Networking – philrickwood.com

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Engaging your Twitter followers
Engaging with your followers on Twitter is one of the most beneficial and cheapest ways to market your brand. Its something you should get into the habit of doing each day. Below I have listed 3 ways you can easily engage with your followers.

#1 Make your posts informative.

Post interesting and informative posts. If a subject is not interesting to you chances are pretty high it won’t interest many of your followers either. Mix your posts up with news from your industry or the category from which most of your followers are interested in.

Its important that you do not make every post about your product or service. Followers will soon get tired and bored with your site if you post repetitive or pushy ads for your business at every opportunity.

If your stuck for what to post try a few inspirational sayings or quotes in image format. They always seem popular on my site.

#2 Engage with followers everyday.

Be sure to engage with your followers at every opportunity. Reply to all comments that people direct to you everyday. You can do this by thanking people for their comments, for following you or for a re-tweet. Engage them by asking questions and building relationships. This will effectively assist in building your brand as a company or business that is responsive to others.

Although the direct message section can be associated with spam you will get some genuine inquiries there so its worth checking out and replying to those messages as well.

#3 Make reference to your followers site.

When others follow you check out their Twitter page and the links to their website. That way you can tweet them a welcome or thank you tweet and refer to something they are interested in. You will be much more likely to get a response when you refer specifically to one of their interests.

Make your tweet an open statement or question i.e ‘What a great site you have how long did it take to build?’ or ‘I see your from Australia, what time is it over there now?’ etc. These types of response will open the conversation up and make it more likely you will be able to build an online friendship and network with fellow Twitter users.

About the Author
Philip Rickwood is a Social Media Enthusiast
from Devonport in Tasmania with over 100k
Twitter followers at @afhitcom
philrickwood.com

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6 Tips When Using Direct Messages on Twitter

1 Before you send any direct messages to people make sure you are following them and they are following you. There is nothing worse than getting a direct message asking you a question you compose a reply then a message appears from Twitter saying you are unable to send a direct message to this person as they are not following you.

2 Twitter direct messages have a bad reputation for spam. Basically don’t use the direct message system to spam people you are likely to get a very low response rate. Its much better to get to know contacts and find out their needs before attempting to sell to them.

3 If you run out of space when sending a direct message just start a new message directly below the previous message.
Twitter will only allow you 140 characters just like in a regular tweet for direct messages.

4 Use direct messaging to thank your new followers. If your looking to engage new followers this is a good opportunity to ask a question about their work, site or products.

5 Use the direct message section to provide information you don’t want others to see. If someone asks for a quote on a specific job for example you don’t want to be tweeting that information for everyone to see.

6 Use of Truetwit. Often I’ll get messages saying user* uses TrueTwit validation. To validate click here: . Basically its not for me once you sign up to that system you will find yourself sending that same message to everyone that follows you. I find it much easier to send someone a personal message or just view their profile you can usually tell if someone if genuine. If their is no picture or bio the chances are pretty high you have been followed by a spam account.
You probably won’t want to follow them back. Some people might like using the Truetwit system but I find it annoying and won’t use it.

About the Author
Philip Rickwood is a Social Media Enthusiast
from Devonport in Tasmania with over 90k
Twitter followers at @afhitcom
philrickwood.com