If Twitter is a great big party, then following is choosing who to hang out with.

You turn up, you find people with similar interests to yours. And then you follow them, in the expectation – or hope – that they will follow you back.

Like any social situation, the more followers – people who find you interesting or valuable – you have, the more attractive you will seem to other people. They will then in turn think about following you.

There’s a guy out there who runs a company and he has over 100,000 followers on Twitter. But some of these don’t run companies. Some are unemployed. Some are what could be referred to as ‘slackers’ even. But they follow this guy who they have nothing in common with.

Why? Because he has over 100,000 followers.

How did he do this? Well, there’s the paradox.

(Of course, it isn’t really a paradox; I kind of just labelled it that because it makes no real sense to me.)

It is a problem though, one that stumps most people. How do you get people to follow you? And more importantly, how do you get 100,000 people to follow you? A million?

Well, you don’t. You don’t get anyone to do anything. Like any form of micro blogging, interest is the thing.

Mingle

The only cast iron method that you (as a normal person and not a movie star) can deploy to boost your number of followers involves following.

That’s it. Of course, you can buy followers but that is something that large corporations do because they think in binary.

As a small business and, let’s be honest, a really nice person, you follow people that you find interesting. People who have the same life as you, or at least the same interests and business dealings.

And you do it every day or at least every two days.

Follow 50-100 people every day and I absolutely guarantee that you will become someone who gathers followers.

About 30-40% of people you follow will not follow back. That’s cool. You’re not God. Or Ashton Kutcher. So deal with that and manage your followers. Follow 50-100 a day and every now and then pare off the people who have chosen not to follow.

Why get followers?

Seth Godin will tell you that you can’t get to know more than a 1000 people. Other, lesser mortals will say that they just cannot manage thousands of relationships.

Whatever you think, there is only one reason to continuously grab followers with the method above. You will get contacts, and you will build a network of people that you are connected to.

Advice, help, business deals and even friendships will then abound.

Trust me. It works. Just don’t try and get followers any other way, even when you’re starting out.

Oh, and the answer to the question in the title? That’s easy. Find approximately one and a half million people (remember the third or so that won’t follow) with your interests and follow all of them. Should take you about a week if you don’t eat or sleep. Got that?

Good.

Until next time, work smarter.

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I’m going to be your guinea pig.

I’m going to try out an MLM opportunity and see where it takes me. I have avoided MLM for a long time but someone I trust told me recently that it is worth trying if you want to make money online. I always want to make money online. So I’m going for it.

The company is SFI. I’m going to register in a few minutes. I’ll keep you posted on how I do.

Until next time, work smart.

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Twitter for business, what not to tweet

In the last post we looked at the basics of Twitter. We also looked at some fundamentals of how it can be used to turn your small business into a successful small business.

Using it to find out what people are saying about your company, for example, is effective. Using it to spam those same people to death is not.

The first post showed how you can spread news, seek help, and generally share ideas on Twitter.

But we don’t always have news, and we don’t always need help. This leads to the hopeless Tweeters first mistake.

Many new Tweeters feel they have to tweet, simple as that. Every few hours. Every other minute.

This leads to pointless tweeting, or boring tweeting. Worse still, it leads to tweets about baking cookies.

Baking cookies

You can tweet about baking cookies if you like, but you will have more chance of being read if you’re famous and you’re baking cookies.

If Madonna baked cookies and tweeted about it, she’d get retweets and comments. Her baking method may well be analysed. It would be cool, funny. She may even get a book deal out of it.

But you? No one cares about your cookies.

No one cares about your day, how you get to work, your favourite music.

But they care if you are interesting.

So find stuff that you know your audience would be interested in, that they would find useful.

This means staying away from coookies. And quotes too.

The nightmare that is quotes

I personally hate quotes. I have had tons of advice from people about using quotes on Twitter. The general messaqge is simple. If you use quotes, people will read your stuff.

This, in my humble opinion, is nonsense.

I think I have used a quote once in the time I have been on Twitter. This has done me no harm. Much better to give your followers stuff that you have thought about, or items of news and industry specific pieces that you know that they will like.

So forget the quotes. They don’t work. Not for me anyway. I read them and I might think ‘that’s nice’. But I never think I want to get to know the Tweeter more. That never happens.

I want to know Tweeters more if they say somethig that is useful, funny, or thought provoking.

So, to sum up…

Tweet:

• industry specific stuff
• funny stuff that you have come up with (as in your own take on news etc.)
• good advice that you have found or you have come up with

That is more than enough to be getting on with. In fact, if you just Tweeted the above, you’d start getting followers soon enough.

Remember, no cookies, or quotes.

And definitely no quotes about cookies.

Until next time, work smart.

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John Crickett, of Business Opportunties and Ideas, is kind of an inspiration to me.

He provides, through his excellent blog, a ton of advice that enrepreneurs and small business owners can draw upon to make what they do rock solid. None of his stuff is throwaway, all his guest posters know exactly what they are talking about (little biased there), and everything he posts to his site is instantly valuable. Go visit. You’ll learn something.

Anyway, I asked John for an interview. He agreed.

Pay attention. There’s some good advice in this interview alone.

John, Sum up you and your site in 50 words or less.

Business Opportunities and Ideas provides a list of business
opportunities and business ideas that I’ve come across / think of, along
with my advice on how to turn them into successful businesses.

What made you start the site?

My wife was fed up of hearing about all of my business ideas. I kept
hearing a lot of hype about blogs. So I thought blogging about the ideas
would be a good way to share them, create a conversation and help others
learn about business, whilst at the same time learning about blogging
myself.

What kind of feedback have you received?

Very positive feedback from all sorts of people, ranging from highly
successful entrepreneurs, through business angels and venture
capitalists to academics studying entrepreneurship.

What has been the most profitable part of your site?

Given that the only real costs are my time and it’s as much a hobby as
a business it’s all relatively profitable.

One ‘killer tip’ for anyone who is running a home business?

Don’t get distracted.

There are a lot of small business blogs. You are an established presence. What makes you different?

Blogs are essentially an open conversation, or a stream of though
which others can chose to join in with or not. As such my blog is
different because it’s my thoughts based on my experience, knowledge and
personal biases. No one else can offer that.

Did you do anything else before this on the internet or is it your first venture?

I’ve worked with/on the Internet since 1996 and I’ve been running
Internet related businesses of my own since 2001.

Who is your inspiration? Why?

When it comes to business I’ve been inspired by a lot of people, from
successful small business owners through to the likes Warren Buffet.
Generally I’m inspired by those who have just gone out there and done
their own thing despite others telling them not to or that it’s impossible.

In your point of view, which are the best places to market your site online?

Search Engines. They provide highly targeted traffic.

What, in your opinion, is the best way to start out in business? What industries, sectors, and so on?

Start in any industry which you know something about and have an
interest, better yet a passion for.

The best way to start is to: start now, fail fast, fail cheap:

http://www.businessopportunitiesandideas.co.uk/999/how-to-start-a-new-business

And finally John, what is the best piece of advice you have ever received about business?

Go and start a business. Now.

Regards, John

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Twitter is fast becoming one of the most essential small business applications. Period.

This series will help you to take your use of Twitter to the next level. We’ll start with basic stuff in this post, and then head on out to the wilder, untamed parts of TwitterWorld.

With this guide at your fingertips, you should be fine. Take what you find here as pretty much the real deal. I know what I’m doing, but it hasn’t been easy. It’s taken time, but I’ve got a healthy account at Twitter now. 

It is hard work though. And it involves integrity of the highest order. If you think you will be able to use the following  information to find out how to palm off a ‘millionaire maker seminar’, or to turn on ‘an automated money-making machine’ you will be disappointed.

But if you’d like to get to know real people, with real lives, and perhaps help to gain small business success on the way, you’ve come to the right place.

So sit back, get ready to take notes. This stuff works.

What is Twitter?

Twitter is a social networking tool. It is a microblogging platform. Microblogging means writing a blog, but in a much smaller form.

This is why each update on Twitter (called a ‘tweet’) is short, 140 characters long to be precise.

This brevity allows for, well, brevity. It allows for quick info sharing. It means you can keep up to date with people without having to bash out an email or make a phone call.

The tweets you write are displayed on the home stream of the people who follow you on Twitter (people who think you are interesting). They can be on the public timeline too if you want, but you don’t have to agree to this.

You can use the Twitter site itself to tweet, or a third party application like TweetDeck. I use my iPhone to tweet via something called HootSuite.

What is Twitter for business?

It certainly is not the spam that is going around on the Twitter network right now. We’ll cover how to write like a real person and not a spammer later, but there is a little something here on The Giant Twitter Shark, for starters.

As a business, you can use Twitter to:

• Spread news. Profits good? New website? New product?
• Publicise your blog posts (because boring old blogs are still relevant to customers)
• Monitor your profile. People are talking about your business. You can search Twitter for everything Twitter users are saying about your company
• Contact and liaise with clients.
• Seek advice and help. Got a sticky problem with an invoice? Ask for help.

That is how to use Twitter for business. Use it any other way and you will be toast.

We’ll get started on the good stuff in Part Two. For now, get an account if you don’t have one. Play around, and start talking to people. That’s the core purpose of the platform. The Giant Twitter Shark likes people who follow the core purpose.

We’ll show you how to use Twitter to get business and make great contacts later. For now, just communicate. If you have fun with it, you’ll stick with it. If you spam it and come across like a salesperson, it will die on you. And no one likes to see dead little birdies…

If you want to miss a post in this excellent, ground-breaking and well, honest series, then don’t subscribe.

Until next time, work smart.

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