The number one tool to optimize Twitter for business use
As a social media consultant, it is imperative to stay on top of the latest and greatest Twitter tools emerging on the market. Using tools to create efficiencies is the name of the game when building a great list of quality Twitter followers.
Recently there has been a lot of buzz about auto-follow and unfollow tools that allow you to build a large list of targeted followers and remove people who don’t follow you back. These can be tremendous time savers; however, which tool you choose largely depends on your Twitter strategy, as there are generally two schools of thought.
The first school of thought on using Twitter for business suggests that you should create a large list of random followers and focus solely on the numbers. This involves following everyone on a given list, regardless of their profile, tweet history, etc. meaning that you will naturally pick up a lot of spammers along the way. While the thought of this might make you cringe, there is a method to the madness, as you’ll read below.
The second school of thought about using Twitter for commercial purposes states that it is better to select followers using specific criteria. For example, if you market a product to software developers, you’d do a keyword search for all mentions of the term “software developer.” I would also do a search for Twitter profiles where the term “software developer” appears. The idea is that you will create a very specific group of followers who have the highest chance of converting into customers.
There are benefits to both strategies. What I have found works well for my clients is to employ the first strategy to generate large numbers initially. This helps you get off to a fast start early on and also contributes to gaining more visibility of quality people as your number grows. And once you’ve gained some traction and have a decent number of followers, you can start using a more targeted approach to targeting 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 an advantage because 5,000 other people have chosen to follow them, suggesting that their contributions on Twitter are of higher quality and more relevant. This is not necessarily true in all cases, but the large number of followers creates this perception and thus leads to gaining more followers.
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