Twitter is an amazing social media tool you can use to build your business for free. Not only that but you can so easily meet and build relationships with people who have the same interests as you or who are in your target niche. The best thing is this is all happening now, so if someone is talking about something relating to your interests or business you can connect and start forming a relationship in an instant.

In our world today things change fast and technology is rapidly evolving. Myspace was the big social media hangout not so long ago but you don’t hear about it much anymore. Twitter may not be one of the big sites a few years down the road either, who knows. But if you learn how to use social media correctly you can apply the same principles to any social media site. So easy pointers on the best ways to use Twitter for your business , how I get followers, how I find people to follow, and a few tools that I use to help make it all easier.

1. People are going to want to buy from you and do business with you if they like, know and trust you.  I myself am far more likely to do business with someone who has earned my respect and trust and has given me value.   I just don’t  buy from a random link from someone I do not know.
2.People are on Twitter to socialize and meet people, they are not there to be sold to.  If someone mentions a product from your company don’t bombard them with something like, “Hey, I see you like so and so product you should join my company, we have the best compensation plan, blah, blah ,blah.”  If you lead with something like that you are not going to earn much credibility.  Instead maybe take a moment and look at the profile of the person that mentioned your companies product and strike up a conversation with them.  Show interest in them, one of my favorite quotes is by Dale Carnegy and he says, “You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.”
3.Think of yourself as a brand and how you want to represent yourself.   Send out Tweets that support that brand.  So share your own personality, use quotes, share valuable information centered around who you are, retweet other people who talk about things related to your brand, connect with people who might be interested in the types of things that are part of your brand, write your bio to support who you are and what your brand is.
4. Work to provide useful helpful content to people.  People will gravitate to you if you are sharing content that helps them and they find of value.  Especially if you are good at consistently providing value.  If you are just sharing links to your products you are probably not going to gain much credibility.
5.Try to stand out from the crowd.   Have a photo of yourself so people see who they are connecting with.  Don’t use the standard Twitter background, either design your own or search google for “Twitter Background” and you will be able to find tons of great backgrounds you can use.  
6. Work to grow your following.  The larger your Twitter network is the more “social proof” you have that you are actually have something good to say and are worth following.  The more followers you have the more people you have to interact with and start forming relationships with.  Just don’t follow too many people at once.  I would suggest 50-100 people a day.  If you are working to build your Twitter account you don’t want to get your account taken away by following too many people at once.

So those are some great ways to use Twitter, here are some ways to get people to follow you.

1.Besides adding value and interacting you can get people to follow you based on the keywords you use in your Tweets. So if you are sharing something about fitness you can use a hash tag with the word fitness  and people searching for that word will see you and your tweet. A hash tag is the pound symbol with the word you are targeting.  So for example after your tweet you would put #fitness.
2. Add yourself to twitter directories for the search terms you want to be found for. The one I use is called We follow and I just add myself with the keywords I want to use.  There are many others out there so be sure to look for Twitter directories that you can add yourself to.

You are also going to want to know how to find people that are in your niche or Target Market, here are some ways to do that.
1. The first thing I do when I try to find followers is to think about finding people who can help me to improve my skills, people who are interested in my niche and target market, and people who have similar interest to me because those are all people that I can connect with.  When I have that figured out I go to search.twitter.com and search for keywords relating to those things and people who are Tweeting about those things.  Those are the people I follow and connect with.
2.   Another similar thing to do is find leaders in your niche or market, figure out who is following them and add their followers to the list of people you follow. 
3.Another great way to find people is to use a website called tweepsearch.com . With this website you can search for a keyword and it will bring up a list of people who have used that word in their bio.

There are a couple tools I use that help to make Twitter so much easier for me.
1. The first tool is called www.socialoomph.com.  I have found this to be a huge time saver for me, I collect interesting quotes, and articles and save them in a Word document. Then when I have a block of time I go to my socialoomph account and I upload the tweets I want to share and set them up to go out at certain times of day, the highest traffic times on Twitter.  This way I always have new useful content coming out and it frees up more time to interact with people.
2. The second tool I use is called www.hootsuite.com.  I am on here daily and have it up most all the time, running in the background if I am doing something else.  On this site you can watch everything that is going on with your Twitter account. You can monitor people who are retweeting your tweets, people who have mentioned you, you can see all the direct messages people have sent you, then you can also set up columns to monitor either people you follow or people who are talking about certain keywords you are looking for.   I have columns for several of my Twitter lists as well as keywords I like to monitor.   This tool makes it very simple to interact and watch what is going on.
3. The third tool I just found out about recently but it is awesome. It is called www.Noteleaf.comand this tool allows you to take notes on anyone you talk to on social media, email or anywhere else online. You can enter their name and take notes about them and you can also set up times to follow up with them.  It is a great tool if you have a hard time remembering people you talked to or just want to remind yourself to follow up with people you have met.
4. The last tool I use is called www.justunfollow.com.  Twitter only allows you to follow people up to a certain ratio so if you are following more people than people that follow you, you can use this tool to stop following people who are not following you back.

I hope these tips are helpful to you in using Twitter to build your network marketing business. If you have other tips or tools on how you use Twitter please leave me a comment below.  I recently gave a talk on a call on this same subject, it is basically the same information in this article but more specific to the company I am with. If you would rather listen to this information you can check it out here, there are some other great speakers with helpful information on the call.  Remember you can take this information and apply it to really any network marketing company you are with.

If this post was helpful to you I always appreciate you sharing it with your friends on the Twitter, Facebook or your favorite social network.