subject: The Number One Tool For Optimizing Twitter For Business Use [print this page] The Number One Tool For Optimizing Twitter For Business Use
As a social media consultant, it's imperative to stay on top of the latest and greatest Twitter tools that emerge in the marketplace. Utilizing tools to create efficiencies is the name of the game when building a large list of quality followers on Twitter.
There's been a lot of hype recently about the auto follow and unfollow tools that enable you to build a large list of targeted followers and remove people that do not follow you back. These can be tremendous time savers; however, which tool you choose depends largely on your Twitter strategy, as there are generally two schools of thought.
The first school of thought in using Twitter for business purposes suggests that you should build a large list of followers at random and just focus on the numbers. This entails following everyone in a given list regardless of their profile, tweet history, etc. which means you will naturally pick up a lot of spammers along the way. While the thought of this might make you cringe, there's a method to the madness as you'll read below.
The second school of thought in using Twitter for business purposes states that you're better off selecting followers using specific criteria. For example, if you market a product to software developers you would do a keyword search for all mentions of the term "software developer". You would also do a search for Twitter profiles where the term "software developer" shows up. The idea being that you'll build a highly targeted group of followers that have the greatest probability of becoming clients.
There are benefits to both strategies. What I've found that works well for my clients is employing the first strategy to build the big numbers initially. This helps you get a fast start out of the gates and also contributes to getting more visibility from quality people as your numbers increase. And once you've gained some traction and have a decent number of followers, you can then begin to use a more targeted approach to selecting your followers.
All things being equal when using Twitter for business, would you be more inclined to follow someone with 500 followers in your niche or someone with 5,000 followers? Naturally, the profile with 5,000 followers gains the advantage because 5,000 other people have elected to follow him, which suggests that his contributions on Twitter are of higher quality and are more relevant. This isn't necessarily true in every instance, but the high number of followers creates this perception and thus leads to gaining more followers.
