First off, you need to define the goal of the strategy and if it is applicable to your business. The questions to ask are:

• Do you want to brand locally or internationally? You need to define the target reach for your business.
• How are your resources? How much time and money do you have to monitor your social media activities? If you can’t respond to your Twitter followers, you’ll lose them as brand supporters.
• What are the types of products and services you offer? Are you catering the mass with affordable goods or high-end items? This will also help how you target your audience.

Aside from those questions, here are more tips to help you attract the right Twitter audience.

1. Create an excellent profile with photo – Don’t leave out information about yourself. Create a bio that tells your followers who you are and what you do. Also, have a nice photo; preferably a nice close-up of you alone, smiling.
2. Cross-promote – Let people know about your Facebook profile, Twitter handle, LinkedIn page, and other social media sites.
3. Put your Twitter handle everywhere – Place them on your email, your business card, maybe even have a bumper sticker made. Don’t be shy to let them know how they can find you on Twitter.
4. Reciprocate – One of the most important things to do in Twitter is to reciprocate. If they like you, like them. Follow other followers back.
5. Be human – Instead of just showcasing your logo or brand, just be you. Use your own identity. Find ways to connect with other entrepreneurs and establish a relationship with them.
6. Use photos – This is a great way to attract other people’s attention. Just make sure they are in good quality and appropriate for your audience.
7. Be in the loop – Update and updates. Always be in the lookout for them and pay attention to updates. You may be missing out on new ways to improve your social media efforts.
8. Set up a schedule – It’s great to have a specific schedule to tweet or reply to some queries. This way, you have time set up for your social media and your business.
9. Review what’s working and what’s not – Growing a business means experimenting and trying some things. Sometimes, not everything will work out. You have to keep note of that and change your approach. See what will work best for every situation
10. Be interesting – Be interesting and engaging through all your tweets. If you are boring then your followers won’t engage with you. Be mindful of your tweets.

Find any of these tips useful? Tell us about it on the comments below. Happy Tweeting!

The post Attracting The Right Kinds Of Twitter Followers appeared first on Ben Francia.

Gary Vaynerchuk has a tip on how to expand your reach with each tweet you make. View the presentation below:

Now that’s been settled, improve your tweet’s reach every single time. Let more people know what you have to say. Try it!

The post The Number One Twitter Mistake Most People Make appeared first on Ben Francia.

SMH – (Shaking My Head) Twitter users use this when they read something that they don’t actually agree with or showing their disgusts.

H/T – (Hat Tip) This is used when Twitter users share something they heard from someone else. It is mainly used to give credit.

MT – (Modified Tweet) This is somehow similar with RT or Retweeting. The main difference is you us MT when you shorten the original tweet to fit it and your comment in just 140 characters.

TBH – (To Be Honest)  If you want to express your honest opinion on something, use this acronym at the end of your statement.

ICYMI – (In Case You Missed It) Updates and sharing of information is so fast nowadays that it is just easy to miss some of them. This acronym can help inform your followers of important news that they may have missed.

Next time somebody uses these acronyms, you can avoid being lost in translation!

The post Twitter Acronyms And Their Definitions appeared first on Ben Francia.

What was your reaction the first time somebody retweeted your post? Probably excited because someone noticed you.

Not to be serious but, as a tip, try using hashtags of your niche or anything related to it, or why not create your own original hashtag. Maybe you want to check if you have a strong Twitter password as well, just to avoid hacked accounts.

Give it a try. What’s the worse thing that could happen? Well, I hope not what happened on the comic strip above.

The post Just For Fun Fridays: Maybe you’re doing something wrong? appeared first on Ben Francia.

Twitter is one of the fastest and updating social media platform there is. In just seconds you easily get updates from your friends, new agencies, and favorite celebrities.

Aside for information bank, Twitter can also help you with your online business. You can use this platform to give your clients instant updates as well as interact with them. It’s also a great way to answer queries and receive feedback.

But before that, here’s a vocabulary list on everything you would need to understand Twitter:

1. Twitter Handle – This is also known as a username. It is the name you select to represent yourself on Twitter, mine is benfrancia. One tip, you may want your Twitter handle similar to your website or blog. Think of your branding as well. This will also help your followers to find you in Twitter.

2. To Follow – this means to subscribe to someone‘s updates on Twitter. Simply the “Follow” button on that specific person‘s Twitter page, which can be found at http://twitter.com/USERNAME. (Insert the specific person‘s username into the URL, for example, http://twitter.com/benfrancia). Once you follow someone, their updates will be displayed on your Twitter homepage.

3. To Follow Back – It is subscribing to the updates of someone who has recently started following you. You’d often see who’s started to follow you in the Interactions tab. You’re not required to follow everyone back, but many people like to be followed too. And this is great if you have the same interest as well.

4. Follower – A person who has subscribed to receive your updates. You can see the total number of your followers on your Twitter profile page.

5. Update – This is most commonly as tweet. The limit for each tweet is 140- characters. You can already say a lot of things with 140-characters. But if you need more than 140-characters, you can easily shorten your tweet through https://bitly.com/.

6. @Reply – This is a message sent from one Twitter user to another that can be seen publicly. You can do this by putting @USERNAME anywhere within the body of the tweet. For example, if you want to interact with me, simply type in @benfrancia along with your message.

7. Direct Message (or DM) – This is a private message sent from one Twitter user to another. Do this by either clicking the “Message” link on your profile or typing D USERNAME. This is the email/inbox form of Twitter, the difference is your message can only be 140 characters long. So you may have to write several DMs if you have a long message.

8. Twitter Stream – This is a list of a person‘s real-time updates. Every time you post an update, it goes into your Twitter stream, which is found on your account page also at http://twitter.com/USERNAME. Each person who has Twitter also has a Twitter stream.

9. Tweet-Up – An event specifically organized for Twitter users to meet up and network, usually informally.

10. Hashtag (#) – This is a Twitter tagging system used to aggregate the conversation surrounding an event, topic, or theme. Hashtags can easily be created by combining a # with a word, acronym, or phrase (#WORD) and used as a tag within tweets. This is a great way to search for people with the same interest as yours too.

11. Retweet (or RT) – To repeat what someone else has already tweeted. People do this if someone has said something especially valuable and they want their own followers to see the relevant information too.

Example: RT @USERNAME: Check out this cool website.

12. Twitter Lists – Public lists that any Twitter user can create. Twitter Lists generate Twitter streams that include specific Twitter users. At times we use this to categorize users who give out related, valuable information. One example is organizing a list of international news agencies.

13. Trending Topics – These are words, phrases, or hashtags that are popular (trending) on Twitter at a given time. These topics can be seen on the right-hand side of your Twitter homepage.

14. Promoted Tweets – Tweets that have been supported and promoted by paid marketing efforts. They are the pay-per-click version in Twitter.

Now you know all these definitions, you can understand how Twitter operates and the different aspects of it. Go ahead and familiarize yourself with this social media, maybe even promote your services as well as handle feedback immediately. However you want to use it, just enjoy.

The post Twitter Talk: A Twitter Vocabulary appeared first on Ben Francia.

Twitter’s been a very helpful tool in an Internet marketer’s arsenal. Its relatively simple interface and the various tools that abound in the Interwebs to automate the way you engage with your following makes Twitter something you MUST have.

Of course, Twitter’s so much more than a chatting interface that helps you connect with your prospects. It’s a way for you to provide the value that your audience needs and wants in 140 characters or less. If used properly, you can nourish your relationship with your audience and get a laser focused audience that hangs on to your every word.

Of course, all these perks come at a price, namely: Time and Value. You won’t build a valuable Twitter following overnight, neither will it trust you in a matter of days. Here are a few things you should do to be able to provide them the value they need and keep them wanting more.

• Define your target audience – You need to know for sure who it is that you want to follow you in accordance to the needs of your business. A lot of Internet marketers make that mistake of publicly telling the people to follow them or following any random stranger. The result?

Nothing significant.

Even in you have a relatively large following, if you don’t have a target audience, you’re bound to fail in terms of getting people to sign up for your list or purchase whatever it is you’re selling. So list down what your target needs or wants, how they talk to each other, what their perceptions are of your business and you’ll be off to a good start in defining a target audience.

• Create a list of 50 topics – Remember how I told you to define your audience? This is how you’re supposed to start. List down at least 50 topics about your business or niche that appeal to your audience. It could be a little burdensome, but it’s actually going to take a load off your back soon enough.

These 50 topics will be the search terms you use to find the best blogs that publish your kind of content. Why is this of great use to you? Consider this: You are a marketer who’s trying to get people to buy your stuff. To be able to do successfully so, you need to earn their trust first and become a figure of authority. The key to being an authority is letting them know that you know your stuff by providing content from related blogs and from your blog as well.

• Schedule tweets every hour – It’s important that you schedule your tweets every hour so they frequently appear in your followers’ respective news feeds. Tweeting with an interval of 2 hours may not guarantee your post being seen by your audience and tweeting in mere minutes might flood their feeds which could be considered an annoyance. An hourly tweet or so is a safe bet.

As for automation, there’s TweetDeck, MarketMeSuite and Hootsuite that stand as three of the most popular tools that posts for you in given time intervals.

• Engage only when necessary – Talk with your audience publicly under only two conditions:

1. They thank you in such a way that a response is needed and;

2. They ask you a question that demands a response.

Under any other circumstances, it’s best that you send a DM or acknowledge the tweet some other time in the future instead. Replying takes time and you don’t have all the time in the world to read the stuff they tell you. Just remain focus on your goal to provide value to them and that’s the thanks they’ll get.

• Schedule chat ups with branded hashtags– Chat-ups are essentially tweets that allow users to respond or retweet your tweets. You don’t have to reply to their tweets, as mentioned earlier, but you may need to reply as per mentioned conditions. Chat ups allow you to make users interact among themselves and in the same time use your hashtag as a reference.

What this does is increase your presence in Twitter’s trends which makes you influential in many ways. Make sure you use a hashtag that has the name of your brand in it to increase your brand awareness efforts.

These are a few things you might want to consider when you’re starting out with your Twitter campaign.

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