The 5 C’s of Following People on Twitter: Customers

Businesses looking to engage new individuals on Twitter are often at a loss when determining which people and companies to follow, and how to find them. This is especially true for businesses just getting started with social marketing. The question of why to engage in social marketing has largely been answered—it opens up potential new markets, and provides a way to build deeper, more trusted relationships with an increasingly vocal customer base. But when it comes to the mechanics of social marketing, there are few answers to be found for the questions of how to engage, and whom to engage with.

Of course, JitterJam can help you with the process to find people to follow, but you still have to judge whom to follow. In this series of five blog posts, we’ll give you the rationale and steps in finding people to follow on Twitter—and getting more people to engage with your business.

The Five C’s of Following People on Twitter

1. Customer: Your current and potential customers
2. Credibility: People who provide you with an opportunity to learn
3. Content: Great stuff that your followers will love to read
4. Community: Business partners, channel partners, and other members of your business community
5. Competition: Keep an eye on what they’re doing

The First C: Customer

Twitter provides your business with a great opportunity to find out who your customers are—AND to develop direct communications with them. You also have the opportunity to find potential customers through searches and outreach. How?

Ask. Ask your customers to follow your business. Don’t forget to follow them back. Social media is all about being social, being part of the conversation. Make sure you ask on all your consumer-facing communications—on your website, in your advertising, on your collateral, prominently on your outbound promotional and personal emails. Create a fun graphic, or just say “Follow us on Twitter” with your Twitter ID and/or a link to your Twitter ID.

Search For Your Business’ Fans. Search Twitter for conversations that include your business’ name, brand and/or product and follow the people who are engaged in those conversations. People might be mentioning your brand, but if they’re talking about you and not to you, you might miss that opportunity to engage with your customer. JitterJam’s powerful social search function finds and saves these conversations for you and enables you to review them and act upon them when it’s convenient for you. Take the opportunity to engage these people in direct conversations (@ messages are nice—they’re public, and they enable others to see you engaging with your customers).

Get Permission. If you’re going to use Twitter as a marketing channel as well as a communications channel, make sure that you ask permission to market to them through Twitter before you send a Twitter direct message (DM) or @ message with a promotional message. Using best practices to market to consumers—regardless of the channel—is essential to building trust with your current and prospective customers. JitterJam’s Make Me Happy™ permission marketing system makes this easy and puts the consumer in control.

The next blog post in this series will cover the Second C: Credibility

The JitterJam multichannel marketing platform is an excellent way to take full advantage of these Five C’s, and to turn social conversations into trusted customer relationships. For a demo, click here. Or, to start a month-long free trial immediately, click here.