Understanding Twitter in 5 minutes:
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Why you need it for your business
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What it is
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How it works
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How you can make money from it
By: Andrew Andersen
In order to help you understand Twitter, you just need to understand and think about it as the ultimate direct marketing tool because Twitter users voluntarily sign up to receive you messages or your tweets.
I’m not gonna mention any other special jargon, we’re gonna bring it down to the basic terms so you can understand the power of Twitter and why you need to understand it and start using it immediately.
This poll and survey was just taken about 3 or 4 days ago and I want to read something of it for you. Are you more likely to buy since becoming a fan or follower? Now, 67% of the Twitter respondents said yes. Are you more likely to recommend since becoming a fan or follower? 79% of the Twitter followers said yes. So if someone’s following you on Twitter and you have a Twitter account and you’re tweeting and sending out messages, 79% of the respondents said they’re more likely to recommend your product or service to someone else that they know.
Those are huge fantastically large numbers and if you follow through with it and understand Twitter, you can make tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, and even in some cases, millions of dollars from it if you use it correctly and understand what’s going on with it. I wanna dive into it and show you the components of it. This happens to be Drayton Birds Twitter account page, and I want to explain a couple of things that are going on here. He’s done it correctly in that he’s got a picture of himself because people aren’t interested in logos.
They want to follow other people. And they want to put a face to that brand. He’s got his phone number, his email address, and his website, which are all requirements for a Twitter page if you’re doing this for your business. Some of the numbers we’re gonna look at here; he is following 283 people, which means in this time line here, 283 people will show up there. And he has 411 people that have voluntarily signed up to get everything that he sends out to them.
Now this is huge, it bypasses spam filters and secretaries and everything else. They will get his messages showing up on his Twitter page.
Now this is one of my twitter pages and you can see here, this is the time line that we’re talking about, and these are the messages from other people. This person here is not following the rules and sending out a bunch of tweets and what happens is I’m gonna unfollow this guy and so he won’t be able to do that anymore. That’s the power of it. If you put out great information, you’re gonna get a ton of people to follow you voluntarily because they can opt out at any time.
This happens to be my Twitter page, and I’ve got 12,969 followers on it currently. And that means whenever I send anything out, I’ve got almost 13 thousand people that have the potential to pay attention to it and have voluntarily signed up to get my information about my products and services and what I put out there. Now It’s not just one way communication, you can do 2-way communications with Twitter.
This is a tool called HootSuite, it doesn’t matter, I just want to show you that you can do this. And we’ll talk more about this later and explain it to you. Basically, this is a 2-way conversation I had with Patrice, and I responded to a message that she sent out that said
“I’m gonna choose wisely who I follow. I hate my time line being flooded with stupidness.” – Patrice
So what she’s saying is if you’re stupid, she’s gonna unfollow you. So you gotta make sure that you use common sense when you’re doing your marketing. It’s the way to use twitter. And common sense marketers need Twitter, and Twitter needs common sense marketers. And if you think of it as a direct mail campaign and send out timely information that’s helpful and people wanna read, and it can solve an issue or problem for them, you’re going to do fantastic on Twitter.
What you wanna do is connect it with the rest of your information that you have online, if you have a blog like I do, I’ve got my Twitter counter here and it says “Follow me on Twitter”. So when people read my blog they can also follow me on Twitter. Now you don’t have to have thousands and thousands of followers to make money.
You just need to get started and connect with those potential clients. One of the things that you need to be aware of is I don’t claim to be the worlds best Twitter expert or guru.
What I do know is how to get Twitter to help make you money and if you follow what I just told you, you communicate correctly with them, you get your account set up and you only give out good common sense marketing information, you’re going to do fantastic and you can pick up a customer every week, every day, every month and it just will snowball.
Hope this helps. We’ll talk to you soon. Andrew Andersen signing out.
Thanks for your insight, Andrew!