The thing to remember though is that once you have people following you that your tweeted “Headlines” and “links” to articles and YouTube videos needs to be interesting and topical to keep them clicking on those hyperlinks embedded in your Tweets. These links does not have to be only your own content but should also include other websites and links to content that add value and solves problems for your followers.

So start building a following that is interested in your topic of choice.

Image by YAPixel



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  • Anonymous

    Great post, you’ve hit the nail on the head with this one

    I’ve been trying to get this message across to people a lot lately, but have been struggling to get people to understand it

    Twitter has so much value, especially to small businesses, if only they grasp the bull by the horns!

  • http://blogdopublicitario.com.br/?p=6 O Segredo de Marketing do Twitter « Blog do Publicitário

    [...] Jeffbullas.com Tags: facebook, mídia social, twitter Deixar um comentário Comentários (0) Trackbacks (0) [...]

  • http://twitter.com/EPMWORLD_HYD EPM WORLD

    Absolutely, correct. Twitter is a unique tool. The flexibility and freedom it offers us to interact with the individuals and organizations is truly admiring. The limit of 140 characters is an exercise given to every one to say precise, concise and to the point giving no scope to boredom. It drives the members to be more interactive. Twitter is a platform that makes people perform.
    http://www.blog.epmworld.in

  • http://twitter.com/awhitehorse Stacey Mayer

    Brilliant. Great day when I found you on YouTube, Jeff. Twitter did more for the growth of my company in one week than everything else I’d been working on – and I have 4,000+ followers. Twitter definitely is a poorly understood tool.

  • http://www.johnakerson.com JohnAkerson

    Twillow is another great resource, Jeff – Thanks for posting it here.  I feel like I learn something new almost everytime I read your blog. Keep up the great work. Best regards, -John

  • Click.

    Great advice. This is the biggest problem with people who use automatic following tools such as Tweet adder, the 100 people you just followed because they mentioned Chanel may have not be the type of followers you want at all, but a lot of people only care about the numbers.

  • Julia Bramble

    Great post!
    Another strategy of course is to search twitter for a relevant keyword in order to bring up all the conversations going on about that subject. You can then interject with meaningful content and conversation should then start to flow!

  • Julia Bramble

    Great post!
    Another strategy of course is to search twitter for a relevant keyword in order to bring up all the conversations going on about that subject. You can then interject with meaningful content and conversation should then start to flow!

  • http://twitter.com/commtracker CommunicationTracker

    Jeff, this must be one of the most basic articles that you wrote. As usual, reading it was enjoyable. Thank you for all the useful tweets that you keep hitting us with. Would love to receive your comments on our blog http://blog.communication-tracker.com

  • http://twitter.com/africlubguy j.s. kitololo

    Yup! Twitter Marketing in 2 or 3 master strokes. This is the roadmap!

  • Anonymous

    Thanks for the tip

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  • http://twitter.com/RubyChan228 Ruby (紅玉)

    Uh, getting randomly followed by some company based on a one word interest search gets my attention for the all of 3 seconds it takes to click the “Report for Spam” button.

    Randomly following people in the hope of getting automatic followbacks is about the cheapest, most lazy way to get followers there is.

  • http://www.redlinecompany.com Redline Company

    Yep, some solid tips there. 
    I would also recommend http://wefollow.com which is also another good tool for finding relevant users to follow including their follower numbers.

  • http://www.redlinecompany.com Redline Company

    Yep, some solid tips there. 
    I would also recommend http://wefollow.com which is also another good tool for finding relevant users to follow including their follower numbers.

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  • http://businessrebirth.blogspot.com Shallie Bey

    Thank you for a great post on the power of Twitter. I love it for exactly what you describe, the power to reach out to others that have similar interests. My efforts to find good people to follow, especially associated with my favorite topic of baby boomer entrepreneurs, has mirrored exactly what you have shared.

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  • http://weinigerhomes.com/ Judy Weiniger

    Thank you for the great content @jeffbullas:twitter . I am trying to learn, learn, learn. I truly appreciate your willingness to help us understand the power of these tools for the real estate industry.

  • http://www.facebook.com/Dylan2James Dylan James

    I liked this post on Marketing Secrets about Twitter. Twellow looks like a good program to have is you are on twitter. I am actually using a different program called TweetAdder. I don’t know which one is actually better. They both seen to do the same thing to me.

  • http://www.facebook.com/Dylan2James Dylan James

    I liked this post on Marketing Secrets about Twitter. Twellow looks like a good program to have is you are on twitter. I am actually using a different program called TweetAdder. I don’t know which one is actually better. They both seen to do the same thing to me.

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  • http://twitter.com/davidbcrowley David Crowley

    Always happy to see someone extolling the virtues of my favorite social media platform! (which I use most extensively via my work handle, @socialcap). Good tips, will share.

  • Sushil Krishna

    great post about twitter use .

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