7 Questions Beginners Ask About Making Twitter Work For Them

These days Twitter is all the rage. In fact, I noticed recently that my little Kansas/Oklahoma telephone cooperative is even on twitter. Go figure. If you aren’t using twitter to build your business yet chances are you just don’t understand exactly how it works or how it could work for you. Of course, Twitter is just one of many many social networking sites that can help you create traffic and sales in your business, but today I’m going to focus on Twitter.

What is Twitter?

Twitter is a micro blogging site. What?? Basically it’s a place where you can tell people what’s going on in your life. The only catch is you have to do it in 140 characters or less.

What’s the point of Twitter?

The point of twitter is to create relationships and build bonds with people. You can connect with people on Twitter that you would never meet in your “real” life.  When you connect with people, they begin to know like and trust you. When it comes to business these are three key ingredients to making sales, as well as building a raving fan base.

On Twitter you can become the “go to” person of your industry. No matter what that industry is. Whether you’re a planting purple holly hocks expert or helping work at home moms keep their kids entertained people will begin to associate you and your niche and think of you when they need what you offer.  People will also remember  you and when they hear someone talking about needing what you offer they will think of you and send the person your way. All from little messages of 140 characters or less ?!  It’s really quite amazing.

How does Twitter work?

Twitter works by reading other people’s tweets and getting other people to read your tweets. (Tweets are those little messages of 140 characters or less). You can read other people’s tweets by “following” them. When you follow someone all the messages they post throughout the day will show up on your page for you to follow along. You can then reply to the person ~ to do this you use the @ symbol followed directly by their name. So if you were replying to me you would use @momtohanna and then the message you want to send me. This will show up in the “replies” area of my account where I can see it easily.

For other people to be able to see your tweets they have to follow you. When they follow you all your messages will show up on their page (also called a twitterstream), which means each time you send out a message you have the ability to connect with everyone who is following you.

Who should I follow?

There are many different “twitter strategies” but here’s the one I use and it works quite well for me. I follow people who I find interesting. I follow people who I think might need my help. I follow big names in my industry. I follow other people who are like me, both in business and personally.

This philosophy allows me to be interested in the tweets I’m getting. It allows me to form relationships with possible clients, it also helps me keep up with new things going on in my industry, and it also helps me form relationships and stay in touch with people I would probably like in the real world, if I could meet them.

How do I get followers?

There are many ways to do this as well, but you have to be careful about how you get followers. You don’t just “get” followers, people have to actually follow you. They have to hit the button and consciously choose to follow you. The best way to get followers is to follow people you are interested in and then provide informative, helpful and interesting tweets.

Followers often check people they are following as a place to meet new people. As your tweets show up in other people’s twitterstream the people that follow them will enjoy your tweets and follow you themselves so they can get all your tweets to their pages.

Should I follow back?

When someone follows you, you have the option to follow them back. There are a lot of programs that will just autofollow anyone who follows you. I suggest, even though it saves tons of time to use software, that you do this manually. Remember, Twitter is all about connections. When I get a notice someone is following me I go to their page, look at their bio, and read their tweets. I like to get to know the person a little bit before I choose to follow them or not. If the person fits into one of the categories I have for “who I follow” I will generally follow them back.

Many times you will find that spammers are just out there grabbing names and following anybody (yes, there is software that will do this for you as well, but I don’t recommend many of them), if you just autofollow the spammers you are going to end up with a LOT of spammy tweets in your twitterstream (believe me I started off that way lol). Then you have to go through all your followers and find the ones you want to keep and the ones you want to unfollow ~ that’s a huge pain, much easier to just start off on the right foot.

How does Twitter help my business?

You can not only tweet about what goes on in your life, but you can tweet about what’s going on in your business as well. You can talk about new articles you’re putting out ~ which gets more traffic to them when they get published. You can talk about the process of putting together a new site/product, whatever. Once you have people’s attention they will start asking you questions and be LOOKING for whatever it is you are putting out there. You can have all your blog posts automatically publish to twitter to get more traffic to them. You can run contests through twitter. You can ask questions to get a better handle on what your market wants or needs. You can run polls to get some opinions of things. You can ask questions. You can answer questions ~ you can become the person people think of when they need what you have.

How am I going to fit this all in my day?

That last paragraph seems a bit overwhelming. There is soo much twitter can do for you and your business, but you may be thinking I don’t have time to twitter away my whole day!!

Believe me, it does not take much time to make Twitter an effective tool in your business. You can have some things post automatically, so it’s as though you are tweeting when you really aren’t even there. You can also set up schedule for yourself to use Twitter. Some people do it between tasks, just a quick break to jump in and tweet a bit. I plan in 3 times a day to get on twitter and interact (usually setting the timer for 15 minutes so I don’t get “lost in twitter”). It doesn’t take a lot of time ~ you can make Twitter an effective business tool for yourself in less than 30 minutes a day.

The key with Twitter is to be consistent. The twitterstream moves really fast. If you aren’t out there on a regular basis getting involved in the conversation, being part of the community then people will forget you. It’s as simple as that. Twitter is not a business tool you can use once a month for 5 minutes and expect to pull huge rewards. It’s a tool where a little bit every day will bring huge benefits.

If you’re ready to get started, but still just don’t quite get how it all works, here’s a great step by step video series that will help you create your twitter account, show you how to get followers and start promoting affiliate products the right way with Twitter.