In my last post I asked you to check out a few twitter ‘plugin’ or ‘application’ websites and for your feedback.

Everyone knows deep down that having a large amount of ‘followers’ on twitter is what many use as a measure of success within the application, it’s what’s known as a ‘vanity’ metric.





The conversations within twitter only work where both you and the other party follow each other, let’s call that a mutual follow. So in my opinion you want a mutual follow relationship with anyone outside say large corporations or perhaps personal idols who are less likely to be following those they don’t know. Twitter can be used to build and maintain online relationships which in turn lead to better customer care, research and business idea building.

So if you’re starting from scratch try to follow a variant of the following two methods – inject your personality and/or that of your company team into the profile. Make it as real as you can – starting out will feel like the first week at school and might drag on for a month or two, but once you’re settled into the rhythm and have made initial mutual follows and developed them into friends it’ll start to piece together.

Method 1

Start out by creating a large base of relatively targeted follows – who will in turn hopefully turn into followers – typically related people in your industry or sector – by searching them out on Twitter or using one of the many 3rd-party Twitter add-on solutions to find out their statistics.

Method 2

Start by building up your voice. Only follow people who you know or relevant people who follow you. This will mean building up your following slowly and organically based on unique, relevant and original content.

Be strict – if someone isn’t what you’d consider a business friendship or doesn’t reciprocate your follow then get rid of them (see tweepi.com as mentioned in the last post) The whole point of Twitter is 1:1 evolving into Many: Many relationships – remember never become the person who’s just 1: Many – that’s when you become a spammer. Debate and discuss, build ideas and then manage your leads like you would do with the ones that come from your regular calls to action from your website (see gist.com)

You can send a message to @alpineguru09 on twitter about this and also please do comment in the lovely comment box below.

There are many 3rd-party Twitter add-on solutions to find out statistics (i.e. follow back %, last tweets) of your followers or potential followers. You can also check out http://twittergrader.com it’s not going to tell you how engaging or interactive people are but it’ll give a general overview without having to integrate one of the more sophisticated Twitter plugins.





Start by taking a look at the following two sites, sign up and have a look around – then next week I’ll show you how to best utilise them to have a clear Twitter strategy that integrates with your company’s CRM & PR protocols. What are your favourite twitter applications, are you using any? Tell us in the comments.

Tweepi

Gist

You want to consider Twitter followers as real life friendships, think about the dynamics of those and then try to fit them into technology. What you’re left with is hardly a teenage fad, it’s much more complex and compelling, so sign up.