Twitter Tips: How to Create Value for Your Followers

Bill Faeth

Why are you using Twitter? Is it to benefit you or your followers?

Hopefully it is the latter.  If you strive to provide value, educate, and engage, then your followers will return the love as you start to build trust with them.

Don’t get me wrong – Twitter can significantly benefit you and your business in many different ways, but when you listen to succussful Twitter users you usually hear the same thing:

Twitter becomes more beneficial to you when you “Give to Get”.

I have been using Twitter for several years.  It is amazing how many different ways you can use it, but it always seems to come back to enhancing the lives of your followers.  The more effort you put into enhancing your follower experience, the more that will come back to you.

Are you creating value for your Twitter followers?

• What are you giving to your followers?

• Are they finding value in your tweets and included links?

• Why did they follow you and what are they looking for?

• Have you asked them?

Obtaining answers to these questions will help you provide more valuable content to your followers and increase your engagement and value with them.  Most importantly, don’t be afraid to ask your followers some of these questions.  It will improve their experience with you and yours with them.

Are you solving problems for your Followers?

If you are able to solve problems for your followers, then you are being useful.

This is obvious, but so many overlook this aspect of communication in real life and forget to apply it to Twitter and their overall social media strategy.

Solving these problems for your followers really starts by identifying the personas you want to attract.  Once you have defined these personas, which you should already have for your marketing and sales team, you can start to solve their problems with content.  When you are developing these personas, ask yourself what each persona needs.  What problems do they have?

This becomes much easier if you are blogging with the same principles in tact.  Now you can use your blog posts as the ‘value add’ inside of your tweets with a link.

Answers to these questions should get you started:

• What’s the demographic of your potential customers?
  
• What problems can you solve for them?
  
• How does a specific product or service you offer make their life or job easier?
  
• What are their personal interests?
  
• What are they tweeting about?
  
• Do they love to laugh or tell jokes?
  
• Do they have a desire to connect with a community about a specific interest?  What is that interest?
  
• Are they interested in the latest news?
  
• Do they have an interest in entertainment, sports, tech?

The list of questions to ask yourself could go on and on.  These are just samples to get you started as you will want to tailor your questions to your followers and to your potential customer base.

Learn more about how to make the most of your social media efforts with this Social Media Tune Up!

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