Building Your Twitter Network Allows You to Go Viral

I have many clients ask me what does Twitter actually do for them and why should they consider using it. There are several important reasons for having a Twitter presence but the most important one is so you can “Go Viral”.

Let me expound on this a bit and then I’ll talk about the other reasons you should consider “doing” Twitter. First when you build your following to several hundred to a thousand followers, when you tweet a link, a special event, a new service, a new flash, you have the ability to tap into the power of viral marketing like never before.

When you tweet it to your followers, some of your followers will retweet your item to their followers, some will visit the link to view the service or other information and create their own unique tweets about it. Just think, if you have 400 followers and 50 followers retweet your note to their followers and if they each have a hundred followers that means your message has been sent to 5,400 live people. The magnitude can actually be much higher than this and you have the ability to reach thousands of people with your news.

Now this does not mean that every tweet you do will be “retweet-worthy” but if you have news, a special event, coupon, whitepaper the posibilites to tap in to a huge network by word of mouth without paying a cent is valuable in more ways than monetarily.

Now what are the some of the other reasons you should use Twitter? Well here’s a short list:

1. Bing is testing indexing tweets for some accounts. If this becomes big on Bing, the other search engines will follow. The link possibilities for SEO and viral marketing are huge and really very important to consider.

2. The interaction with prospects, clients, and others in your industry is incredibly valuable intel that can be used for strategically positioning your brand on the Web and fine tuning your online message. People like to connect and will use Twitter to connect with you, the voice of your firm, to interact.

3. Using Twitter you can drive traffic to a white paper, page link, or news story. Better yet is that if these items reside on your own website you drive your own free traffic. This is really like a viral component but also a first level traffic consideration.

4. Use Twitter because it is hot. If you are supposed to be a leader in your industry to not be on Twitter, embracing the hottest new technology on the Web, may put you at a disadvantage when a prospect compares you to your own competition. It’s all about perception isn’t it?

5. Use Twitter to create bridges with competitors and others in your industry. I have found that people I thought were tough competitors actually became colleagues and shared information freely on Twitter. Although typically it starts out that you follow all your competitors to spy on them. But it usually turns out that you can have a friendly exchange with them and some of these folks can be the very best when it comes to retweeting your own news due to a sympathetic connection that you build with @ replies and DM correspondence. There is real value in tapping into your own industry network. You just never know where a strategic partnership may be able to be built.

If you are ready to check out Twitter, consider our Twitter Implementation services, Twitter Executive, and Twitter Junior ghost writing services.