Where to Find Great Content to Attract Twitter Followers

In the race for social networking dominance, Twitter may have lost to Facebook in terms of total users – only 7% of the U.S. population has a Twitter account, compared to 41% for Facebook.

But Twitter is ahead of Facebook in one key area: brand awareness. A recent survey by Edison Research and Arbitron found that active Twitter users – those who access the site at least once a month – are more than 3 times as likely as other social network users to follow brands: 51% vs. 16%.

The survey also found that 42% of active Twitter users say they use Twitter to learn about products and services, and 41% say they contribute opinions about products and services.

The key to successfully using Twitter as a marketing tool for your business lies in your ability to do three things: attract followers, foster brand awareness and finally, get them to buy your products or services.

How do you do that?

Though it may be tempting, you can’t tweet about how great your products or services are all the time.  That would just come off as spam, and I don’t know anyone who likes spam!  Remember,  Twitter is a social networking tool. And that means, it’s all about building relationships with your followers. You know the old saying, “People do business with people they like.”

To get people to like you on Twitter, follow the 80/20 rule. Share interesting news, helpful tips, fun facts, a personal tidbit or two, 80% of the time and advertise your business 20% of the time.

If you’re unsure where to find relevant, interesting content to share with your Twitter followers, here are three suggestions:

1. Alltop – This website collects the headlines of the latest stories from the best websites and blogs that cover a particular topic. Then it displays the five most recent headlines of the information sources as well as their first paragraph. Their topics run the gamut from adoption to zoology. Your challenge is to find topics of interest to your target audience, and then share those links with them.
2. Stumbleupon – Another site with excellent content. Stumbleupon helps users discover and share websites of interest to them, matched to their personal interests, and recommended by the user’s friends or others with similar interests.
3. Smartbrief – This company hand-picks the most relevant, important news from 25 key industries, summarizes it, links to the original sources and delivers it to you, free of charge, in an e-newsletter format.

If you have any additional questions about using Twitter to promote your business, contact Gloria@gloriarand.com.