“Focus on growing a targeted and engaged following of people that want to hear what you have to say”
We all want to grow our following on Twitter. We want to reach more people with our content, of course, but the vanity in all of us also wants follower bragging rights and the chance to replicate the success of our competitors.
Many businesses that use Twitter for promoting their brand, driven by these questionable motives, fall into the trap of acquiring fake or useless followers in the hope of expanding their reach. Marketers call follower numbers a ‘vanity metric,’ for good reason – it is actually no indicator of how many engaged followers or leads you have generated.
When it comes to building a following for your business, it is about quality, not quantity. With an engaged, targeted and relevant Twitter following, you could see drastically improved ROI on your social media efforts, and turn followers into paying customers.
Pinpoint Your Audience
There is a large, captive audience out there, just waiting to be reached. The question is, how do you find them?
Twitter can drive traffic to your blog, get more people to see your content, promote your products or services and increase your influence on the social web – providing you have grown an audience of engaged, targeted and relevant followers, organically.
Craft your tweets accurately, and with you audience in mind. Think like the readers you want to reach, and tweet content that directly appeals to them. Google alerts is extremely useful for finding third party, curated content that has the most relevance to your audience.
Make sure that your bio information, icon and header photo are all relevant to your audience to prompt an instant follow from your target Twitter users. Retweeting and linking to users who’ll value what you have to say and using hashtags related to your business are also very effective ways of reaching out.
Write the Perfect Tweet
“it’s easy to make mistakes that can be very costly indeed, leaving your tweet (and content) all but ignored.”
Consistently accurate and excellent tweet content is key to generating an engaged following – no exceptions. Writing the perfect tweet is essential to generating the right followers.
Ask yourself two questions when you next craft your 140 characters– is it readable and is it retweetable? These are two things you must think about if you want to create an engaged twitter following for your business.
You are much more likely to reap the benefits of daily traffic with quality, engaging and well-written tweet content. Too much sales and self-promotion, for example, is an instant turnoff and typing errors, poor punctuation and link errors will kill any value Twitter has for your brand very quickly.
Some practical tips to live by:
- The ideal tweet is 100 characters, the ‘magic’ number. This leaves the perfect space for a retweet.
- Shorten all links using a bit.ly or an ow.ly to save characters.
- Use proper language and accurate punctuation – avoid text speak and always start with a capital letter.
- Use no more than two relevant hashtags, ideally that are trending at the time.
- Include a ‘call-to-action’, like ‘click here’ or ‘please retweet’ to prompt some response to the tweet.
Do all these things, and you’ll see you following grow naturally and, what’s more, you can guarantee that each and every one of those followers is interested in what you have to say.
We offer various training and consultancy packages to help you get the most out of your social media marketing and convert followers into customers. Get in touch today, and our team would be happy to help you choose the right package for your business.
Look out for our comprehensive guide to growing your Twitter following organically – How to Build REAL Twitter Followers – coming soon!
