How to Use Twitter for Developing Valuable Business Relationships

Posted on 25. May, 2009 by Monique in Articles

twitter-bird-1Are struggling to figure out how Twitter fits into your business model?  Have you read or heard that twittering is good for your business, but you are frustrated because you are not getting the results you want?

Well, if you have had this experience I would invite you to reflect back on the reason why you joined Twitter. 

Why Use Twitter for Business?

Twitter is a means to communicate with other people in an abbreviated format.  You can share your current activities, thoughts, and experiences.  As a business strategy, it’s also a medium to connect with individuals who may be interested in your products, services, or profession.  That seems like a good concept, but in the excitement of emerging into the Twittersphere, signing up and getting settled in; it’s easy to get distracted.  You may have decided to setup some Twitter automation services to automatically follow or unfollow.  But, if your focus is adding value to your business this may be a high price for convenience.

What is the Value of a Follow?

If you decided to automatically follow you may be losing sight of the intangible value of a follow.  I made the same mistake on my personal Twitter account and had to do the following assessment to re-calibrate my strategy.

My Twue Life Story – The Short Version

I started twittering two weeks ago with two separate accounts one personal account and one account for my blog Lean Six Sigma Source.  As soon as I joined, I began following my favorite bloggers, authors, etc.  Then later setup autofollow on personal account, but disabled autofollow in blog account.  Well, my follower count blew up on my personal account.  People were coming from everywhere following me.  I thought it was cool. Until I realized, that I lacked interaction with the people I started autofollowing.  I saw fewer tweets from the people I was really interested in.  I began to feel lost in a twitterstream and frustrated until. . .

I read the most recent post from Yaro Starak titled, “You Are As Good As the People Around You.”  The two of the key takeaway points were. . . 

1.  Become a leader in your industry by being better, more prolific, and more helpful than everyone else in your industry (this will take time).

2.  Find people who are equally motivated, talented, and committed as you – your current online peers – and form relationships with them now.

Then, it hit me that I was doing this all wrong.  I realized how could I be a leader if I’m following everyone and their mother?  Or if I want to connect with others I view as valuable, how can I see what they are saying if I have a lot of noise or waste in the process.  I had to figure out how to reduce the noise to let the value re-surface and focus vital few.  As a result, I dropped from following 640 to following 19 twitters. 

Here’s what I did and what you can do to come back into the light, build valuable connections, and look forward to tweeting with purpose.

Five Step Value Added Action Plan

1. Disable Autofollow

2. Assess Which Followers Have Interacted You via Direct Message or @Reply

3. If Still No Interaction With That Segment In Your Following Group – Determine If You Believe The Connection Is Still Valuable

If connection Is Still Valuable – Keep Following

4. Move Valuable Twitters You Are Following into VIP list via Hummingbird

5. Unfollow Everyone Else That’s Not VIP

The Result – I saw the sunlight.  The clouds parted and the sun came out. Without all the noise I could actually see and hear what all my valuable following group members or VIPs were saying. Which was something I couldn’t do as of this morning.  This is my strategy now and as Joel Comm states in his bestselling book, Twitter Power: How To Dominate Your Market One Tweet at a Time - ”There are no rules.”  So you have to find what works for you and implement your own action plan based on your business goals and objectives.  Align your strategy with those points in mind. 

Remember, you have to interact to build relationships or prove you are worthy of following.  Lead my making valuable contributions and make genuine efforts to help others in the process.

Take time to ask yourself – What do you value most?

Tell me by commenting to this post – How Has Twitter Helped Your Business?

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2 Responses to “How to Use Twitter for Developing Valuable Business Relationships”

  1. Mitch

    13. Jun, 2009

    Very nicely written, and on point. First, where did you find all those Twitter birds? :-)

    I’ve never gone through the process of totally weeding out everyone I’m following. Luckily, since I looked at every person before I followed them to begin with, I felt I had a feeling of how they were going to use Twitter, and what their primary focus was. And, because of TweetDeck, I can segregate those people who I want to make sure I see everything they put out from the rest of the crowd. I do that mainly for time, because when I have extra, I then will look at the larger group for nuggets I might have missed, and sometimes find some pretty good stuff.

    Thanks for following me, and for sharing this post.

  2. AG

    24. Oct, 2009

    Good summary. I suppose my presence on Twitter has been stagnate as of late. Very busy with life changes these days. Additionally, I had a nasty encounter with Twitter Gestapo. It wasn’t all bad, as I discovered indenti.ca, open alternative to Twitter. All I really wanted out of Twitter was a means to connect with people of like minds and passions. I’m a geek and I found lots of other geeks on indenti.ca. My Twitter use will likely be sporadic at best.

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