Building a Following: It's Twitter Time!

Our last entry discussed the details of getting friends on different social networking groups, and how to get started, but this week I want to go more in-depth on one in-particular: Twitter.

Twitter, a relatively new phenomenom, involves "following" others and being "followed." Everyone can make whatever updates they'd like on their life or whatever else, and when you're following someone, you see their updates. When they're following you, they see yours. It's that simple.

But it's a bit hard to build a following if you don't know what you're doing. I'm going to give some step-by-step directions to help you get started on Twitter.

1. Register for Twitter! Obviously important.
2. Make a couple of updates. The first should tell the world something about you, and your business. The second should be something interesting. If you want to do one or two more to share other interesting facts or websites, feel free.
3. Go to "Find People" at the top of the site. Search for a major keyword for your industry. For example, if you were to sell Motorcycle Parts, you could search for the term "Motorcycle."
4. The list that pulls up will include people who have the word "Motorcycle" in their name or their description of themselves. The ones that have the most followers are listed at the top. Click on the first one that looks like it applies to your industry (so if the first one is "Motorcycles Suck," don't follow it -- go for "Motorcycles Rock" or whatever applies below that).
5. Follow them! Now look at the right hand side. You can see how many followers they have. Click on where it says "### followers."
6. You know two things about these people. 1) They are the sort who follow others in your industry. 2) They have some sort of interest in your industry.
7. "Follow" down the list. Don't over-do it. Twitter may not like you if you send out 2000 follows in a day. Keep it reasonable, but add a lot of follows.
8. Wait 48 hours. Check your e-mail. You should have several hundred "This Person is Now Following You on Twitter" notifications.
   

Congratulations! You've just leeched off of the following of others, establishing your own with people who are likely to be interested.

Of course, this is just the beginning, and there are a lot of tricks of the trade to be learned. To find out more about how a quality coaching company can help bring your online business out of the dark ages and into the modern world of social networking, just visit http://www.thriveli.com.