Articles

[Follow Creative Flavor on ]

Build a Twitter Network

Remember the movie Field of Dreams and its classic "build it and they will come" line? While solid willpower worked for baseball, it's not so great for building a Twitter network. Building a Twitter network involves targeting your messages, interacting with followers, and reciprocating when appropriate without overwhelming your followers with a constant barrage of overly promotional or irrelevant tweets.

#1 Who will follow you? If you sell designer dog bowls, then you'll want to attract dog boutique owners, groomers, and dog lovers.Brainstorm the types of people that you want to attract along with the information that would be of interest to these people long before your first tweet.

#2 Why will they follow you? Consider what information those people want from you. Do that want to know about dog accessories, learn about events, or connect with people who love dogs?

#3 Attract followers. You need to create interesting content (tweets) so that potential followers can find what you've built via Twitter Search.  As you begin, spend a few days tweeting about your topic, making sure to provide interesting and relevant information. This way, when people find you, they will see whether or not you are follow-worthy. If your tweets are boring or spam-like, few will follow.

#4 Seek followers. Use Twitter Search to find users who are tweeting about your topics and start following them. Since many people follow their followers as a courtesy, this is a quick way to build your Twitter community. When you find a strong Twitter user who matches your demographic, such as dog boutique owner, check out which Twitter users she is following and follow these same people.

#5 Follow your followers. Not only is this considered good Twitter etiquette, it also shows potential followers that you are interested in engaging with others. When users see a Twitter profile where the user has many followers but is following few, they may conclude the Twitter user is only interested in self-promotion.

#6 Interact! Twitter is a social medium. When your followers have a question, answer it. When you see an interesting comment or link, join the discussion. Stay on topic, but don't constantly hammer home how you're the expert. Share your passion.

Remember that other Twitter users are joining the network for the same reasons that you have: to build a community of followers for their brands. By retweeting relevant tweets of your followers, you are building goodwill as well as thanking them for following you. And guess what? As followers see you retweeting them, they'll retweet you! This exposes your tweets to a wider audience and brings you more followers.

Joining Twitter and building a community of like-minded followers takes more than simply building a profile. Inform, interact, and reciprocate. Do this, and they will come.