Strategies for Growing Twitter

At this point in the social media game, you understand how impactful Twitter is for your business. It is important to remember that growing your Twitter presence doesn’t happen overnight. It takes time, effort, and persistence to succeed with Twitter.

The first thing that is very important to understand is that Twitter (like other social media channels) is a living, breathing, growing community of which you and your business are a very important part. With that in mind, there are certain steps that you need to follow (in a specific order) in order to grow your Twitter community and to get it to the level that you need to make it really sing.

Really listen to others

Knowing that Twitter is a living community, it is important to understand that the communication that you have with people who follow you and whom you follow must be a two-way street. Your goal should be to customize your Twitter presence so that it reflects the values of your brand. Some of the questions that you should ask yourself about your Twitter community are:

• Which topics in your Twitter community excite people and cause them to discuss?
• What do people spend their time on?
• Specifically who is buzzing about your brand?
• Who are the influencers in your niche?
• Remember that it is critical that you pay close attention to the discussions that are occurring

Get involved with the discussion

Whenever a discussion is taking place on a topic with which you should be involved, jump in and be a part of it. It is important to be active to the appropriate degree. Of course, that doesn’t mean that you should inundate people with information to the point where you are spamming. Your approach should be to

• Demonstrate that you are helpful. If people ask questions, try and respond with informative, helpful, resourceful answers. If people bring up issues that they need help solving, try to come up with intelligent, easy solutions.
   
• Show your gratitude when other people are considerate enough to mention your brand. Remember that they are not under any obligation to do so. They are doing it because they believe in what you are doing and because they are trying to help you to succeed.
   
• Initiate conversations with the influencers in your niche or industry. It is very important for your to connect with influencers because they lead the way to success. People follow influencers because they have influence. Their thoughts and opinions carry weight and you definitely want to be within their inner circle, if at all possible.
   
• Make sure that your Twitter community understands your sincerity when it comes to listening to them. You need to make them understand (beyond a shadow of a doubt) that their needs and wants are more important to you than anything else.

Put your most exciting foot forward

If you look at things from the other person’s perspective, your being interesting is extremely important. They need to have a good reason for following you. If you don’t do anything for them and the interactions that you  have with them are not interesting, why should they bother with you and your business? It is important to remember that your followers’ needs come first. If you always interact with that in mind, you will never go wrong.

• As you are interacting with the members of your Twitter community, remember that your posted content should always be relevant to their interests and their needs. Making sure that the quality of your content is top notch, of course, goes without saying. However, it is possible to have great-quality, not-so-interesting content. You definitely don’t want to go that route.
   
• Considering that you are part of this wonderful, living social community, you should show your appreciation for what already exists in that community by taking the ideas that have already been formulated and work hard on making them even better.

Creating a Twitter account is not the end of the road. It is only the beginning. Once you have established your Twitter account, you will follow interesting people and you will interact with them on as regular a basis as possible. In order to do that, you need to make sure that you are easy for them to follow. The way that you do that is to have an easy Twitter handle (short and memorable), write tweets that are rich with keywords, write tweets that include backlinks to your content, make the most out of your Twitter biography, use the full URL to your website, and encourage people to retweet your content as often as possible.

Conclusion

Twitter is a very important social media tool for the success of your business. It is not a fly-by-night trend that will be here for a short time and then disappear, never to be heard from again. It is still on the upswing after all of this time. If you carefully plan you Twitter strategies and work them to their fullest potential, you will get a tremendous amount from the tool, much more than you put into it. You owe it to  yourself to take Twitter seriously for your business. Work your strategies consistently and regularly and they will most definitely pay off for you and your business.

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