10 Steps to Building an Organic Following on Twitter

Twitter may be free to use, but the platform definitely requires time to leverage correctly. Using Twitter to market your brand also requires a strategy. Start by building an organic following on Twitter with these 10 steps.

Free Twitter Marketing Strategy

Use Your Real Name in Your Profile

If you put all the other pieces of a Twitter marketing strategy together properly, prospects will be interested in you. Success rests on having a completed profile that’s authentic. Use your real name and a real picture. If you’re looking to get creative, you can adopt a customized background. Remember to add a bio and website info too.

Get Verified

The blue badge gives your account the creds it needs to sell goods and services by telling visitors you’re authentic. Submit a request by filling out a form. You’ll need a phone number and verified email address as well as some other information you can find here.

Add Video

Seeing is believing. Besides, video helps you to engage with prospects and returning customers alike. Download the app that allows you to record, edit and share videos. Remember, videos don’t count toward your 140 character limit. You’ll also get an automatic loop for anything 6.5 seconds or shorter.

Use Twitter Chats

Engagement is the name-of-the-game and the best way to grow your Twitter following organically. Twitter Chats are effective. Why? Because they draw in users who interact. Those are the very people that retweet and spread the word about the goods and services you sell. Here’s some free Twitter chat tools.

Create A Post Schedule

It’s  good to have lots of ideas for compelling tweets. Better if you’ve got the time and ability to put them all into 140 characters and best if you schedule them to release incrementally. Scheduled tweets can be added  to existing campaigns and even organized for up to one year in advance.

Create Twitter Moments

You need to have a loyal following to to sell stuff and that’s just what this feature can do for you. These are current and relevant topics all corralled into one place. Create one of your own via the web, or through iOS and/or Android.

Take Advantage of Direct Messages

Following up is important when you’re looking to turn a prospect into a client. This private conversation feature allows for a personalized engagement touch. You can also receive and send them on your phone via SMS. There’s even a way to create a deep link to take public conversations private.

Put Together a Twitter Team

Use this feature via TweetDeck and you can have multiple people sharing one account. Perfect for the team with members on the road who still want to participate. Add up to 200 marketing team members but be sure to coordinate the image you want to show to the world.

Use Advanced Search

Chances are, when you’re running a small business, time is of the essence for everything you do. Using Advanced Search helps your marketing efforts by funneling searches to specific people, dates and more. It’s an important tool to see engagement patterns and trends so you can make the right decisions.

Engage

There’s no substitute for having the dedication to practice good customer service even in cyberspace. If you’re going to take the time to use Twitter for marketing, you need to be all in. That means responding to the Tweets your clients send you and to each and every query from prospects too.

Twitter Photo via Shutterstock

This article, "10 Steps to Building an Organic Following on Twitter" was first published on Small Business Trends