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

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 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

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.

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