5 Steps To Building A Loyal Twitter Following

Most of us are on Twitter in some form or another, but whether or not you are utilizing the platform to the best of your abilities may be debatable. In order to build value, you have to start by providing value of your own, and you have to know where on Twitter to go so that your value will be appreciated. While letting everyone know what you had for lunch (ported over via Instagram, of course!) or what movie you’re about to see might be fun, inundating your feed with personal clutter will not only limit the amount of followers you have, but it will also limit the value that those followers can have to your business.

If you’re having trouble turning your “followers” into a “following,” you may want to check out these tips:

Find The Right People
When someone starts a company, or expands into a new market, one of the first things they do (or at least should do) is identify their target demographic. If their products and advertising aren’t speaking to the right people, their sales numbers will reflect that. In the same fashion, you need to figure out where on Twitter you’ll reach the best group of people for you. Once you’ve identified your target audience, make sure you’re following those people and interacting with them whenever possible.

Tweet Often
If you own a brick and mortar store, you’re not going to get much business opening every other day, and sometimes forgetting to open altogether. When it comes to Twitter, you’ll find that you quickly drop off of the average user’s radar if you go silent for more than a few hours at a time. For diehard Twitter users, a day may mean thousands of messages, and if your name isn’t attached to any of those, you’ll quickly be forgotten. If you can’t monitor your Twitter account throughout the day, you may want to consider scheduling posts with a third-party app, but also be sure that you’re adding to those and that you’re responding to anyone who mentions you.

Join The Conversation
The main thing to remember when it comes to your Twitter followers is that you want to talk WITH them, not AT them. A dozen tweets a day will mean absolutely nothing if they’re all thinly-veiled ads for your business. Add to conversations, respond to questions, retweet interesting or funny tweets – anything that gets people talking will also make them remember you.

Embrace The Hashtag
Many people are less than nice when it comes to the discussion of hashtags, but regardless of whether or not you enjoy them personally, hashtags are a vital part of Twitter, and they serve a great purpose when used correctly. Hashtags let you keep track of who’s talking about your brand, product or ad campaign by giving all the relevant tweets a common identifier. The trick is to avoid overuse or misuse, because nobody likes the person who hashtags #every #word #in #their #sentence. (see? it’s annoying!)

Tweetchats
Tweetchats are simply organized conversations on Twitter. In most cases, a beginning and ending time are set, a single hashtag is assigned for everyone to use, and a moderator is on hand to keep the conversation on track. Tweetchats are a great way to show your expertise in a certain topic, and to connect with people who are obviously already interested in what you’re talking about.

Once you’ve figured out how to balance the personal and the professional on Twitter, you’ll find that it’s fairly simple to engage your followers in a way that will both provide value to them and also turn them into potential business leads. When the course of a conversation turns to business naturally instead of forcefully, the sales will come in much, much easier.