It’s common knowledge that Twitter has become a very powerful platform, and its popularity continues to rise.
However, like anything else in marketing, you have to know how to target the right people.
When you launch a SaaS like ours or e-commerce website one of the main challenge is to draw traffic to your site, and most importantly to get the ‘right’ people.
So, referring to Twitter, if you have (say) 200,000 followers that certainly looks impressive, but how would you feel about having just a fraction of that number with the same level of engagement, taking a fraction of the time to nurture and build?
As we know – time is money!
What’s in it for you? Well, by using the tools and strategies mentioned in this article, you’ll get more links/mentions, more social shares and more traffic; resulting in more business leads.
HOW TO TARGET THE RIGHT INFLUENCERS ON TWITTER
When thinking about your Twitter account and methods for targeting users, you must venture outside the normal methods of looking at your ideal audience.
The market you’re involved in has a demographic of customer you’re aiming to reach. When you’re just getting started – meaning you have no audience or following – it means you’ve got some serious work to do in order to get your business to where it must ultimately be in order to be successful in the market place.
Fortunately for you, there are other blogs and businesses that currently have an established base of users that your target customer falls into, so this is the place for you to begin. Using these people, you can create an active and strong following that will be happy to share your content and assist in generating more leads.
We’ll divide these blogs and businesses into the separate types of users you’ll be targeting; remembering there is bound to be some crossover amongst them.
Industry Influencers
Who are your industry influencers? They’re the companies and people who carry the most weight in your industry, and it’s these who must be your first and top priority.
What you want to do is find who they are and follow them on Twitter.
Industry influencers will typically have all the following –
In your industry, whose opinion do you value, and which blogs are you subscribed to?
This will give you a pretty clear idea of who you believe is an industry influencer. If you have faith in someone’s opinion, it’s highly likely other people do too.
A great and simple way to discover and compile a list of top blogs in your industry is to use Alltop .
The majority of these blogs will have an associated Twitter account. Simply visit each and every blog and look for the author’s Twitter account.
I recommend you find a way to organise the people you’ll follow. I like to use Twitter lists to organise the people I follow.
Now go deeper, and expand your list as much as you can. You’ll have a much better chance of your brand name, share, or content going viral when you actually connect with these influencers on Twitter, and your brand or business will soon be perceived as an authority in your industry.
Of course the better you understand your industry the easier this is, but it’s important that you don’t just list the first few names; these are what are known as trophy influencers. Yes, of course, you’d love these people to mention your business or share your content, but in fact you need a much more extensive list to work with.
Don’t assume that because someone has only (say) 100 Twitter followers they don’t influence other people because that would be a mistake.
Amplifiers
What is an Amplifier? An Amplifier is a Twitter power user and it’s important that you target them because they’re –
For anyone interested, these statistics are taken from a Twitter and Compete survey completed last year.