You have your Twitter account up and you are sharing valuable content. Everything is going well. Now, people are starting to follow you. Excellent! You want to share your content and spread news about your products/services with your followers.
What is the next step? As a business owner, you are going to want to follow most of your followers back. This acknowledges them and allows them to send you direct messages. If you don’t follow back, it tells them they are not important enough to you to be willing to listen to you privately.
One thing you can do is ask your followers how you can help them. If a follower mentions you in a direct way, it’s a good idea to reply and if they retweet your content, you can thank or respond to them.
Another way to engage your new follower is to ask him a question to start a conversation. It’s not good enough just to say thank you for following. You are building a network and using Twitter to create meaningful interactions.
It’s important to follow social etiquette on Twitter so if a follower sends you a direct message, reply in kind. Check your inbox on your account every day. Once you follow your follower, you have access to sending messages to him and it makes business sense to take that extra step. Ask your follower a question so that he is more inclined to respond to you.
If you find you are getting inundated with new followers, you can create a special list for the newbies. For a few days, you might want to pay extra special attention to a person’s tweets to get a better idea about where to relocate them, based on activity and topics of interest.
To create a list, click on Lists on your profile page. Then click on create a new list. Enter the name of your list, a short description of the list, and select if you want the list to be private (only accessible to you) or public (anyone can subscribe to the list). Then save it!
From there, you can cultivate new relationships after you have a solid relationship with your followers. You can ask your follower who he/she likes most on his Twitter feed. Then it’s time to talk to their followers.
As I mentioned earlier, you want to follow MOST of the people who follow you as a business owner. Who should you possibly not follow back? Twitter is not just accumulating as many followers as possible. It’s about interacting with your customers, industry leaders and fans.
If a follower is just tweeting a syndicated feed of posts, he is only going to pad your follower count. Might not be worth it. Some Twitter accounts are like spam and you don’t want to follow those. For example, if the new follower is following several hundred people but has fewer than a hundred followers and has not sent out any tweets, that is a red flag.