Keys to Your Wealth

My first reaction to twitter was “What a waste of time!” The crowd I hung around simply said "Twitter is stupid!" Little did I know that not far in the future, Twitter would have a significant impact on marketing.

I mean, I saw the value in short messages to groups of people. Not messages like "I'm sitting at my desk bored to death". I was thinking more along the lines of "This place is packed! Get here soon, I'm in the back next to the Juke Box". At best, I thought that we could maybe replace the company pager's and just let Twitter provide an SMS message.

Mostly, if I were going to use Twitter, I wanted to find a way to monetize it. I was having a tough time figuring out how I could give value to someone in only 140 characters. At least, enough value to have someone pay for it.

To my surprise, I found that you can actually build relationships with people in only 140 characters. Heck, maybe it shouldn't be so surprising. I mean, according to the statistics, parents, especially Dads, seem to form relationships with their kids in only 10 minutes a week. :-)

Like all marketing strategies, people buy from people they know, like and trust. What we need to do is to use Twitter to build credibility, boost trust and nuture relationships. By doing that, we can then create value and drive traffic allow our followers to visit our website.

To market on Twitter, you have to dump the old school ideas of mass marketing. In social networking, we are talking to individuals, not a crowd. Yes, we send a tweet to a bunch of folks at one time, but that conversation is perceived as one on one. If you use the tactics of crowd control, your followers will simply unfollow you.

The first step in building trust is transparency. Any one tweet you send out won't typically make much of a difference. But as you send out more tweets, over time a picture of you develops in the mind of your followers. It is a bit difficult to hide who you are if you tweeting regularly. Your biases, feelings, opinions and ideas get shared. So, when you share, be transparent. Your followers should see who you are. And one of the things they need to see is the fact that you care about them and you care about providing them with value.

Transparency goes hand in hand with honesty and integrity. Do you care about others? Does it show in your tweets? Do you have a spirit of wanting to give rather than thinking only about yourself and how much you can make? Do you treat people fairly? Do you think of your followers as friends or just as a commodity?

Your tweets, over time, reveal the most interesting things. Your views showup in the strangest places. For example, up above, you notice that I crossed out "drive traffic" and used "allow our followers to visit". I said the former because that's marketing speak and it's how we share marketing ideas. I changed it because I don't want anyone to think that I only value them for the money in their pocket.  

I'm not saying you can't use a pen name or  that you need to provide your tax return before you plan on having followers, I'm just trying to point out that we need a mindset of thinking about the customer first. With all the press on corporate greed and the games that people play, folks just want to know who you are.

Bottom line--liars are often caught because it's just plain hard to keep your story straight over a long time. What you really value and really believe, will come out. If you say things that are not in accordance with your values, sooner or later, the truth will come out. Integrity and honesty is simply the easiest way to not have to deal with those issues.

Finally, don't be rude and crude. Aside from the fact that all of your tweets are public and will stay in the search engines forever, why alienate your followers? I'm not saying everything should be light and cutesy, but foul language, for example, won't garner you any new followers but it sure can cause some people to not want to hang around. Followers are volunteers. They don't have to put up with you or me. Be rude and they have no need to stick around, they'll go someplace where they are wanted.

People buy things because they either need it or because they know, like and trust you.

Twitter is a platform for building trust & likeability.  The principles we learn in How To Win Friends and Influence People still applies. Be friendly, have empathy, provide service, be real, don't argue, be authentic, admit mistakes--and lots more.

Once your followers begin to know you, through your regular tweets, you will build more and more trust. And when they do trust you, when you make a call for action, they will respond. The biggest mistake most people make is forgetting the relationship side and send out 2-3 messages a day with a product promo. No problem in sending out a product promo, but you also need a lot of messages that are just showing followers who you are. And when you do send a promo, there would be some real value in only promoting something you actually agree with and have some idea of its value.

Oh yeah, and when you are building your Twitter follower list... it should revolve around some niche. You can't be all things to everyone. I mean, if you are a conservative and your marketing gathered a large group of liberals... they may not be so very kind to you when you throw out your best political joke. Keep your tweets on subject for the niche that you are in. Unless it is your niche--discussing sex, politics and religion is a sure way of dividing up the group.

So, to build this credibility and eventually the trust, you can start with the basics.

• Choose a username that reflects the topic or target market.
• Upload an appropriate avatar for the niche or better yet, provide a picture of yourself so folks can associate that trust factor with your face.
• Put information in your profile page that reflects the target market or niche. Make sure you have the link to your website or blog.
• When building your follower list, keep in mind that you want followers who have an interest in the niche. People want to hear about subjects they are interested in and tune out when you don't share that kind of info.
• Create a custom background in your Twitter page to reflect the niche you are in. Doing that will also radiate professionalism and increase your credibility.
• The bio should either share about you or about the niche that you are trying to cover.

So, now we know the topic we want to cover and we know how we are going to act. How do we get followers? The details can get complicated but the basic principle is in the following steps:

1. Start following people who are in your target markets. Find them by using Twitter search with appropriate keywords and then going to their Twitter page and click follow.
2. Visit other user lists of followers who are focused on your topic and follow people in those lists.
3. As you join in and participate in those markets, some folks will follow you. They decide to follow you if they have interest in your niche or based on the information they see in your profile. They'll even do a search against your tweets to see if your tweets are the kind they want to follow.
4. When someone follows you, follow them back.
5. Send on topic tweets, regularly.

Twitter has rules. You can go to the site and find out what they are. In particular, there are rules on how many people you can follow and ratios that must be maintained. There are details you need to pay attention to if you want to ensure you don't get slammed by Twitter. That is beyond the scope of this article. For more detailed information, you might want to grab a copy of Advanced Twitter Marketing.

And don't sell products or services through Twitter directly. Instead, direct them either to valuable/useful blogs or articles that are relevant to them and to your opt-in Newsletter page. Use your email list to market your products and services and use Twitter to build credibility, inform, entertain, give value and offer the opportunity for them to join your newsletter. Providing a link to a great product or service once in awhile is fine, but by and large, if you are always hawking products in your limited 140 characters, pretty soon you'll be unfollowed.

How often to tweet? That's a hard one. At least once a day. Some teachers have been saying 5 or 6 times a day. Personally, I'm not sure I can provide relevant and valuable information that often. 

Make sure the links you provide in a tweet are to quality and relevant content. Retweet's are fine, again, be sure it is relevant and of value to your followers. If someone retweets one of your messages, be sure to thank them.

This information comes from Eric Bonnici. You can get a free copy of his ebook by going to Twitter Marketing Mindset and providing your email address.

Rich Freeman
Keys2Wealth.com