Why Businesses Get it Wrong on Twitter

Or are they getting it right?

For me the jury on this one is still out.

Twitter tends to be used in two ways by serious users on Twitter - i.e. not spammy idiots who are trying to get you to sign-up for a free laptop.

1. Usually used by business and is a broadcast medium sending their followers links to their new products or to their blog posts.

2. Communication between like-minded individuals about topics they're interested in, or maybe just their social lives, fun stuff etc. May consist of catching up or posting of links about topics they're interested in.

The ideal for business is to use Twitter how real people use it and actually have conversations with customers. But what so too often happens is that businesses revert to a broadcast marketing communications stance with Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, and vainly try to encourage participation from their Followers, but rarely succeed.

Yet they will get followers, don't get me wrong, and there is a positive outcome to being able to distribute broadcast messages via Twitter as people do pick them up and even retweet them if they are compelling enough.

But probably the best most businesses can hope for is to provide links of interest to like-minded people, hopefully some of whom might be prospects or customers too. The alternative is to really get under the skin and try to really be part of a potential twitter community that is interested in your type of product. But to do that you need pretty-much dedicated Twitter marketers, which is hard to justify with the prospect of uncertain returns.

One better and longer-term strategy is to not try to broadcast or engage directly, but to create content, products, that will get others talking about you on Twitter. Then you're going viral and you're onto a winner.

Using Twitter Trending Topics to Drive Blog Post Ideas

Sometimes it can seem you just don't have anything to write a blog post about, but there are lots of ways to get ideas and one of these is to see what's popular at the moment on social media sites. The concept is pretty simple really and is all about ridding buzz and connecting it to whatever your blog or company is about.

So for instance if you have a blog about movies look at the movies that are trending on Twitter. If you have a B2B product such as insurance see if there are trending topic related to crime or weather warnings. A bit cynical. but if you pitch it right you can get some good traffic and actually be informative to potential prospects too.

So how do you see what's trending in Twitter? Well it's very easy. Just pick a region that you want to target - could be global, country or even a city and see what people are tweeting about - see to the right for today's trending topics in the UK.

As you can see as well as the usual celeb gossip, there are topics such as GCSE Results or the BBC Micro that may well be relevant to your business.

You won't always get good inspiration from these, but it's worth checking regularly to see what's hot and make the most of it.

Right off to right a blog post now about Sean Connery use of paperclips to improve his GCSE results!

Strategies for Getting More Twitter Followers

So you want to increase the number of followers you have on Twitter? Well in that case you have what I think are really two main options, which I classify as the slow and steady approach vs. the fast and slightly spammy approach.

Increase your Twitter Followers slowly but surely

For this approach you need to rely on the quality of your content to do your marketing for you. Make sure you post relevant links, do reply @ strategically amongst possible brand advocates and cross-promote your Twitter presence via your other online channels. The advantage of this approach is that you are more likely to get better quality leads over time and will also maintain a very positive Following to Followers ratio. It tends to be the case that if you follow fewer people on Twitter than Follow you, you get more kudos as an authoritative source.

Increase your Twitter Followers fast and without prejudice

This is really a case of being a lot less discerning about your approach to Twitter. You still need to be Tweeting quality as your new followers won't stay, but this method gets you more followers fast, but at the sacrifice of a poor Following to Followers ratio - i.e. you end up following more people than follow you in the short term.

So how do you get more Twitter Followers fast?

Step 1. Find Tweeters in your target market with a reasonable number of Followers - a few hundred should do.
Step 2. Check out the lists they have been listed on and determine if these match your target market - e.g. Jeff's list of Paperclip Purchasers, if you are selling Paperclips.
Step 3. Follow the members of those lists!
Step 4. Watch and see how many people follow you back - if you have chosen a list that matches your own profile quite well then they should be interested in following you too.
Step 5. A few weeks later you should go back and use a tool like Twitter Karma to cull those people you followed but then didn't follow you back.

This is an effective but slightly spammy way to get more Twitter followers - so you use with care!