How to Build Relationships With Twitter?

Posted by Nebojsa Skenderovic in Business      No comments

Feb
7

Twitter has truly started to turn into just about the most popular online social networks. Its has rapidly revolutionized and changed the way we communicate with other people in ways we never might have before. It would be great if more people would become more Twitter literate. The thought of having ‘followers’ is unfortunately lost on many individuals. Let’s take a few moments to check out practical ways to build lasting business relationships on this network.

Your Twitter follower count doesn’t mean a hill of beans. The original purpose of ‘follower-count’ was to give Twitter users a quick and simple way to gauge their audience. It allows you to see how many individuals you are following, and how many individuals are following you back. Unfortunately, something terrible happened. People learned tips on how to game the system to inflate their follower-counts.

Users started taking advantage of auto-follow services to swiftly create fake relationships. The basic idea is: if you follow someone, they’ll auto-follow you back providing you still follow them. This works for a while, providing both participants maintain a practical amount of relationships.

Unfortunately, both parties repeat this process until they are following so many people they cannot reasonably maintain. Everybody is in it solely to get their own message out. Its like entering a stadium full of shouting people, in an attempt to have your message heard.

The real you comes out on Twitter, and you are not fooling anyone. Now, clearly people who use this tactic feel their is some motivation for doing so. Here are two potential reasons why they may think this strategy pays off. First, they may think Twitter is just all about the numbers. If they get thousands of followers, maybe a few will actually listen to what they have to say. Second, they may think that having a high follower count acts a social proof to make them appear important. Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth.

Folks that use Twitter to form real business relationships can instantly spot this phony behavior. These are people who actually want to network, and would make excellent business contacts. However, they instantly lose all respect for auto-followers when they spot their follow-stats.

In other words, the people who make the best business contacts ignore users engaging in this behavior. Nothing screams networking-amateur louder than someone trying to take advantage the system for private gain. And, in a world where respect is hard to come by, this is a big reputation killer.

Wondering building real substantial relationships in Twitter? If you want to build relationships with like-minded people, you need to focus on quality over quantity. Ignore your follower stats for a while, and focus on connecting with people who share your small business goals. You may not have a massive audience, but you’ll have greater influence within your network of true followers.

written by Dawn Jennings