If you’ve been on Twitter, even for a couple of minutes, it’s easy to get struck by it’s vast marketing possibilities. Before long, you are asking yourself “How can I build a large network of clients, customers, associates and friends using the social networking website Twitter?
Many new users of Twitter want to know how they can use the site more effectively for their business. With Twitter’s amazing success, growing into an internet mega site, seemingly overnight, they are right to ask. Let’s face it, Twitter is an amazing tool for your online business.
Internet relationships are very different from actual personal relationships. They are based primarily on like, know, and trust. Many people are reaching out to others through social network websites like Twitter, Facebook and many others.
If you are new to Twitter you may not realize that you can create your personal or business brand and virtually dominate your market, simply by building a list of followers.
Setting Up Your Profile
Once you’ve set up your Twitter account you will want to work on setting up your profile. Twitter lets you easily customize the look and feel of your profile page. You will want to pay close attention to your one line bio.
Bio Line
Because, besides your Tweets, this is what people will read and judge what type of person you are before they decide whether or not they want to follow you. You will only have 160 characters to describe who you are and what you do, so you have to make it good!
Photo
It’s essential that you use a real photo of you over an image your company logo. I recommend you use a real photo because people connect with real people and trust a user with a face. A user profile that has a business logo just screams sales and is a turn off for most people.
Background
You also have the option to upload a customized Twitter background to your profile. This is something you will want to utilize ASAP as this is a massive benefit and way to get free exposure for you or your company.
There are a ton of free Twitter backgrounds that you can download edit with photoshop floating around or you might want to get one made up professionally by a designer. Want a free one…just do a Google search for “free twitter backgrounds” and you’ll come across thousands. If you’ve spent money on a website template or having a website custom built, it’s worth spending a little more to complete your branding by getting a custom Twitter background created just for you.
The next thing you will want to do after your profile is set up right is start to get ‘followers’. If you have business contacts or an email list that are already using Twitter, invite them to follow you.
Put your twitter url in your emails, on your websites and blogs asking people to follow you. You could even put your Twitter url on your business card, so that you can gather followers from offline as well.
Don’t be shy; tell everyone you meet about your Twitter page. Make is sound exciting and let them know that you will be sharing important updates, great tips and information with them if they follow you. You may be surprise to find out that almost everyone will click the follow button just to see what you’re up too!
Another thing that I feel that is important especially for Internet marketers is to seek out and follow the ‘gurus’ and the powerful users of Twitter. This will benefit you in more than one way. It will give you a bird’s eye view of what they’re doing on Twitter, so you can learn how to improve your own results and it will also put you in front of all the people they are in contact with.
Curiosity, you can’t fight it, so you may as well take advantage of it. People are curious by nature! They like to see who is following who, so often they will click on the links and check out the followers of people they know and follow them as well and by following the leaders, so to speak you may naturally end up will new followers as well. Just try and keep your target market in mind when you choose ‘gurus’ to follow.
In addition, find people to follow on Twitter who are interesting or who might be beneficial to your primary audience, or even those who are interesting to you. In the beginning, set a goal of about 10 new people a day. You can often find new people to follow just by scanning through the people you are already following and checking out who they are following and also what threads they are following.
We recently setup a new Twitter account just for Boutique Success. I’m going to go through the above tips and see how quickly I can grow my list of followers – currently just 1. Good luck!
