Should I follow anyone I can on Twitter?

If you have deter­mined that Twit­ter is a good tool for you to use for your ser­vice busi­ness, then cre­at­ing good fol­low­ers is cru­cial. Many of my cus­tomers get over­whelmed when they get on to Twit­ter. They don’t know where to start or what to do with this form of Social Media. To keep this post sim­ple, don’t go over­board with Twit­ter when start­ing off. Remem­ber the Sound of Music line, ​“Let’s start at the very begin­ning. A very good place to start!” 1. Qual­i­ty of Fol­low­ers, not Quan­ti­ty Begin using Twit­ter by research­ing who is local to you. Who is your tar­get audi­ence? If you deal with a lot of home­own­ers, you should con­nect with stay at home moms. These are easy to find on Twit­ter. Try to con­nect with local busi­ness­es that can not only use you but bet yet, refer you! Twit­ter is also a great brand­ing tool. You may not get direct leads right away from Twit­ter, but it is a great way for peo­ple to see your com­pa­ny post (tweet) and share infor­ma­tion. Twit­ter users fol­low­ing you will see each time you post…whether they read it or not. When they go online to look for your type of ser­vice and see the oth­er online things you’ve been doing, it might trig­ger their mem­o­ry, ​“Oh I think I’ve seen them before.” 2. Local Fol­low­ers, not Nation­wide It is easy to fol­low peo­ple on Twit­ter. You can get up to a thou­sand fol­low­ers in no time flat. But get­ting good local fol­low­ers is more impor­tant than focus­ing on ran­dom Twit­ter users. Spend time read­ing some post. Set a goal of find­ing 10 qual­i­ty com­pa­nies to con­nect with on Twit­ter each week. In a year, you’ll be fol­low­ing 400 – 500 qual­i­ty com­pa­nies, local shops or stay at home moms. Take time to com­ment, retweet and post to the folks you are fol­low­ing and see if they will con­nect back with you. If after a time they don’t fol­low you back, maybe con­sid­er unfol­low­ing them. Ide­al­ly the goal is to fol­low every­one who is fol­low­ing you. If some­one does not return the favor after sev­er­al attempts, move on. Peo­ple can only see YOUR post/​tweets when they are fol­low­ing you. I’m not a big fan of fol­low­ing as many peo­ple as you can, but every once in awhile, I’ll advise a con­trac­tor to fol­low a few nation­wide Twit­ter users. Why? Only if we know they have good con­nec­tions in their city they ser­vice. For exam­ple, I know of one Twit­ter user who has a prop­er­ty in La Jol­la and New York, though her main res­i­dence is in NY. So the con­trac­tor I work with in La Jol­la is fol­low­ing this user and has con­nect­ed with her on a few occa­sions. This is rare, but you will always find excep­tions to the rules. Final­ly, Twit­ter is a great way to learn about what is going on in the areas you ser­vice. You can read about what peo­ple are doing. Some of it is ridicu­lous and bor­ing. But if you use Twit­ter prop­er­ly it can be a valu­able mar­ket­ing tool. Let me know ways you are using Twit­ter to con­nect and grow your busi­ness. P.S. This is Twit­ter 101. I’ve only scratched the surface.