Twitter Profits From Directing the Conversation

Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009 at 2:04 am

If you’ve been a subscriber to this blog, you know I’m a big advocate of the power of Twitter. Even Google is getting nervous that Twitter’s ability to report real-time news is surpassing the search behemoth. Twitter is all about conversation, and if you’re in business to make a profit, you will benefit from directing as much of that conversation as possible. But how do you direct the conversation on Twitter? Isn’t that like controlling the tiger by grabbing its tail…?

Let’s first review the basic Twitterquette — don’t spam “sales” messages to your followers, but do mix up your posts between relevant, interesting posts on a variety of topics with your sales tweets tossed in sporadically. Also, be generous with retweets and participating in conversations.

After you have mastered that, you may want to find conversations on topics that are relevant to your business. You can see the hot topics by looking at the right side of your page in Twitter. If you don’t find something there that is relevant to your business or interests, simply go to http://search.twitter.com and search for #yourtopic.

The # is called a hashtag. You can find more about Twitter hashtags here – http://twitter.pbwiki.com/Hashtags

If a topic doesn’t exist, create it by tweating #yourtopic. It’s that simple. To create a conversation or buzz, you may have to tweet several times or even ask your followers to retweet… The best topics are somewhat viral — be realistic in that not everyone will care about your #VALVESALE topic. If you can tie your business into a current event, you really have a #WinningTopic that will attract many other users to your tweets.

Twitter accounts are supposed to express the multifaceted nature of you — in other words, your personality. Resist the trend to open a separate Twitter account for every topic you’re interested in, unless you plan to actively tweet about those topics and develop them into something specific (like their own website or business). Doing otherwise is actually “spammy.”

It’s best to tweet to your followers about all the things you find interesting. As with any “list,” your Twitter follower list is only as valuable as your relationship to it. If your only Tweets are a cloaked link to a spam affiliate page, not only will people not get to know you, they will probably block you. Come on — not every Twitter user earns $3,462 per day from Twitter! LOL

Instead of directing the #conversation, you will find yourself with no one to tweet to — no matter what #yourtopic.

And of course, follow me @marketyoursite