Building a following is not a quick process, especially if you want your followers to be dedicated and loyal. The more your following is made up of raving fans, the easier it will be for you to sell to them. Not only that, but raving fans turn into lifetime customers and your main goal is to work smarter not necessarily harder. Working smarter means making more money from a single customer rather than finding more customers. This is because it takes much less time and it is less expensive to maintain an existing customer than it is to find new customers.
Twitter gives you the added advantage of traffic that converts well. Studies have shown that social media traffic has a higher conversion rate than organic traffic or paid traffic because these are prospects with whom you have established a relationship.
We have already covered how you can find prospects, but now we need to look at how to turn those prospects into followers. One way to do this is to begin by following these people first. You can start with any existing customers you may have in your personal contact lists and this can be done quickly because you can import your contact lists from Gmail, Yahoo! and AOL. Twitter will compare the email addresses from your lists with its database of users and return a list of all your existing contacts who are using the service and allow you to decide who to follow.
Then you can begin to follow people you have discovered in Twellow or similar services such as Twubble.com or 99Tribes.com that are in your niche. Twubble analyzes your existing list and makes suggestions based on similar profiles while 99 Tribes allows you to search based on interests. The advantage of the latter is that it allows you to really narrow your focus quickly by employing a wide range of filters making your work much easier and faster.
Following FollowersAnother approach to building a list of followers is by following people who are on the list of followers of your competition. You should focus on people who are industry leaders in your niche, so, for example, to continue with our Internet marketing niche, if you provide PPC services or information products, then consider following someone like Perry Marshall’s followers.
One advantage of following people like this is that many have autofollow activated which means that once you follow them, they will automatically follow you back. However, to make sure they stay on your list you need to make sure you are providing valuable and compelling information.
The Power of ListsTwitter lists are categories of Twitter users that people create to make it easier to follow their tweets. For example, some users build lists of their favorite tweeters on social media marketing strategies or lists of their personal friends.
This means that you have a list of people in your niche that has already been researched by someone else, which will cut down on the work you need to do considerably. Additionally, you can follow a whole list of people with a single click.
Now that you have found people to follow, you need to make sure they follow you back. You do this by providing valuable content and information as well as being helpful. For example, if you come across someone asking for help in your niche, you can provide them with a solution. This will begin to build your image as an expert in your field and an increasing number of people will turn to you for help.
The more people regard you as an expert and someone who provides value, the higher the chance of their defenses crumbling. The latter means that they will be much more open to your commercial messages and the likelihood of them buying your product is much higher.
No matter what anyone tells you, if you want to build a business that is sustainable for the long term, which we think you do, then you need to understand that providing quality content matters. You might be able to make a few dollars here and there with badly written content that provides no value, but it won’t last long and Twitter is definitely one place where sub-par content will result in complete failure.
Your main goal should be to keep visitors on your site because the more time they spend on your site, reading your content, the better chance you have of converting them into customers. However, if your content is unreadable or simply filler, people will hit the back button faster than you can blink.
Additionally, if you provide low quality content on Twitter, people will simply ignore you or un-follow you. This is definitely something you don’t want. Thus, you need to look at quality content as an investment for your future success, even if it means you have to spend some extra money creating it.
There are two schools of thought on building a following in terms of quantity and quality. Quantity clearly refers to the number of followers you have while quality refers to their responsiveness which translates into conversion rates. On the one hand, there are those who say that, since Twitter has an average 4 percent conversion rate, you are better off building a huge list of followers and ignoring quality.
Then others say that it’s better to have a smaller list of highly responsive followers because you can increase those conversion rates. Since this is purely a numbers game and you can never rely on averages to hold true for your particular case, you are better off focusing on both quantity and quality. In other words, build a large list but also focus on increasing your conversion rates by testing different strategies and improving on those that work.
When you are building your list of followers you need to be aware of the fact that Twitter sets certain limits on the number of people you can follow. This is done to avoid people who have a tendency to follow a lot of people with the sole intent of spamming them with commercial messages. Thus, once you are following 2,000 people you are only allowed to follow 10 percent of the number of followers you have per day. Thus, if you have 500 new followers a day, you can only follow another 50 people per day. This means that efficient list management is vital to building a large following on Twitter.
So, the first step is to make sure that you follow people up to your allowed limit each and every day. Additionally, if the people you have followed don’t follow you back after 72 hours, make sure to un-follow them. You don’t want to have a huge list of people you are following who aren’t following you back because it will be a waste of your time.
There are a few strategies you can employ to increase the number of people who follow you back. First, you need to start the conversation yourself, so, when you follow someone consider sending them a personalized message that shows you have read a little about them and want to know about them as a person. Even if this takes a bit of extra time, it is worth it in the long run because people will be flattered that you took the time to connect with them and that increases the chances of them following you back.
Additionally, another way to increase the rate at which people follow you back is by adding followers when people are more active on Twitter, which is usually in the evenings and on the weekends. If you are adding followers during the middle of the day when people are at work and don’t spend too much time on Twitter the chance of them following you back is minimal.