7 Proven Ways to Build Strong Relationships on Twitter

And yes, it’s all about building relationships

Like email, a lot of social media platforms have been infiltrated by spammers. I am sure you have seen them, especially on Twitter. Very annoying! However, if you are an avid online marketer or a hobbyist, you know that one of the ways to get traffic to your website is through social media. Note though, good and regular and interested traffic can be had through your ‘relationships’ via social media. For the purpose of this article, I will focus on building relationships on Twitter.

1 Use your real name and picture on your Twitter Profile People like to know who they’re dealing with. If you use your company logo, instead of your picture, it looks commercial. If you use the picture of some cartoon character or a celebrity and you are not the celebrity, it looks spammy. Keep it real, keep it personal. You will not only build more relationships on Twitter, but you will also gain more followers.

2 Follow people in your niche On a business level, this means following people in your industry. On a personal level, it means following people from your demographic. You can break this down any way you like. So you can follow Jamaicans if you’re from Jamaica. You can follow people in the Real Estate industry, if you’re in Real Estate Marketing. You can follow business coaches if you’re a business coach. I am sure you get the idea. This just makes sense. Your followers will be more responsive to your tweets if they share the same business, demographics, hobbies, etc.

3 Start Retweeting I am a big fan of the Retweet (RT). You RT someone by placing the acronym, RT before someone’s Twitter name preceded by the ‘@’ symbol, then the persons tweet. So for instance if I tweeted a popular quote and someone wanted to ReTweet it. It would look like this: “RT @StephTreasure Never, never, never give up. Winston Churchill”. The RT does a few things when used, namely:

- Exposes the ReTweet and the person who wrote the original tweet to the ReTweeter’s following
- Shows that you took note of the original tweet, saw value and decided to share it with your following
- Friendly gesture

When I start following someone in my niche, I read through their tweets that show up on the first page, then I look at their profile and click through to their website or blog. If I see value on their blog right away, I will tweet it via RT. It’s my way of getting the person to take notice that I have followed them and like their content.

4 Take the relationship beyond Twitter This point also stresses the importance of following people in your niche. When you follow people in your niche, you naturally are interested in what they are doing outside of twitter. So their blog or website naturally would contain information that you are interested in. I subscribe to the newsletter or RSS feeds of a few of my Twitter followers with whom I share similar interests. So when they make an update to their blog or release a newsletter I am automatically notified via email. When this happens, I read through the blog post and if moved, leave a comment. After a while, if not right away, the person will remember you from Twitter.

5 Tweet personal updates Admittedly, I am not a big fan of this one. I am still trying to warm up to the idea of sharing things about my personal life with my social networks and weekly ezine. However, I have seen these tweets get more response and attention and enhance my social media relationships. It really works.

6 Tweet VALUE!!! Do not spam Twitter. Tweet quotes, news headlines, new videos you have posted, new EzineArticles submissions, blog posts. Just make sure you add value to your network. This does not have to be time consuming. Most of what I just mentioned can be automated. EzineArticles.com, YouTube.com, Blogs and tools like SocialOomph.com allow you to automatically post updates and schedule updates to Twitter.

7 Be a regular Try to be active on Twitter. Go on at least once per day and do a personal update. Schedule your other updates ahead of time, like motivational quotes, success tip of the day, fitness tip of the day, diet tip of the day or something related to your niche.

How do these relationships help? Building relationships on Twitter has many advantages including helping to build your list, increasing and leveraging your visibility and credibility, JV partnerships, affiliate relationships and I’m sure there’s more. Twitter is a social networking tool. And just like networking in real life, online networking has endless possibilities.

Happy Tweeting!