Introduction
Whenever I mention to people that Twitter is a great place to meet interesting people and to also meet potential leads and customers, they often agree with me about meeting interesting people, but think I'm kidding about meeting potential leads and customers. That is, until I explain to them what I do to meet customers on Twitter.
First of all, if you haven't done so already, you'll want to grab up your name on Twitter as well as your company's name (if you run a business). You can visit Twitter.com to create them both. In the end, you'll end up with something like twitter.com/accountnameyoupick and twitter.com/companynameyoupick.
How Twitter Works
In case you're new to Twitter or to the concept, let me explain how it works. First, you create an account, which let's you follow around other people that have accounts on Twitter. by simply browsing through the database, or going to Twitter.com/search, you can quickly find other people that have similar interest to you in any country on the face of this world. You can click on the FOLLOW button of any person you wish to follow. At that point, anytime they send a message to Twitter, the message appears in your home page (after you've logged in). You can also view anyone's page publicly without logging in yourself. You can also see the messages that pour in to that account from those that are being followed by this person. So, essentially, you could be witnessing strands of conversations going on via one person's account.
If you decide to view your own home page, you might only be seeing one side of the conversation, unless you travel over to the followee's page and view the whole conversation, since you'll be able to see the messages from those that the person is also following. You can also decide to follow the other people on the followee's page, so that you are able to view the entire conversation on your own home page in Twitter.
Twitter As A Networking Tool
In case, you are already lost, I'm about to enlighten you with an example. Twitter is like a social gathering room that continuously goes on forever. The doors never close, and the lights never go off. If you have ever attended a business card exchange, or a leads group meeting, those types of events take place on a particular date, at a particular time, and usually only last 1 or 2 hours at most.
With Twitter, the social gathering (whether conversing socially or about business) can go on forever with no time limits. Now imagine, that you've walked into the room. There are already tons of conversations going on. The key is to find a few that you can participate in, thereby making some small talk. In a real-life scenario, you'd do the same. You'd walk up to a few people, see what they're talking about, and tap into the conversations that you know something about. Eventually, the conversation may take a path towards what you do or sell, and you might have the opportunity to make a lead or a sale right there and then.
Twitter offers these same opportunities, except, as I said, the room never closes, and the lights never go out. Most of the time, most Twitter users post their messages (or as we like to call them, "tweets") using their computer. They log into their account and enter a post at the top input box and click update to send their message to not only their own home page, but to all of the followers, that are presently following them.
However, as a Twitter user, you are not limited to just using your computer to post tweets. You can elect to use your cell phone as well, by simply texting your message using SMS. I've setup a contact on my phone called Twitter that contains the number for me to send tweets. Thus, I can be standing in line at the supermarket, and still post things that come to mind while I'm standing there.
Finding People To Connect With On Twitter
The next question I'm often asked about Twitter, is how do you find people to follow? As I already said, you can perform a search at search.twitter.com or you can have another tool that I use to bring them to you.
That tool is actually a website named tweetlater.com. TweetLater has tons of features to help you with Twitter and becoming more social on it (too many to mention in one article, but in due time, I'll go over many of its features and talk about how I use them).
In this article, I want to concentrate on Keyword Tracking. You can read more about it at: tweetlater.com/alerts.
Essentially, it acts as your Twitter conversation locator and reports back as often as you tell it to. You tell it what keywords you're interested in, and it goes out and finds conversations currently discussing those keywords. Then, periodically, it sends you a digest of those conversations, along with direct links to the actual users currently discussing it. That's your opportunity to chime in and present yourself:
"Hi @mrtwitteruser, I noticed that you were asking for others to provide you with suggestions for the best hosting on the Internet...that's what we do best and I'd love for you to take a look at our website or perhaps allow me to call you with some information..."
So, now you see how you can gain leads from Twitter, and perhaps even turn them into followers. Remember, most of the time, if you follow someone, they will follow you back. Some even have their account on auto, which allows them to automatically follow you back. I'll discuss how to do that using auto-replies and all in a future article. But how do you keep them following you around?
Keep Your Followers Coming Back For More
The answer to this question is that you must continue to provide them with interesting things to discuss. They have to see that you always have interesting things to talk about. But how do you know what is interesting to them? How do you know that others will find anything that you have to say interesting? Truth is that it takes practice to become witty and funny and sociable on Twitter. Often though, if you want to use your account for business purposes and want to be seen as a professional in every aspect of your life, you have to watch what you say...especially online, where every word you say is sometimes taken literally, can get you into trouble, and is as good as writing it in stone.
I personally like to play it safe and keep my funny comments and wittiness to a minimum. However, I did promise you that I would provide you with something that you could always depend on to provide your followers with interesting things that would make them continue following you, so here it is. The answer lies in Digg.com. But before I show you how, let me back up a bit and explain why this works.
If you remember, I mentioned that you want to find people that discuss things that are interesting to you. This means that things that interest you, also interest them. Let's take an example. If you like to discuss politics, there are tons of other people on Twitter that discuss politics. In politics, there are things always happening, being discussed, being written about, and from all kinds of different perspectives. You don't always have to agree with what others are saying, but there's nothing to stop you from opening up things for discussion.
Digg.com is the perfect place to find out just about anything that is currently being discussed by others in the field of politics and to gain insight. Enough insight that you can share various articles with others that are presently following you. And since you followed them for the same reasons or interests, chances are that they are probably following you right back. Therefore, when you break a story to them about your shared interests, they'll appreciate it and in turn, continue to follow you and maybe even turn on other followers to you. It's like a chain reaction.
Making It Easy To Be Interesting
So, you're probably thinking, "darn, are you telling me that I should keep going back to Digg every few minutes to find out what story is breaking news in my area of interest?" The answer is NO...thankfully, Digg.com offers a tool that can be added to your browser, which brings the front page breaking news to you. As you may or may not know, the way Digg works is that someone, somewhere in the world, notices an interesting blog, news item, post of some kind, video, or photo. They then post the item on Digg by logging into their account, and posting it on Digg, along with a headline, a topic category, and description.
As other Digg users notice the post, or post it themselves, the post gains popularity. The more popular the post becomes, the more closer it gets to the home page of Digg. When it finally hits the home page, the browser add-on receives the alert and shows you an 5 second popup window that shows the headliner (for those categories that you have subscribed to). Thus, Digg brings the popular headlines to you, based on your interests, which by the way, happen to be the same items of interest as those that are following you around on Twitter. Now, you have something to talk about.
Tweet Faster Than A Speeding Bullet
Only one thing remains, how do you quickly add that story to Twitter so that you can keep working on whatever it was you were working on before you saw the headline? I use another tool called TwitThat, which is located at http://twitthat.com. This tool adds a shortcut to your browser so that you can quickly click on it, it popups with predefined text that allows you to tweet many different common messages, along with your link (already compressed using tinyurl, which is another web tool that shrinks long URLs down to manageable sizes that will fit into Twitter's maximum length).
If you do decide to get yourself a Twitter account, come on over to our business page on FaceBook (link is shown below) and add your Twitter ID to our Twitter discussion on that page. All of our fans will follow you around as well, giving you more followers. And while you're there, don't forget to become a fan of our business page.
Ken Ramirez is the founder of Axsys Technology Group, a website hosting, website design, and e-marketing company. Ken often lectures about social media marketing, hosting, website design, and many related technologies. Ken can be reached at ken (dot) ramirez (at) axsystechgroup (dot) com.
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