Twitter:  Follow with Focus or Flounder

For me, getting Twitter was like learning to swim – something that everyone seemed to do so readily yet I waded at the shore just a little scared.  I felt like I would publish something regrettable or that I would have some accidental ‘Reply to All’ email nightmare on my hands. As it turns out I should hope for so much attention. Nothing could be more casual than Twitter in terms of broadcasting a message. In composing this post, when I typed ‘unfollow’ I had to ‘Add to Dictionary’. This won’t be necessary for long. But unfollowing (added again) is important and not rude in the least. But to what end? I’m swimming in Twitter now though I am no Michael Phelps.

Twittering requires business focus.  I finally dunked my head in and took a stab at phishing for followers, which actually worked. However at first the followers that reciprocated weren’t qualified leads at all. Rather, they were just polite reciprocators. Correcting my stroke, it didn’t take any extra work to follow the same number of accounts, but strictly accounts that appear relevant to my business: Online Content Creation.  Interestingly, even following accounts willy-nilly generated direct messages asking about my business objective. These inquiries would have been more welcome from qualified prospects!  So I did some Twitter laps and got follow-focused. It just took doing. There was no harm done in awkwardly getting in the water, but there were respectively few visits to our website originating from Twitter until learning to follow with focus.

Tips for effective freestyle and butterfly twittering:

• Follow like mad, but do it judiciously. Follow relevant prospects that stand to benefit from your value proposition.
• Reciprocate followers judiciously with business objective in mind. It does no harm to have followers of any kind.
• Always respond to personal direct messages about your business. If the question is relevant to your business, answer it. If not, simply move on. Treat inquiries with the Golden Rule, not prejudice.
• Unfollow without looking back if you realize that you’ve inadvertently followed an account that is not a good match. It’s not synchronized swimming – it’s Twitter.
• Retractions won’t be required from authentic blurb. You only owe Twitter your level best. Move on if you’ve swallowed some pool water. An accidental ‘Reply to All’ in email is much more painful.

The next post in this series, “Focused Social Networking” provides more painless free marketing tools.