Five Tips for Getting Targeted Followers on Your Store’s Twitter Page
“I ate tortilla soup today and spilled cheese on my dress. Oh bother.”
“Hi Tweeps, what’s shakin in ur hood?”
These are just two examples of the mundane messages you will find on the microblogging service Twitter. Twitter is often dismissed by mainstream media, but a study by the Altimeter Group finds that brands using social media have seen recent increases in revenue by 20% on average.
Twitter and other social media tools humanize merchants. To customers, we become something besides just nameless faceless online stores. We have wives and husbands, we go on vacation and get irritated by restaurants. Social media also allows you to show customers why you are passionate about what you sell, and that has been a missing ingredient in commerce for a long time.
Because you are a human and not a nameless faceless website, you are also held more accountable to your mistakes and are more inclined to hear feedback about your products. Customers on Twitter will tell you what is good and bad about your website and your products. Some merchants don’t particularly like this, but those who embrace it tend to have the most loyal fan base of customers who recommend them to anyone.
The big question people ask is, “I’m on Twitter. Now what?”
Here are a few tips on getting targeted followers who can then help spread your brand virally:
Tell your current customers that you are on Twitter. You’d be surprised to see how many people you find who are on Twitter if you just say something about it. Send a newsletter out about it and put a link on your website.
Go to wefollow.com, and search for Twitter users who have tagged themselves with topics related to your products. You can also tweet that you follow those topics too.
Use a Twitter client like TweetDeck or Seesmic Desktop to pull searches on keywords pertaining to your products. Follow people who tend to like stuff you sell, as well as people who offer useful information that you can retweet to share to your followers.
Go to hashtags.org and search for tags that pertain to what you sell on your store.
Send tweets that are interesting, and try to engage your followers as much as possible by using @replies. You aren’t just tweeting to someone, you can actually use @replies to “introduce” your followers to each other. They will use @replies to introduce their followers to you. In this respect, you aren’t just sending tweets, you are building a community around your brand.
Twitter is a communication tool, like a cell phone. Its uses are only limited by your imagination. Using it wisely can connect you to millions of people who just might be looking for what you sell for a fraction of the cost of other advertising methods.
2 Comments
Dean Iodice says:
Great points, I love the human factor. I agree I think Twitter is a great tool to humanize ecommerce sites that already suffer from being so non personal. I think it's cool to see human side to online businesses.
Shopping Cart Software says:
One key thing to point (great piece by the way) is that if you have a good email list, you always want to tell customers to follow you on twitter. You already touched on this in the #1 point but my point is to make it very prominent in every newsletters and offer discount to Twitter users!
Promote that on the site, it works!
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