We at Downright Media love Social Media. As a business owner, Twitter gives you the opportunity to interact with your industry and customers in a way that has never existed before in history. However, It can have a downside. Especially if you are the type of person that can get distracted easily. So we’ve gone ahead and created this executable action plan for you.

Get Clicky

Go to GetClicky.com and create an account for your site. Get Clicky will let you monitor and analyze your web traffic. You can also use Google Analytics if you like. The important thing is have this website traffic data. Without it, you are wasting your time and effort. 

Growing Your Twitter Following 

Twitter usage has been exploding over the last year years. In fact Google and other search engines think so highly of Twitter that they have started to include realtime tweets into search results. The problem is that Twitter can seem like a huge conversation about nothing. This is why most people don’t understand nor get Twitter. They say things like “Why do I care about what so and so had for lunch?” and that’s true. 

The opportunity with Twitter is knowing how to read the signal from the noise. Meaning, you should be able to find the conversations that matter to you. So if you love Indie Rock Bands from Brooklyn, you should find that conversation, listen in or contribute to it. It’s that simple. Twitter is brilliant finding real-time conversations on whatever matters to you. 

Okay so let’s move into growing your Twitter Following. 

• Use the “Advanced Search” on Search.Twitter.com for Your Research
• Follow Influencers in Your Chosen Field
• Add friends ( find like minded people)
• Remove Friends ( 36 hours if they haven’t friended you)
• Interact & Engage 
• Rinse & Repeat

Follow all the influencers in your field. Start adding people that follow these Twitter influencers and are like minded, remember Twitter has many automated account or Twitter Bots that just ReTweet things and don’t add anything to the conversation. Stay away from these guys, you only want real people.

Don’t go crazy and add too many, Twitter will ban your account. Remove friends that haven’t followed you back, give them about a 36 hour window. Again don’t go crazy here, Twitter will ban you if you unfollow too fast. Interact and engage this new audience, you have to be genuine. Whatever topic you pick should be your passion, so this should be easy for you. Lastly Rinse & Repeat. 

Following this game-plan will increase your Twitter following and with time will make you an influencer. The best thing about become an influencer is that your Twitter following will start to grow organically. People will start to follow you automatically, which makes you even more of an influencer in the eyes of others.

Now make sure that your Twitter page leads to your site. You basically want your Twitter traffic to generate leads into your sales funnel. It’s okay if you don’t have a product or service to sell. Just have the ability to send your Twitter followers to something. It could be your blog, your resume or anything else that you want to promote and use to solidify your influencer status. 

By continually working on this action plan, you will increase your Twitter friends, followers, fans, influencer status and your bottom-line. 

Let us know what you think? Continue the conversation in our comments section.

So we know that we have many social networks that you can sign up your small business for. This phenomenon of Social Marketing is here to stay, and if used right you have a huge opportunity to really grow your business. Let’s look at the two networks that everyone needs to use right now. The current heavy weight king of social networks is Facebook. This is the biggest, that baddest, and most established website in the social scene. You can pretty much do everything that you need to do on Facebook to grow your business, without any cost to you. 

The key with Social Marketing is engagement, and it’s no different with Facebook. If you want your fans to keep coming back to your fan page, you need to have an open line of communication with them.  

 You can easily do this by:

• Asking Questions
• Answer Questions
• Posting Photos, Videos
• Individually Thanking Your Fans
• Offering Facebook Only Specials

You also don’t want to overwhelm your fans. If your Facebook fans don’t think that your status updates are useful, they can just as easily un-fan your page. So be sure to keep this in mind before blindly posting every few minutes. Ask yourself this question before updating your status, “Does this information benefit my customers?” If it doesn’t, don’t post it.

The next big player in the social network landscape that all small business owners should use, is Twitter. I really like Twitter for the small business. Mainly because they train you to be brief and concise. Since you only have 140 characters to use, you better use them wisely. This allows you to think like a Newspaper Editor. Think about this for a moment. If you read news paper and magazine headlines, you pretty much have an idea of what the article is about. But if you need more information, or you find the headline interesting you’ll read the entire article.

You should use your Twitter status exactly like this. Give a short, very to the point headline, with a link back to a page on your site with all the information that they need to know. Twitter is very powerful to the small business owner. You can search for people that have questions and problems in your field, and help them just by answering a question. How amazing is that? 

The benefits of social marketing are many, however you shouldn’t see this activity as a task. You should see this as a genuine way to interactive with your audience. As we all know, people like doing business with people that they like.