When you are building your Twitter network, one of the big things you need to consider is who to follow and who not to follow.
If you intend to connect to people who will purchase your products or services or enhance your business in some other way, indiscriminately following anyone who follows you isn’t going to cut the mustard. As with any other marketing strategy, you need to develop a targeted group of followers on Twitter if you expect to earn any money from them.
So how do you decide who to follow and who not to follow?
There are a few tricks you can use to choose your followers in a more selective manner in order to market your business most effectively.
Look at a potential follower’s Twitter stream. Go to their home page and read their Twitter stream for a page or two. What do you see? Are they constantly promoting themselves? You may want to take a pass.
Do they provide useful links to other people’s websites? They could be entertaining as well as helpful to your business. Do they talk about things pertaining to your expertise? Common interests are a definite plus when choosing a follower, so you may want to give those with similar interests a chance.
Look at who is following them. Every profile page has a list of the person’s followers. You can click the link on the upper right hand side of the page that says followers or you can move through the grid of photos further down the page. Look for followers you have in common. This can be a good indicator of mutual interests.
Use Twitter search. At the bottom of the page is a clickable link to Twitter search. Once there, you can enter in a key word or phrase and click search. You will find all the recent replies using the term. If you use a relevant key word, this can be an excellent way of finding followers interested in your business.
While none of these methods of finding followers on Twitter is fool proof or offers any guarantee your business will increase, they are all great ways to find some interesting new people to meet and potentially do business with in the future.
