Grow your business by following the right people on Twitter

Joining in with trending hashtags, following other users and making regular tweets are the best ways to quickly and organically grow the Twitter audience for your business. However if you want to build up a valuable audience (one that will actually listen to your tweets and hopefully make a purchase) you need to be strategic about the accounts that you follow and interact with. Here’s how to build a valuable audience on Twitter that will help your business grow:

How to begin

To follow this strategy you are going to join in with hashtag hours, follow the right accounts for your business and interact with other users. But first, you need to establish who your target audience is. Your target audience is twofold; users that are interested in online business and users that are interested in your area of business (i.e. gardening, fashion etc).

Following other users

Following other users is important because doing so will get your account found by people who are also looking for users to follow. You should be searching only for users that have a large amount of followers (typically anything above 2k) and are either related to your area of business in some way, or business in general. This is because users who are looking to follow as many people as possible will target accounts with a large number of followers, and follow that account’s followers. You should ensure that each user you follow has an active account (tweets regularly) and has more followers than the number of people that they are following.

The best place to start when looking for these accounts is with your competitors. Depending on how you feel about following competitors on Twitter, you could follow them (this is where your main pool of potential customers will be) or follow accounts that they are following. This will kick start your Twitter profile, but always keep in mind that you should only be following accounts that are loosely related to what you do.WeFollow is also a great tool for finding accounts related to a subject area; just search for a topic and find users ranked by popularity for that subject. From there you can also look at the people being followed by and following this account.

Although it may be tempting to just go to a competitor’s Twitter page and follow all of the accounts that are following them; this way will not guarantee you an engaged audience. Be selective with who you follow.

Joining in with hashtag hours

Hashtag hours are an arranged meeting during which users tweet using an established hashtag to join in the conversation. These meetings act as a networking event for the subject area of the hashtag. Most of the hashtag hours that get a lot of activity will have an account that details what day and time the hashtag meets (these are also very useful accounts to follow) and if necessary what the hashtag discussion will be about. Check out this account for an example. These meetings are a great place to interact with a wide range of users with similar interests to those of your account and will help to build up a network of people that will be interested in your tweets.
The easiest way to find hashtag hours is to search for them on Google. There are many lists that detail hashtag hours according to subject area, such as this one but they can often have some hashtags that no longer exist on there too. You can check if a hashtag is still active by searching for it using the search bar on Twitter; if the hashtag has a lot of live tweets then it’s still active but it it only has a couple of tweets a day then it isn’t worth joining in with. Start a document or spreadsheet to keep track of all the hashtags that you want to join in with.

Carrying out the above two strategies daily will see your Twitter follower count grow quickly but will also fill your Twitter account with users who are interested in your content. They will therefore be more likely to retweet or reply to your tweets.

What should I say during the hashtag hour?

During the hashtag hour it isn’t a good idea to just tweet a link to your business out and hope that it gets some traffic. The hashtags that have a lot of users that do this don’t generate much conversation and therefore aren’t as useful because no one reads anyone else’s tweets. Either ask the audience a question or reply to tweets from other hashtag users. If the hashtag has a topic (this is quite rare) then stick to the topic but if not, just make friendly conversation. Ask questions about current events of popular interest or related to your business; or if you’re stuck ask users how their day is going. Friendly or engaging questions will usually get a response during lively hashtag hours because everyone is looking to make conversation. When you’ve talked to a user, it’s a good time to grow your audience by following them.

Should I follow back?

With these activities you will quickly gain a lot of followers. A lot of these users will be looking for a follow back but will then unfollow you again once you follow them back so it’s best to assess how useful the account is to you. If the account has a lot of followers or is of genuine interest to you, follow back but if not, don’t return the follow. Initially, it could be beneficial to follow every account relevant to your needs back because it will encourage more users to follow you for a follow back, but the long term goal of your business is to have more followers than the number of people that you are following.

The end goal

The aim of this task is to have an audience that will respond to your tweets and buy products from your online shop, thus using Twitter as a free tool to grow your business. Ideally you should end up with more followers than you are following. When you are approaching your goal number of followers, begin to unfollow any accounts that you don’t want to see updates from.

Many of our customers have a great Twitter presence. If you have any tips about Twitter use, share them with our community below. Or if you’d like to see an article about any other aspect of social media, let us know too.

How to Become a Twitter Super Star

Twitter has become extremely popular in today's world. It has become a form of social networking and youngsters use this for communicating with family and friends. They are able to keep track of celebrities or they follow common interests, hobbies etc. Twitter is a powerful tool and it helps in generating traffic to the websites and increases business.
Some people just while away their time and do nothing fruitful. It is of essence that you do not take to spamming, because instead of attracting more business, people would start running away from you. Hence, use Twitter to build your business, so that you do not lose out good business in the long run.
If you want to be become a Twitter rock star, ensure you follow these tips:
Design your personalized profile and market your brand:
Posting your photograph on the site so as to enable people to interact and communicate with YOU is important. The profile has to be explanatory and informative and should provide details regarding you as a person, your goal, how different you are from the common person and your experiences. Twitter helps you get connected with people and people are not necessarily looking out for business opportunities. Also ensure the landing page is linked to your personal profile. It is important for people to know you well so that they can connect with you.
Providing Value:
People do not respect spammers; hence avoid spamming on every single tweet. Ensure to provide something of real value. This can be done by tweeting articles, jokes, random thoughts and videos. It helps in projecting yourself as a real person and not as someone who only spasm for advertisement of their products or service.
Pay attention to professionals
The Twitter professionals do not engage in spamming. They provide valuable information that is information and knowledgeable and also keeps the followers entertained in the best possible way. They are able to create their self image of who they are.
Building targeted follower list
If you are keen that your tweets are visible by people who matter the most to you, then you need to build your targeted follower list. If you have sent something about cooking, it should reach followers who are interested in cooking and not any other sports lovers. The search feature in Twitter has to be used for identifying individuals with similar interests and likings.
Be humble and not snobbish
When you are humble, you would always chance upon individuals who provide value. Even if you have a handful of people of your tastes and liking, it is worth it. If people turn out to be spammers, it is best to ignore them and not keep track of them. Follow the thumb rule that if someone fails to post his photograph, it means they are not going to be of any value to you.
Keep track of interesting people:
Follow people who are interesting and you provide you with valuable content. You could also get to know them more personally.