Last week, we looked at how you can use Facebook to cultivate relationships for your network marketing business. While Facebook is the top social media network, it isn’t the most friendly for discovering people who might be interested in your networking business based on their conversation. That’s why we’re going to look at Twitter in this post as another social network to use when cultivating relationships for your networking business on social media.
Why Twitter?
Twitter may not have the audience that Facebook does, but 320 million active monthly users is nothing to scoff at. With Twitter, it’s not the number of users that counts, but rather the ways of connecting with them. On Facebook, you have to hope that you can find new people who are active in groups or starting conversations on public pages.
On Twitter, however, most people allow their tweets to be shared publicly since the only option is to have all public or all private updates. Twitter makes it easy to search for those conversations by keyword.
Best of all, you can talk to anyone who makes their updates public on Twitter, regardless of whether they are following you. So unlike Facebook, you don’t have to wait until someone becomes your friend or joins a group you belong to in order to have a conversation with them. Everyone is pretty much open game, from local connections to celebrities.
On top of that, you can even advertise to specific audiences on Twitter without knowing their email address, phone number, or waiting for them to visit your website first. We’ll show you how to do that later in the post. Now, let’s look at how to use Twitter for your network marketing business.
Before You Get Started
Before you start relationship building on Twitter for your network marketing business, your first goal will be to ensure your Twitter profile is up to date. Fortunately, this is a pretty simple task, even if you haven’t used it too personally in the past.
Here’s what you should focus upon when preparing your Twitter profile for network marketing.
Have the Profile of a Real Person
Similarly to Facebook, people on Twitter like to talk to other people as opposed to other businesses. Hence, having a Twitter profile with your personal photo, name, and bio will count when connecting with new people. All you need is a good cover photo, professional headshot, and a 160-character line about yourself that incorporates what you do.
Twitter makes it super simple for everyone to discover you by keyword, so make sure your profile includes a mix of things that people would be looking for if they happened to look for someone in your line of business.
Clean Up Your Tweets
If you haven’t used Twitter wisely in the past, you can quickly clean up your updates by looking for the current tweet-deleting tools and apps online. They will get rid of all of your tweets in a few runs (depending on how many tweets you have).
If you don’t have many, and not all of them are bad, your best bet will be to load your Twitter timeline and do it manually by clicking on the three dots at the bottom of your tweets to find the delete option.
Organize Contacts with Twitter Lists
If you plan to start following lots of people on Twitter, it’s good to organize them using Twitter lists in order to manage the flow of conversation. After a while, it will be almost impossible to see everyone you follow in the news feed often enough to make casual conversation.
Hence, you can create Twitter lists for your friends, family, partners, customers, and other connections. You can make your lists private so that only you know how you have classified people. Do this by going to your profile and clicking on the Lists.
In the right column, you will see the option to create a new list. Once you have created your list, you can add people to it by going to their profile and clicking on the settings wheel to add them to one or more lists.
Then, you can use your Twitter lists when you are in the mood to see updates by specific groups of people to start conversations accordingly.
Now that your profile and your lists are ready, how do you cultivate relationships on Twitter? Here’s how to do it, starting with the people you know first, then expanding to new relationships.
Bring Offline Connections Online
Twitter allows you to search for people you know using the Find Friends feature. Here, you will be able to connect to your email address books from various platforms to see if people you know are on Twitter.
If you have a list of email addresses you’d like to check to see if they are on Twitter, but they are not in your email address book, you can export them from the source you have them in and import them into one of the above supported email applications. Use this tactic to find people in your customer database, people on your email marketing list, people you are connected to on LinkedIn (export those contacts here), people on your local sports league, and others you know.
Check Out People You May Know
Once you start following people on Twitter, Twitter will suggest people you should follow on your Who to follow page based on common interests (bio keywords) who people you follow are following.
Search for People Who Like Another Twitter Profile
Think about local businesses you go to or local groups where you know a lot of people, but don’t know them well enough to have their email address or mutual friends. Find their Twitter profile and look at their list of followers.
This should help you find some additional people to connect with based on common interests.
Peruse People Your Friends Follow
Since there is no way to make the people you follow private, you can easily peruse the list of people your friends are following to find more people who you know well or know through your friend that you could get to know better.
Form New Relationships
In addition to connecting with those you already know on Twitter, you should look for opportunities to create new relationships on Twitter as well. Here are some ways to do just that.
Search for Conversations
Know what your ideal customer or partner would be talking about on Twitter? Use the Twitter search box to find them based on keywords they would use in their discussions.
You may even be able to find people specifically looking for someone in your line of work!
As you find the right people, follow them, add them to the appropriate Twitter lists, and for tweets like the ones above, reply to their tweets right away. Even if the tweet is a few days old, you still might be the first person to get in touch with them.
If location is an issue in your network marketing business, use Twitter’s advanced search to pinpoint discussions within your area. You may get less results, but you will get the ones that are most likely to benefit your network marketing business.
With both the regular search box or the advanced search form, once you have found a search that works, be sure to save it so that you can run it again on a regular basis.
Alternatively, if you use a tool like HootSuite or Tweetdeck to manage your Twitter account, you can save the search in a column inside those tools for constant monitoring. These tools will also make it easier to monitor people you have organized into Twitter lists, so they are highly recommended.
Advertise
As mentioned earlier, you can advertise to a target group of people on Twitter using their usernames. This will allow you to grow your follower base with people most likely to become a key asset in your network marketing business. In particular, you will want to look for people who have specific keywords in their bio, live in a specific location, and have a large following (if you are looking for referrals).
Two tools that will help you export the Twitter username list you will need for advertising are Followerwonk and SocialBro. Premium account users of both of these tools will allow you to search for people with the right criteria and export their information.
Once you have a list of over 500 people, you can upload it to a Twitter tailored audience and promote your account to those people for more followers.
Alternatively, you can promote a tweet to that tailored audience that encourages discussion or focuses on getting more customers or consultants under your wing, based on the type of people you searched for and exported.
Cultivate Your Relationships
Once you have started connecting with people on Twitter, your goal is to strengthen those relationships. Just like on Facebook, you can’t do this by posting about your business 24/7, something that will ultimately get your account suspended or deactivated. Instead, you have to be real with people and engage with them. Here’s how to use Twitter effectively for your network marketing business.
Jump in Discussions
You can use your Twitter lists to engage in discussion with specific groups of people at a time, or use Twitter search to find people discussing a specific topic and jump in by simply replying to them. Assuming they check their notifications, people will see your tweet anytime you include their @username in it.
If you start a tweet with someone’s @username, it will usually hide it from your main timeline and the news feed of most of your followers. If you want to ensure that the most people see a tweet, you can put a period in front of their username (. @username) or start the tweet off with another word (Hey @username).
Answer Questions
If you’re not feeling comfortable with jumping into random discussions with complete strangers, start by focusing on finding questions and answering them. They don’t have to be about your networking business, but just questions asked by people who have the potential to become involved in it.
The goal is to help new people get to know you. Once they see that you are someone who is a real person, they will be more interested in you and then immediately (or later down the road) interested in your business too.
Connect Privately
If you see a post from a connection that can segue into your networking marketing business, reach out to that person privately. On Twitter, some people allow anyone to contact them by direct message, while others only allow those they follow to do so. You can find out by visiting their profile and looking to see if you can tweet to and message them.
Click on the Message button to send them a private message.
Invite Them to Your Facebook Group
If you have people on Twitter that are connected to your business as a customer or partner, but not in your Facebook group yet, invite them by sharing a link to your Facebook group with them in a tweet or privately in a direct message. This will help you build a closer relationship with these people while simultaneously growing the Facebook group for your network marketing business.
Connecting with people on multiple networks may feel like overkill, but in reality, it will ensure that you don’t lose touch with them. If they eventually become inactive on one social network, you will still be able to connect with them on the other.
Why Twitter Works
Using Twitter to build and cultivate relationships works because of the less personal nature of the Twitter platform in general. Because people are not as likely to be sharing photos of their children or talking about the super personal details of their lives, they are more likely to be sharing their discussions publicly. This means they are more open to connecting with new people like you, and ultimately learning more about what you have to offer in your network marketing business.