Product and Affiliate Review

Tweeter has been the center of a ton of attention the last year.  It’s explosive growth and strength as a real time organic search engine, instant breaking news resource, and marketing tool provide people using it an amazing advantage over those who don’t.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about 5 Twitter Newbie Mistakes To Avoid which was a great hit and some basic information about Twitter Lists.  The success of those articles has made me do a lot of thinking about how to get the most out of Twitter.

Five Reasons To Use Twitter

If you’re like me, you use Twitter for 5 reasons: To find useful information, to share useful information, to market my product, to build a brand image of value, and to build relationships.

While it is possible to do all of these things without following a ton of people or having a ton of followers using searches and hashtags, following the right people and having the right followers make the process much easier.

Step 1. Follow And Be Followed

One of the easiest and most popular ways to build a following is to follow someone and hope they follow back.  It’s not always easy to know who to follow and who not to follow.  Randomly following people will end up getting you a bunch of followers who you don’t care about and don’t care about you.

Step 2. Follow People With The Same Interest

The next natural step is to follow people who follow people you are interested in.  In other words, if you follow Shoemoney, you might follow other people who follow Shoemoney or people Shoemoney follows.

You can do this manually, but there are a lot of third party programs that automate this process.

Step 3. Follow Active Tweeps

A lot of Twitter accounts go inactive and there is no point in following them (even if they follow you back via automation).  People who only tweet once a week aren’t going to offer you anything special.  Many third party follow programs  just follow everyone without rhyme or reason.

That’s why I use Tweepi.  Tweepi is a free website lets you sort the “prospect follows” by almost every imaginable category including number of recent tweets, number of RTs, times RTed, and % of tweets with links.

After sorting the prospect, you can selectively pick which ones to follow.  Because I’m most interested in sharing information, I follow users who tend to RT and be RTed the most.

People with bigger followings are not always better. At first I thought it was great to be followed by people with thousands of followers.  After all, if they retweet my article, I’ll get tons of traffic, right?

Wrong!  The majority of those people just joined the random follow back frenzy, and their followers are not targeted and probably don’t care.  In fact, I’ve come to prefer people who are following less than 500 people (which usually means less than 1000 people are following them).  They tend to be more interactive and are far more likely to see my tweet, read my article (or other articles I recommend), and actually care.

Step 4. Provide Valuable Tweets

There is a reason Guy Kawasaki has so many followers.  He tweets useful information.  Don’t over promote your own product, don’t tweet affiliate links, and don’t spam, and you’ll be way ahead of the crowd.

The more you interact and more value you provide when you tweet, the less likely people are to unfollow you (even if you don’t follow them back), the more you will be retweeted, and the faster your following will grow.

Step 5.  Make Functional Twitter Lists

Even if you’re very selective about who you follow, there will be a point where you just have too many people to keep track of all at once.  Making the most of your Twitter Lists is one of the best ways to make following thousands of people more manageable.

Group people who tweet about similar subjects together.  Also group people who tweet with about the same frequency together.  If you have a list that is getting over 100 tweets an hour, you probably have too many people (or people who are too active) in the list to follow them closely.  You don’t want people who only tweet 20-30 times a week to get drowned in the noise of people tweeting 20-30 times an hour.

Lists for grouping people like classmates, coworkers, family, or other general categories can be bigger, but it will prevent you from following as closely.

Step 6. Unfollow The Spammers And People Who Don’t Follow You

Seth over at Blogussion wrote an awesome article about how to use ReFollow to clean up the people you are following.  I unfollow people who constantly tweet affiliate links.  I also unfollow almost everyone who doesn’t follow me back.

There are a few people who tweet about useful things that I always re-follow after

Step 7. Stay Active And Don’t Rush

There is no point in following people and building a following unless you are going to be active.  Interact with the people who you follow.  Get to know them, befriend them.

There is no point in rushing to get tons of followers if the ones you have now don’t care.  If you selectively follow people and slowly build your following, you’re Twitter experience will be far more powerful and useful than those who grow fast and never interact.

These 7 easy steps will put you well on your way to harnessing the power of Twitter.

Related posts:

1. Sponsored Twitter to make Money on Twitter
2. 5 Twitter Newbie Mistakes To Avoid
3. Think Twice About Who You Put On Your Twitter Lists
4. Twitter Testing ReTweet Button (With RT Tracking)
5. How Twitter Has Become The Face of Social Networking Marketing