3 Tools to Make Twitter Work For You

January 28^th 2014 Sally Ormond finding people to follow on twitter, tweepz, Twitter, Twitter followers, twitter tools, twtrland

Twitter is a great tool to widen your sphere of influence.

Never before has it been so easy to gain access to people who would normally be inaccessible to you - celebrities, CEOs, thought leaders - they’re all there waiting to engage with you.

So how do you get started and how do you find the right people to follow?

To begin with, I would advise against using Twitter’s auto-follow feature. It’s important that your Twitter stream contains information and chats that are relevant to you. Just because someone follows you doesn’t mean you have to follow them back. So when you get a new follower, take a look at their profile and tweets and make your own mind up about whether to follow back or not.

It’s better just to follow those you want to follow and that means going out there and looking for them.

So how do you do that?

Finding people to follow

1. Know your audience

Think about who it is you want to see your tweets. Who are your customers and key influencers?

For example, if you run a catering company you may be looking for hotels, wedding planners, associations, party planners, clubs etc. So stage one would be to start Googling for potential followers.

Once you have a list of companies and their websites, check to see if they’re on Twitter, if they are, follow them.

Not everyone will follow you back, but some will.

2. Using tools

There are several tools that can be used to help you find followers, but for this post I’ll just look at 3.

The first is Twitter itself. Not the most refined way of finding followers, but you can search through suggestions of who to follow and browse categories (based on your current followers):

The next tool is Tweepz.

Just enter a keyword into the search box and you’ll get a list of potential people to follow. Then all you need to do is go through that list to find the most relevant people and companies to follow:

Finally, the third tool is twtrland. Again, after entering a keyword into the search box a list of search results are returned. Then you can filter these results by type – celebrity, power user, casual and novice, location, gender and estimated age.

Unlike the other search tools, this one offers much more information, including the number of tweets they send per day (average), content breakdown, retweets etc.

3. What do you do next?

Once you have your followers it’s time to start interacting with them.

Notice the use of the word ‘interaction’ there? That means no blatant sales pitches, no harping on about how great you are every 5 minutes and no incessant chatter about ‘we did this’ or ‘we did that’.

You have to ‘listen’ to what others are saying and start a conversation with them. If they ask a question, respond and help them if you can. Yes, you can also send out links to your own blogs because they may be useful and it will also help widen your readership, but it’s important to remember that Twitter is a two-way channel.

4. Be responsive

Twitter is a real time social platform that means when people interact with you they expect you to respond reasonably quickly.

Checking your Twitter stream once a week isn’t going to work. If you have a smartphone download the Twitter app so you can be notified of any interactions that come your way.

There’s nothing worse than tweeting someone and not hearing from them for several days, or worse never hearing from them.

If you’re going to use Twitter you have to be committed. Only through chatting, posting and responding will you see results. It is a great business tool if used right, so make sure you take the time to hone your Twitter skills and make it work for you.

Sally Ormond – Copywriter, blogger, tweeter and MD at Briar Copywriting Ltd

Tags: finding people to follow on twitter, tweepz, Twitter, Twitter followers, twitter tools, twtrland

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