The True Power Of Twitter

by Willard

Twitter is a service that's received equal amounts of hype and disdain, with many internet pundits hailing it as the coming of a new generation of short attention spans. With so many people using the service now, there's certainly some truth to their argument. However, there are many ways to use Twitter as a highly useful marketing tool, beginning with just a few simple marketing principles. Whether you're a Twitter power user or just someone that wants to get more exposure for yourself or your business, optimising your Twitter usage through some very basic principles can lead to massive increases in your affiliate earnings, page views, and advertising revenue. These simple tips and strategies are detailed below:

#1 - Follow as many interesting people as you can.
This is a Twitter strategy that all too often gets massively misunderstood. With many accounts having massive follower counts, there are also far too many that have huge 'following' counts. Lets explain the differences between a value creating follower, and a value extracting follower:

A value creating follower is someone with whom you can connect, benefit from through tangible results, and communicate with to create value for both sides. This can be a mentor, an artist that you admire, or just someone that's interesting to you. It doesn't necessarily have to be anyone important, just someone that can create value you, and for whom you can create value.

A value extracting follower is someone that follows you for the sole purpose of increasing their follower count. This can be a false metric sometimes. While often your follower count is a great way of gauging your online influence, all too often it can become deceptive. When your follower count is filled to the brim with followers that are only there for their own personal gain, it massively devalues your total follower count's value.

#2 - Give your followers more than you take.
This is one strategy that far too many Twitter marketers fail to achieve. Instead of creating value for their followers and winning their trust, many marketers simply spam their followers with endless affiliate links, poorly crafted sales pitches, and shameless self promotion. This isn't a long term strategy.

Affiliate links and promotional material can prove to be an exceptionally powerful and lucrative resource, but without the proper amount of preceding value, your followers will likely click away once they hit your sales page. You need to build trust with your followers before you lead them towards any sales pages or money making opportunities. Spend some time building that trust, and you can take your followers anywhere you can imagine.

This all boils down to a basic marketing truth: people will always listen to someone they trust before someone they don't. Nowhere is this more true than on the internet, where spam and advertising is always present. Be the knight in shining armour and you can eventually lead your followers down a path that makes you massive amounts of money.

Discover the top 10 Twitter tricks in the free Turnkey Twitter report. Feel free to distribute this article in any form as long as you include this resource box. You can also include your affiliate link if you sign up at Clickbank Pirate.

This article follows on from Part 1, in which we discussed some of the most important tips and tricks for optimising your Twitter account, and increasing your online influence.

#3 - When you introduce monetisation, be subtle and cautious.
Twitter isn't something that you can monetise straight away. If you're an absolute beginner, your follower count is next to nothing, your credibility is low, and you're known to nobody. Before you can effectively market your products through Twitter, you need to built up those three elements. Here's how:

To increase your follower count, either use a Twitter follower system, or go about it manually. There are major advantages and disadvantages to each method, but in the end they'll likely produce the same results. When you use a Twitter follower system, you'll gain massive amounts of followers quickly. While most of them will be highly targeted and appropriate, some of them won't be, and you'll likely lose a few over time. By contrast, if you go about gaining those followers manually, you'll need to spend a massive amount of time on Twitter in order to match the follower account of the Twitter follower systems. This one's a trade off; one offers faster followers, and one offers greater customisability. Each to their own.

Secondly, increase your reputation, credibility and online persona by creating value for Twitter users. This could mean anything from providing interesting links to helping people with their problems online. Everyone's an expert at something, so use your innovative and unique skill set to help other Twitter users.

This is where you should begin to approach monetisation. When your audience is behind you, you can take them anywhere. Slowly introduce affiliate links and promotional material into your tweets, but don't overdo it. The aim is to ease your followers into your promotions, not to brute force them into clicking on your links. Treat your followers right and you'll end up with a massive permission marketing resource.

#4 - When all else fails, learn from it and change your plan.
There are more variables to Twitter promotion than this article could possibly cover, and that's a good thing. When there are so many variables within a system, the possibility to dominate a small niche and make massive money through it is endless. However, due to the massive amounts of variables in Twitter, many entrepreneurs and marketers don't make it the first time. Here's what to do if you're one of them.

Learn from your failure. Take it in stride, make notes of what went wrong, and start again. The beauty of Twitter is that you can always communicate with your followers, and this gives you a huge advantage for information gathering and metric testing. If one of your Twitter strategies isn't working, test your audience with it, learn from what went wrong, and incorporate the new knowledge into your next campaign. This is how you'll truly dominate Twitter, and effectively use it as a powerful marketing platform.

Discover the top 10 Twitter tricks in the free Turnkey Twitter report. Feel free to distribute this article in any form as long as you include this resource box. You can also include your affiliate link if you sign up at Clickbank Pirate.

© Willard, All rights reserved.
Willard is an Entrepreneur with concerns about the uncertain economic times. He has decided to become involved with a Home Business with multiple streams of income to make sure his family will be financially secure. Clickbank Pirate.

Submitted on March 3, 2010