Social Media in general, and Twitter Marketing, specifically, has been often highlighted as a way of getting traffic to your website.  But like any marketing, unless it is seen by others, there is no point.  If you’ve been studying Twitter marketing you’ve probably realized how critical it can be to have followers on your Twitter account.   In social media marketing, your results will be exponentially better as more and more people see your efforts.

Strategy #1– Effective Use of Your Profile

To gain more followers on Twitter, it is important to remember to create a profile that contains very useful information about your business. Since Twitter’s main theme is brevity, space is very brief for your Twitter profile and leaves little room to describe your business in detail.  Your profile should be memorable, and encourage newcomers to follow you.  An ideal profile should describe 1)what your business does for followers, 2)keywords, and 3) a personal detail that humanizes you.

For example: A great profile statement for MarketingDotCom might be

MarketingDotCom.com provides the latest information about what’s working now in online marketing.  MDC staff is committed to being informative, amusing, and spoiling the office cats KittyDotCom and Bloggy.

See how engaging that can be? Not only does the reader know we provide marketing information, but they know we’re cat lovers as well.

Strategy #2–Twitter Lists

Twitter lists are an underused secret weapon in social media marketing.  Twitter lists can also be used to demonstrate leadership in your area of expertise and provide something of value to your followers. Twitter lists can grab the interest of people you most want to meet, help you make a great first impression and can help you with marketing segmentation.  They also provide you the ability to organize and sort your twitter followers into different groups based on those interests.  There are many reasons for creating lists, but here are a handful of ways that you could use the Twitter Lists feature.

–to segment your customers and prospects, to target tweets directly to them

–to segment you personal friends and your business contacts so that personal tweets can be sent to only your friends, and similarly your friends don’t need to see your business tweets

–for serial entrepreneurs that operate in several niches, you can segment followers based on their interests

–when you attend an event you can create a list for the event of all the people you met or saw there and send tweets regarding your common shared experience

Any Twitter strategy is a perpetual work in progress, requiring time and patience. When planning your strategy keep in mind that it is better to adopt a “work smart, not hard” policy.  Start activating your Twitter strategy with target dates to stop and review progress, as well as determine areas for improvement.  Set objectives so you can see the short- and long-term benefits of your Twitter strategy paying off.

Example: I will reach 2,000 followers by March 15th by searching for and following everyone with my keywords in their profile

Using new social media marketing techniques, you can deepen relationships with your most passionate, profitable customers–and create more of them than ever before.

Some Action Steps

1. Create a twitter account if you don’t have one already

2. Write a compelling profile that shares something interesting about you, as well as the benefits you give to your customers or clients

3. Start segmenting your twitter account into lists

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Technorati Tags: Overlooked, strategies, Twitter