Twitter has quickly become one of the most popular social networks. Its has revolutionized the way we communicate with like-minded people in ways we never could have predicted. Unfortunately, the notion of having ‘followers’ is lost on many people. Today we are going to look at practical ways to build lasting business relationships on this network.

Twitter Follower Count Is Not Important

The original purpose of ‘follower-count’ was to give Twitter users a quick and simple way to gauge their audience. It allows you to see how many people you are following, and how many people are following you back. Unfortunately, something terrible happened. People learned how to game the system to inflate their follower-counts.

Users started taking advantage of auto-follow services to rapidly form false relationships. The basic idea is: if you follow someone, they will auto-follow you back as long as you continue to follow them. This works for a while, as long as both participants maintain a reasonable number of relationships.

Unfortunately, both parties repeat this process until they are following so many people that they cannot reasonably keep up. Everybody is in it solely to get their own message out. Its like entering a stadium packed with shouting people, in an attempt to have your message heard.

Participants Are Not Fooling Anyone But Themselves

Now, clearly people that use this tactic feel their is some motivation for doing so. Here are two potential reasons why they may think this strategy pays off. First, they may think Twitter is just all about the numbers. If they get thousands of followers, maybe a few will actually listen to what they have to say. Second, they may think that having a high follower count acts a social proof to make them appear important. Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth.

People that use Twitter to form real business relationships can instantly spot this phony behavior. These are people that actually want to network, and would make excellent business contacts. However, they instantly lose all respect for auto-followers when they spot their follow-stats.

In other words, the people make the best business contacts ignore users engaging in this behavior. Nothing screams networking-amateur louder than someone trying to take advantage the system for personal gain. And, in a world where respect is hard to come by, this is a big reputation killer.

How To Build Real Twitter Relationships

If you want to build relationships with like-minded people, you need to focus on quality over quantity. Ignore your follower stats for a while, and focus on connecting with people that share your business goals. You may not have a massive audience, but you will have greater influence within your network of true followers.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Rick_Kettner

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On my quest to better understand Twitter, I found this article.

Twitter is one of the social media. It is pretty much a blog combined with a chat room, so, basically, it allows you a platform to get your ideas out before a group of people in real time.

Before we get into the meat of my article, I want so share something amusing that happened as I was writing it: As I was dictating the title of my article, my dictation software spat out this sentence instead: “how to use torture as a marketing tool”

Back on topic: It might be helpful to briefly discuss how Twitter works: It is sort of like a walkie talkie in that only people who have switched on to your channel (by following you) can receive your messages. In the same way, you will only receive messages from those people whose channel you have switched on (by following them.)

So, the first order of business, after you join, is to start adding people to your followers list. You will then be switched into their channel and be able to receive their messages.

Who should you follow? Anyone who is interested in your niche. So if you are promoting a make money offer, you should follow people who are interested in making money. If you are promoting a dog training book or technique, then people interested in dogs would be appropriate. Use the “find people” tool at the top right of your screen when you are logged into your Twitter account and type in keywords related to your niche. You will then pull up a list of Twitter accounts tagged with those keywords. Pick one or two accounts as a “base” account out of that list and start following people who are following that account.

I should insert a word of caution here: Twitter does have a follower limit: you may follow no more than 2000 at a time until 2000 or more people are following you. After that point, you may follow an additional number of people no greater than 110% of the number of people following you.

Accordingly, you should be careful about whom you follow. Don’t feel the need to follow someone just because they’re following you. You want followers who will actually read your tweets, and are not just following you to increase their follower count.

Once people start following you, you will be able to send them messages. What should you “tweet” about? Well there’s no hard and fast rule here, other than you should always aim to send no more than one promotional message for every three messages that you send out. The reason for this is that you want to give your followers a reason to keep following you, and constant promotional messages (like one after the other, all day long) is probably the fastest way to get “unfollowed” really quickly.

If used judiciously, Twitter can be a great marketing resource. You can use it to build a list of followers highly interested in what you have to say. That, in Internet marketing terms, is like having money in the bank.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Kathy_McGraw

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