How To Use Twitter For Your Online Business Success, Part 2 December 21, 2010 | Posted in Social Media | Leave a Comment

Social Media

The key is to find time-effective ways to use Twitter for your online business success. Remember, we only have so many hours in a day. Prioritizing that time is critical. And it's easy to lose lots of time at Twitter, 140 characters at a time.

 

The basic concept for niche-twittering starts as follows...

You search for someone who is interesting and influential in your field. If you find someone, follow that person. Make a couple of good tweets before attempting to reach him/her.

When that person makes a good tweet which you can answer intelligently, reply to it. Try to strike up a personal contact and take it from there. If you're good, it may yield something, especially if you don't shoot for the superstar (at least, not right away -- build your presence up first).

That particular strategy offers a focused use of your time. Here's a step-by-step process for building a following in your niche at Twitter, and then using it to grow your site...

1) Start at http://search.twitter.com/ with a search about your Site Concept Keyword and some tightly related words.

Subscribe to the RSS feed to track what's new about your topic. It may just give you some great ideas for new content (ex., through news or comments about your niche) or you may give a short reply to a question with a link to your site. But it gets better, since this is not enough...

2) Now push one step further. Visit the folks who turn up for your search. Review the bios and the tweets, pick the ones who look serious about your niche and follow them.

A good Twitter tool to find people related to your niche is twellow.com. It searches for your keyword within the username and bio, so tends to bring back relevant twitterers.

There's a tendency for folks to follow you back. If not, you can always introduce yourself, pass along a nice comment, do something strong and original to make them want to follow you back. This is especially worthwhile with the "big players" in your niche (i.e., who have lots of followers).

3) Add your Twitter URL on your site's contact page, inviting visitors to follow you there, ask a question, etc. Why handle e-mail when you can turn inbound questions into niche-based followers on Twitter?

4) So now you're building a following. You can track what they're saying through RSS, too. There's a feed that pulls together all the tweets of all the folks you follow. So you've got two feeds... one for all who you follow (ideally, they're all related to your niche) and the search feed that lets you know whenever anyone tweets about your Site Concept Keyword.

5) Build on this and keep growing your online business success with a niche-based following.

One final tip... Twitter sends you e-mails that tell you that you have a new follower. Check out who they are. If you see someone who is following 2,000 and who has 2,000 following him, just ignore. But if you see someone who has an interesting-sounding username and who is followed more than s/he follows, it may be worth making contact. And, finally, if it's from a big name in your field who you recognize, it is DEFINITELY worth the effort to make contact.

Stay tuned for the next article, where we reveal a powerful combination... Niche-Twittering and Content 2.0. In the meantime, find out what SBI! can do for your online business success.