Twitter has over a 140 million active users making its potential as a marketing channel now undeniable. But understanding where your audience are and how to engage with them so that they follow you can be challenging. Similarly, knowing how engagement leads to achieving commercial objectives can be equally mysterious.
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Know Who Your Target Audience Are
First and foremost you need to know what exactly you’re trying to achieve on Twitter by outlining your goals and objectives within an agreed social media strategy. Are you looking for followers from a specific geographical location, or existing customers of your products or services? It’s all well and good to have new followers to bolster numbers, but if they’re irrelevant to your end goal, then what’s their purpose?
Ensure Your Profile is Relevant to Your Target Audience
Make use of your 160 character biography, profile picture and background image are all key elements. Your biography is hugely important as Twitter will use this content to determine where it suggests your account to others, prompting them to follow you. Subsequently, relevancy is of prime concern.
Research also shows that users who have profile pictures have 10 times more followers on average than those with the default Twitter egg, presumably as the default image is typically associated with spam accounts.
Follow People You’d Like Following You
This is the best way to ensure you are in the front of your potential followers’ minds. Once following, engage in conversation with your potential followers; comment on the content they’re sharing, answer the questions they’re asking, share your own views and opinions with the thoughts and musings they tweet. Provided that they find the conversation interesting and useful then this will naturally prompt them to follow you.
Share Your Twitter Username Everywhere
The last point is something you may have partially done already by implementing a follow button onto your website footer and linked to your Twitter in your e-mail signature, but what about business cards, presentations, documents, printed materials and any other form of advertising? These are just some of the opportunities you’re missing out on letting your target audience know that they can find you on Twitter.
We’d be interested to hear what methods you find work best when building qualified Twitter followers?