The number one tool to optimize Twitter for business use

As a social media consultant, it’s imperative to stay on top of the latest and greatest Twitter tools emerging on the market. Using tools to create efficiencies is the name of the game when building a great list of quality Twitter followers.

There has been a lot of buzz recently about autofollow and unfollow tools that allow you to build a large list of targeted followers and remove people who don’t follow you back. These can be tremendous time savers; however, which tool you choose largely depends on your Twitter strategy, as there are generally two schools of thought.

The first school of thought on using Twitter for commercial purposes suggests that you should build a large list of random followers and focus solely on the numbers. This involves following everyone on a given list, regardless of their profile, tweet history, etc. which means you’ll naturally pick up a lot of spammers along the way. While the thought of this may make you cringe, there is a method to the madness, as you’ll read below.

The second school of thought on using Twitter for commercial purposes states that it is best to select followers using specific criteria. For example, if you market a product to software developers, you would do a keyword search for all mentions of the term “software developer.” I would also do a search for Twitter profiles where the term “software developer” appears. The idea is that you will create a very specific group of followers who are most likely to become customers.

There are benefits to both strategies. What I have found to work well for my clients is to employ the first strategy to generate large numbers initially. This helps you get a quick start right from the start and also contributes to getting more visibility from quality people as your number increases. And once you’ve gained some traction and have a decent number of followers, you can start using a more targeted approach to curating your followers.

All things being equal when using Twitter for business, would you be more inclined to follow someone with 500 followers in your niche or someone with 5000 followers? Naturally, the profile with 5,000 followers gains an advantage because 5,000 other people have chosen to follow them, which suggests that their Twitter posts are of higher quality and more relevant. This is not necessarily true in all cases, but the large number of followers creates this perception and thus leads to gaining more followers.