Twitter Marketing: How to be Follow-Worthy on Twitter

Copyright (c) 2009 OnlineBizU.com

I often get asked the question, "How do I get more followers on Twitter?" Many of my clients want to pay a sum of money for the latest scheme to get them 10,000 new followers in 24 hours or some such nonsense as that. As in all marketing strategies, it's not the number that counts. Rather, it's the quality in the numbers that really matters. So, 10,000 followers who are not members of your target market are fairly useless to you. Of much greater value would be a smaller list of 1000 followers who are all members of your target market.

All in all, online social networking is not that vastly different from face-to-face networking. Some basic networking principles still apply, regardless of the platform:

To be interesting, you have to be interested (in others). Try to be a resource and give first before asking for anything.

I'm not particularly a social person, nor do I like to waste time making chit-chat with my followers. It's just not my style. I realize I lose some major networking points because of this personality trait, although I will comment on something of a personal nature or add to a discussion on occasion.

However, what I do well is educate and provide useful information that people want and need, so that's the strategy I use in my social networking. Quite frankly, that's the primary reason I pay attention to only a small select group of people on Twitter -- they consistently provide me with great information of use to my business, and many times it is this same information that I'll retweet to my followers. Understandably, it's probably taken me longer to build a following than someone who spends more time on this than I do, but in the long run, you have to determine what works best for you and set a finite amount of time each day to devote to social networking so that it doesn't become all-consuming.

Here are the 7 ways you can become follow-worthy on Twitter:

1. Distribute your ezine. My ezine is chock-full of useful info each week, and it's connected to both Facebook and Twitter. So, every time I publish an issue, all my Facebook and Twitter followers receive it.

2. Distribute blog posts. My blog is also connected to both Facebook and Twitter, so every time a post is made, all my Facebook and Twitter followers receive it. My more popular articles will be retweeted at least 10 times by different followers on my list because they felt the content was valuable for their network.

3. Distribute your articles. My EzineArticles.com account is connected to Twitter, so every time they accept an article for publication, it goes out to my Twitter and Facebook followers.

4. Retweet the posts of others. I'm regularly retweeting the posts of people I follow that I find useful and think that my followers will find useful as well. In fact, I am regularly cited as someone to follow because I provide great information to my followers.

5. Create a tips hashtag campaign. I've got a tips series that I publish on Twitter where I regularly publish tips on traffic generation for my followers. Many of these have been retweeted over time.

6. Comment on other people's posts. If I have something pertient to add, I'll comment or reply to a small number of posts each week. 7. Be interested in your followers. Ask and answer questions, make referrals, take suggestions, provide support, and do many of the thing you would normally do if you were in a room of people.

Use your information and knowledge to build your following on Twitter. Your followers will pass your useful information to their networks, and slowly but surely, your number of followers will increase, as well.