It can be quite frustrating when it seems someone invents a new means of communication seemingly every 6 months or so! Just when people managed to understand Facebook, along came Twitter. Marketing people and business people have been trying to find ways of monetising it ever since.
Well, here’s one way. It assumes you at least know how to use Twitter on a personal level, like it or hate it. (For instance, you started an account and had a go for a bit.) If this is where you’re at, the following may be able to help you and your business.
- Sign up for an account in your company name, or (if your name doesn’t clearly state what you do), with a name that says what you do: “FenceFitter”, “PregnancyAdvice” etc.
- Start Tweeting business related things 10-20 times a day – some of which should be “retweets” of interesting tweets from other people about your sector, and some of which should be links to interesting and business-related things you’ve found on the web.
- When you have done this for a few days (so you have a few score tweets under your belt), start following people. A proportion of these will follow you back. At this stage, think about what having 10,000 followers on Twitter could do for you. For instance, if you’re a seed seller, you want gardeners following you, etc. To find relevant people, use Twitter Search to find people saying words that your demographic may say. (So for gardeners, search for people using the word “gardening”, or “been in the garden”, or “planting seeds” etc. You get the picture. Click on the person’s profile before you follow, though, to double check: “uphill gardener” means something very different to “gardener”, for instance!)
- Do this daily, forever. Should only take 10-15 minutes when you’re into the swing. Every now and then, cull people who never follow you back or never engage with you.
- According to the business parable “the Go-Giver”, the first two of the five “Stratospheric Success Laws” are: Give more in value thank you take in payment (the takeaway here is to answer your followers’ queries online, to make sure you help them out), and “Your income is determined by how many people you serve….” (so keep at it, you want 1,000, then 10,000…
With 10,000 Twitter followers who think you’re worth knowing, there’s no reason why the occasional sales email saying “First stockists of this year’s X… click here to buy now…” won’t just net you some handsome sales.
But it still makes no sense at all…
Such is Twitter, that you will either have experienced an “a-ha!” moment here, or be even more confused. That’s fine. It’s a hard one to get your head around, this peer-to-peer marketing. Bit by bit is the key. If it seems a bit too alien, that’s really very normal.
I advise that you simply keep playing with Twitter and come back to this post in six months. By which time there’ll probably be another revolutionary communication tool we’re all trying to monetise!
By Phil Morse
