One fundamental flaw in the way that most people approach Twitter marketing is that they use tools intended to get as many followers as they can, with the idea that if they have lots of followers they have lots of people to sell stuff to. The problem is there are lots of people all doing the same thing, so there is a disconnect between the selling and buying markets.
I just don’t have much confidence in tools that are intended to automatically build up large lists of Marketing Consultants followers. For instance, I looked at one yesterday that visited other Twitter users’ pages, based on a seed keyword, and automatically follows the people who those users follow. The advantage of this type of strategy is that it is exponential in nature. In other words, every time you follow someone new, you gain a whole new group of followees based on the users who that person is following. The disadvantage is that the further away you go from the people you originally followed, the less relevant your followees are going to be.
Let’s say, for example, that you are a business attorney in Houston wanting to use Twitter to promote your law firm. It would be a good idea to follow business owners or managers in the Houston area. You could start by following people based on the keyword “Houston.” If you then follow all of the people who those people follow, you’re going to be moving farther away from your core market in terms of relevance. Over time, if you keep doing this, you’re going to have a lot of followees and followers that do not have anything to do with your core target market.
In some instances, depending on your business objectives, this may be fine. A lot of people are adopting the mass marketing strategy of getting as many followers as they can so they can promote affiliate products to them. Maybe this strategy will work – I don’t really know. But for any business with a defined target market, you will be better off concentrating your efforts on a smaller group of Twitter users who are potential customers or referral sources.
One Twitter follower building application that I do like is the Friend Finder capability in TweetLater. It does not work by following anyone en masse. Instead, based on a group of keywords that you pre-configure, every day it looks for users who it believes are relevant. You have three days to approve or deny those users. After three days, the program will either discard those users or follow them, depending on how you have it configured. I like this approach much better. It is a slower approach, but will result in a much more relevant base of followers.