Harris Fellman Live Life To Its Fullest

Twitter No Good For Your Business?

I was recently on a friend of mine’s fledgling advice-centric social network, AdviceEnomics.com, and I happened up this post looking for advice re: Twitter.

“I am on Twitter now but they say 60% of the people
drop off during the first month. I am not feeling so hot
about connecting with others. Maybe I am not using it
properly to promote my business. Can someone give
their advice regarding this?”

So, I thought I’d share with you my advice:

Gosh, where do I start?

I’ll try to keep this advice focused directly on the question and not reply to the other people that gave advice (or opinions).

I’ve recently been doing a lot of interviews with internet marketers. I asked them “give me a free traffic secret”, more than half of them have said “Twitter”. So, I drilled down a bit.

One of the things I kept hearing from IMers is “my twitter list is MORE RESPONSIVE than my email list”. It took 4 or 5 months and hearing that many times that it finally hit me like a house falling on me over the rainbow…

Twitter Followers = List Building

And here’s something AMAZING about Twitter…

YOU CAN SEE WHO’S FOLLOWING WHO

So, here’s a strategy for you.

Step 1) Go into settings and fill out all of the Account Info in full. Be sure to put good KEYWORDS (for your biz) in the bio.

Step 2) Make sure you upload a nice engaging picture of yourself and a decent looking background that matches your business (Picture & Design under “Settings”)

Step 3) There’s a free service called TweetLater – go sign up for the free service level. Set up an automatic WELCOME MESSAGE that will be sent to each of your new followers. This welcome message should have a link back to your business giving away something of value. (Could be a name-squeeze page — or *not* — doesn’t matter. Give value.)

Now you’re thinking “new followers … WHAT NEW FOLLOWERS”.

Step 4) Okay, here’s where it gets good. Go to “FIND PEOPLE” and put in some keywords that relate to your business. Find some people with a good sized follower list to follow. Some of those people will follow you back … maybe 10% of them.

Step 5) GET IN THE CONVERSATION – now that you’re following people in your target market – *interact with them*. Mouse-over the message and click the little reply button for starters. Retweet things you like (Just cut and paste and put RT in front of it). Go to http://search.twitter.com and look for keywords related to your business & get in the conversation some more.

Step 6) Kick it up a notch. Okay, remember those people you’re following – targeted for your niche? Go to THEIR FOLLOWERS LIST and follow the active people (hint, no profile pic? don’t follow). 15-30% of those people will FOLLOW YOU BACK. Feel free to follow as many people as you want up to Twitter’s daily limit (currently 1000 a day) – you can have an employee do it – just be sure to UNFOLLOW once a week as well because Twitter likes your follower-to-following ratio to be pretty close.

Step 6b) Same as “6″, but follow people you find talking about your keywords in http://search.twitter.com (plus reply to anyone you feel like from there as well)

Step 7) STAY IN THE CONVERSATION – keep doing what I said to do in Step 5. Keep being a part of twitter conversations, opportunities will arrive to suggest products or services from within your business. It’s always good to add value, too – Twitter People (tweeps) *love* videos, webinars, teleseminars, etc. Move them from Twitter to something of value (for free) and then into your marketing funnel somehow from there. Look around at what others in your niche are doing, too. Most importantly, you have to be a part of twitter to benefit from it.

Do this for a couple weeks and you should get more than a taste of how powerful Twitter can be for your business.

If you liked my advice, be sure to follow me on Twitter as well. I give a free video tutorial for people starting out.

http://twitter.com/harrisfellman

Harris Fellman

PS (Added a couple days later – yes, there are tools that help you do this too. I’m reviewing them right now.)