If you want more followers on Twitter, you need to follow people too
If you want followers on Twitter, you need to follow people first. And you need to make sure they are the right people. If your tweets are interesting, some of these people will follow you back.
For example, if you’re a Dermatologist, think about who will be interested in what you have to say. You may want to follow health & beauty bloggers, Eczema charities, beauty bloggers, and Psoriasis support groups.
How can I promote my business on social media without selling?
How can I promote by business on social media without blatantly selling my services? Most of us realise that a sales pitch is an instant turn-off.
One effective solution is to ask (and then answer) the questions you know your target audience will be asking. E.g. If you’re a high-end graphic designer, post a tweet starting with a question e.g. “Why would I pay £3000 for a logo when I can get one done for £1000?”
How to retweet
A retweet is when you want to publicize a post that someone has made on Twitter. This may be because somebody has said something interesting or because you simply want to promote somebody else. My video below shows you how to retweet.
Social media is a lot more effective when you’re funny
If you want more followers on Twitter, remember this golden rule:
"People are attracted to people who have a great sense of humour"
Humour makes you look human, especially if you can laugh at yourself. So here are a few pointers to help you be more humorous on social media.
- Share a humorous quote.
- Share humorous videos. It doesn’t have to be related to your work: e.g. Just for Laughs gags.
- Humorous observations from your work. E.g. I posted a blog article about illiterate SEO consultants, by publishing some sample comments I found on my blog.
- Describe humorous things that have happened to you.
- Most importantly, never make a joke at someone else’s expense. It’s not funny, it makes you look unprofessional, and it will probably backfire.
How to search for tweets by geographical area
Do you want to find Tweets within a certain geographical radius? Here is one way of doing it.
Say you are looking for mentions of "Osteopath" within 20 miles of the centre of Manchester:
1. Go to http://maps.google.co.uk and find Manchester, UK – point to it on the map and right click. Select "whats here?". You should now see the geo location appear in the search box at the top e.g."53.490905,-2.235718".
2. Go to the search box on Twitter and type (without the quotes "osteopath geocode:53.490905,-2.235718,20mi"
3. If you want to change the radius, just change the "20mi" to the number of miles you want the range to be.
It’s not completely accurate, but it works far better than searching place names e.g. "Osteopath Manchester" where you often get no results at all.
To succeed in social media, you need to engage with others
Too many people regularly post links on Twitter and think that they are fully utilising it as a business tool. But to really promote yourself on the social networking site, you need to be interacting with other users.
Unless you are ‘talking’ to other users, you are writing a monologue – not participating in a dialogue. Reaching out to others allows you to build up more personal relationships with companies and people with whom you may wish to do business. Answering other people’s questions in your niche area, or discussing business issues of mutual interest with them, enables you to demonstrate your expertise in a very targeted way. Show potential clients and potential contacts how you can add value!
Using LinkedIn to drive followers to your Facebook page
So, you’ve launched your new Facebook business page. All your friends, relatives and even a couple of strangers have ‘liked’ it. What now? How do you continue drawing new fans to your page, giving it enough exposure to turn it into a useful business tool?
One way is to use other social media sites in order to promote it and drive traffic to your page. Of course, any time you post an item to your Facebook page – be it news item, poll, special offer or information — you should post a link on Twitter. Hopefully, some of the visitors will decide to follow your Facebook page permanently.
Finding newsworthy and relevant topics to tweet about
One reason Twitter can be intimidating to new users is that they worry they won’t have any interesting content to post, and that finding useful content will take up large amounts of their time.
Of course, the best tweeters post original content – perhaps links to their own blog or published material – and interact with other Twitter users spontaneously. But if you are going to rely on material published elsewhere, such as news stories and blog posts written by others – as many people do – there are some ‘tricks of the trade’ that will help you use your time efficiently.
How to spot a Twitter spammer
One secret of Twitter that many new users take too long to work out is that putting together a good, solid list of accounts to follow is just as important as who, or how many people, you get to follow you. You don’t want your Twitter feed clogged up with useless rubbish – you want links, information and discussions that can benefit your business.
So, you should avoid the temptation to follow everyone who follows you. There are a few obvious warning signs that your new Twitter follower is a spammer or time-waster:
- They are following hundreds of people and have very few followers themselves.
- Their user name is complete gibberish, usually a weird and random collection of letters and numbers.
- Their profile picture is a young girl (usually blonde), typically showing a generous amount of cleavage.
