Managing your Twitter followers: How well do you know your audience?
Your Twitter followers are more than just a number. Knowing your target market and your audience is one of the golden rules in marketing and communication. These very same rules apply in the way you market and communicate your brand in social media channels. How well do you know your Twitter followers? Do you take time to check out their profiles or are they just a number for you?
When you’re a small business owner or a freelancer, you may not have other people to delegate Twitter to and you will have to get familiar with these tools yourself and understand how you can use them to your advantage. This is actually a good thing because it allows you not to deviate from the main purpose of these social networking platforms, which is … networking!
Because Twitter is non-reciprocal, knowing your followers is easier said than done. Unlike other platforms such as Facebook, where networking is reciprocal, Twitter allows you to separate the people you follow from the people who follow you in non-reciprocal relationships. Getting to know your Twitter audience is a conscious deliberate process that can take time but it’s worth it.
The best way to do it is step by step:
- Keep track of all your new followers daily. There are tools such as Twittercounter (www.twittercounter.com) that help you do that. If you check that information daily you can then take some time to check out your new followers’ profiles and see if they fit into your target market or not.
- Send Thank You DMs (Direct Messages) to all your new followers. This is the first step you make to connect with them directly. Even if this is an automated message, you should have it set up. There are tools such as SocialOomph (www.socialoomph.com) that allow you to set up these automated messages.
- Follow back your followers that fit into the category of your target market/potential clients or peers, potential business connections. The easiest way to make sure you don’t miss anyone is actually to set up your account to follow back anyone who follows you automatically. You can do that through SocialOomph – you can also set it up to unfollow automatically anyone who unfollows you.
- Study your target audience/followers’ timeline. Check out what the topics of conversation are, if there are any emerging trends and study their interests.
- Develop a tweet plan accordingly, to ensure you’re building your influence, communicating your brand and engaging your audience by providing good quality Tweets that are in line with their interests and will add value. There are several applications out there to help you manage and schedule your tweets but Hootsuite (Link to www.hootsuite.com ) is the best.
- Engage with your followers. Send DMs to your followers; ask questions, RT (Retweet) valuable tweets from them. Make sure you are networking – that’s the point!
How about you, do you have any other tips for getting to know your Twitter followers? Please share right here in the comments section.
Thank you!
Ana x
