In this series, we’re detailing the steps you should take to find new people to follow on Twitter and to get them to engage with your business. Part one covered the First C: Customer, part two covered the Second C: Credibility, and today we’re discussing the Third C: Content.
The Third C: Content
Twitter is an extraordinary tool for sharing compelling, relevant content with your customers and prospects. The trick is to find time to write that content yourself or to find reliable sources that are regularly producing content you judge to be worth sharing. How do you do that? You can evaluate worthiness based on the pure volume of tweets about a user’s content, but that strategy ignores the fact that part of the usefulness of Twitter is its ability to help users discover and connect with new voices. Certainly you should be highlighting the users and content that are widely agreed to be worth reading, but injecting a healthy dose of fresh perspectives into your followers’ streams is a way to differentiate your business and provide added value.
Start With Who You Read, But Go Further. If they’re on Twitter, follow the blogs and news sources you’re learning from outside of the service. As we recommended when discussing the Second C: Credibility, check for “Follow Us on Twitter” links in their sidebars, footers, and headers. But go further than that! If the blog features multiple writers, examine the author list, click on the names, and see if there are links to individual profiles there. If there are not, use a Google search to conduct a search on the author’s name alongside the word Twitter. These authors may be writing for other blogs that you haven’t discovered yet.
Find New Voices & New Perspectives. Search for industry-specific keywords, and make sure to require the abbreviation http in order to bring back only those results that include links. JitterJam’s powerful social search capabilities offer decided advantages for blog consumption over RSS readers. First, if you’re already using Twitter in other areas of your business, using it as your primary content discovery tool means you’ll have one less application to open. And second, discovering the new voices we discussed above is far easier with a social search than it is with an RSS reader—with an RSS reader, your potential discoveries are limited to those new voices recommended by the bloggers you’re already following.
Make It Easy. Create a Twitter list to group all content providers together for easy access. Not everyone you follow will be a providing content on a regular basis. Group together those who are providing content regularly and make it easy for yourself to find something to tweet when you need something to tweet.
The next blog post in this series will cover the Fourth C: Community.
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.
