Are you being a twit?

Are you making the most of your Twitter account?

You may be working hard to come up with clever or relevant tweets for your target market or unique offers to send to your followers, but if you haven't put the time into acquiring and cultivating the right followers then you are just wasting your time.

If you are a B2B company and think that following medium-to-large sized businesses twitter accounts is getting you any value, then you should rethink that idea. These accounts are maintained by the communications/marketing/pr department of a company, so unless you are selling advertising or other products related to these specialties then you aren't hitting the decision maker for your product. The people you need to try and get following you are the decision makers in those companies. But how do you find those people?

• Collect business cards from networking and business meetings then check to see if these contacts are on Twitter
• Go through the Followers of the company's corporate Twitter account, the people managing the account will often like to follow members of the company
• Use other social media profile information (ie. Facebook, LinkedIn) to see if contacts have listed a Twitter account

Just following these people won't guarantee they follow you back, but it is a good way to let them know you are on Twitter and introduce yourself to them. When one of these people gets an email notifying them "John Smith is now following you!" the reaction will often be to find out who this new follower is.

Now all you have to do is keep them interested in what you have to say.

Using your blog for good or evil

Let me preface this post by saying I understand writing your own personal blog is about building your brand and promoting yourself. But if you have developed a loyal following of people reading your entries when does too much selling yourself lead to a drop off.

I have followed the Pow! Andy Nulman blog for 7 or 8 months now and there was often some very interesting entries. He would talk about recent marketing campaigns that had used the Power of surprise to catch peoples attention and thus land themselves a good return. It was thoroughly interesting and I always looked forward to his newest post until.......

He got a book deal.

Now pretty much every single post is selling his book. Now he does mask it with promotions he is offering with the book, and contests he is running, and how he is trying to Pow! sell his book. But it all feeds back to being about his book, and in reality trying to sell more copies of his book.

Fair enough. You built your blog up, you built the brand of it, you got a book deal out of it so why not use your blog readers to sell copies. But what's going to happen when those loyal readers start to tire of seemingly the same thing every day. I know I am.

It's just like an overused advertisement. Wassssssupppp!!!!