Twitter® Marketing For Dummies®

Chapter 7. Building Your Personal Twitter Tribe

In This Chapter

• Developing your network on Twitter

• Choosing quality of connections or quantity

• Considering whether to use automatic direct messages

The problem most people have with Twitter is that they start an account, but they don't follow up with it. They add a couple of friends, post a few tweets, and then give up, saying it didn't work for them. In fact, according to some studies, as many as 9 percent of all Twitter accounts may be inactive. If you dive even further into the stats, you see that 10 percent of Twitter users produce 90 percent of the content. Still, millions of people use Twitter (at the time of this writing). And you need to get some of them to follow you.

When you use Twitter, you have an expectation that if you follow someone, that person will follow you back. This doesn't always happen, but it does a large part of the time — especially if you're a real person following real people. But if you're a spammer or you look like you're on Twitter to send nothing but commercial tweets, you don't get many follow-backs.

In this chapter, I discuss several ways that you can build your Twitter network, which can help you market and sell your product or service.

Building Your Twitter Network

You can build your network in several ways. Depending on your attitude toward the sanctity of Twitter, you can either add people organically (manually following people when you find them to be a good fit for your marketing goals) or artificially ...