How to find targeted Twitter followers

Twitter, in my opinion, is the most effective social media marketing tool. The two social media marketing (SMM) giants are Facebook and Twitter. However, I don’t think that Facebook marketing has quite the same impact as Twitter.

In my personal experience, the click through rates of Twitter followers is much higher than that of Facebook friends.

I find that it is much easier to gather targeted followers with Twitter. And having targeted followers, or friends as it’s called in Facebook, is truly vital.

Why are targeted followers so essential?

Let’s imagine that you have just set up a niche website about jewellery. You can apply this to almost any type of website or business model, but in this particular example the business model will revolve around making money from AdSense adverts.

Having a niche website, for instance a Flash website selling jewellery, can help you to earn a really nice passive income. However, you need to have the right traffic coming to your website in order to succeed.

As you probably already know, a lot of traffic comes from Google, which will be targeted. The traffic from Google will be targeted because your website will only appear under relevant search terms. This means that the people who come to your site will be genuinely interested in the topics featured on your flash website.

The adverts on your website will be relevant to the content that features on your website. Google will only place adverts on your website that are likely to have successful click through rates.

If you’ve got traffic that is targeted to your niche coming to your site from search engines, couldn’t you do the same thing using Twitter? The answer is yes, absolutely. However, you need to know what you’re doing, as the same principles of targeting apply when adding people to your Twitter account.

How do you get targeted followers?

Now that we have established that having targeted followers will have the same effect as random visitors come to your site from search engines, let’s try to understand exactly how we go about getting these ‘ targeted followers’.

When it comes to search engine optimization (SEO), you will only target keywords that are relevant to your site. There’s no point spending time and money altering your page rank for search terms that are not relevant to your flash website; no-one would bother clicking on your site if it doesn’t look similar to what they’re searching for. And if they do click on your site, the chances are 99% of your visitors will have no need for the products being promoted on your AdSense advertisements.

If we apply the same principles of SEO to SMM, we can gain an understanding of how to go about adding the right type of people to your account.

Unless you’re using software, which I do not advice, you will find your followers in the search bar located at the top of the Twitter homepage.

People go wrong by simply typing in names like ‘john’ and ‘mark’, and adding everyone under the first one hundred pages. Barely anyone will actually reciprocate, and if they do, the chances are they won’t be interested in the links that you’re promoting.

Before you even start adding people, customise your profile so that it is clear what you’re trying to promote and what website/niche you belong to. This is so that targeted people will be aware of what you’re interested in straight away, thus increasing the change of them reciprocating your act of following. The idea is that they will be interested in something to do with your site, and will therefore be happy to follow you.

Start adding people by typing in exact keywords that are relevant to your website. For example, if you had a jewellery flash website, you’d type in ‘pearl necklace’ or ‘gold bracelets’. Do not be too refined or you’ll have no success in finding anyone.

After typing and searching, don’t add everyone who appears on the first few pages. Filter through each post that has your keyword in it, and add people who have actually shown a genuine and recent interest in something associated with your services, website or product.

Do not add them if they are a company promoting a service. It’s a waste of time.

Once you have built up a strong base of targeted followers, start posting! Before you post, be sure to understand a few fundamental rules:

1. Don’t over post

2. Don’t add your link each time

3. Add interesting comments about your website without a link once in a while

4. Don’t hide the fact that you’re marketing