Follow people who can provide you with valuable information.  Don’t follow random people in hopes of reciprocity.  You’ll waste valuable business time un-following all of the people who Tweet what they had for dinner.

Follow experts in your niche market to get great advice on growing your business.

If you find someone who tweets interesting things, see who they follow.

Monitor your followers? You will automatically get an e-mail message when a new person becomes a follower.  It’s time consuming, but a good idea to check them out.  Potential customers will be able to see your followers and you won’t to maintain a professional image.

To get quality followers, you may want to post to Ezine sites which allow for easy Twitter integration.

Place twitter icons or use social bookmarking tools on your web site so your visitors can easily follow you and share your content.

When promoting a post, explain what is in it.  Just linking builds skepticism and doesn’t earn follow through clicks.

Include your twitter address in your online correspondence like email.

Twitter is an interactive tool so use it to reply to your followers’ questions. This helps build strong relationships with your customers who get to know like and trust you. If your customers trust you they are more likely to listen to your product recommendations.

Don’t spam your customers.

Create relationships by providing sound advice.  This will earn trust

Tweet about other people’s stuff.   It improves your image.

Ask questions. Get opinions.

By: Chris Randall, Technical Director

        

• Increase your number of targeted followers. Targeted followers are your target market or better yet potential customers who are genuinely interested in what you are saying and not just hoping to get concurrent followership.
• People want to follow and be followed by others with the same general interests. With Twitter one of the best ways to attract followers is to follow, since most people will follow back. You need to be careful that you aren’t just following anyone though, so Hashtags allow us to target specific keywords and have the opportunity to reach our target audience who actually has need for our products or services.
• The Hashtag will make that keyword stand out in a tweet and make it easier to find. When you someone is tweeting with a keyword you are interested in, that is a good person to follow.
• It is easy to identify your keyword in Twitter using Hashtags. All you have to do is type a pound sign (#) before the word.
  • A Tweet may look like this “Today’s concert #presale passwords are posted at www.presalezone.com” Presale is my keyword and the pound sign identifies it for Twitter.

By: Chris Randall, Technical Director

        

The social networking giant is touting these changes as simplifying its settings.  It is apparent though that they are promoting for users to use their recommended settings, since you still have to go into your privacy controls afterwards to make any changes other than what they recommend.  Members can still share their content with only friends, friends of friends, everyone or make customs lists.  Facebook is also giving users the ability to control who sees each individual piece of content they create or upload.  You can still limit who sees tagged embarrassing photos, for example.  You can also limit your picture albums individually now.

Facebook has posted this new privacy video explaining how the new system works and making suggestions for your privacy settings.  It is important to note that if you want anything other than your old settings or those that are recommended by Facebook you will still need to go to your privacy setting tab to ensure you are achieving an acceptable level of privacy.

As Facebook’s recommendations tend to the liberal side of information sharing, I would recommend that you check your individual setting after you have gone through the new automatic system.  Considering that Google’s will be searching Facebook pages, you may not want everyone having access to all of your information.  Once it is out there, you can’t bring it back.

By: Chris Randall, Technical Director