Two Ways to Use TweetDeck to Build Your Twitter Follower Base

Among the roughly one-fourth of small businesses that use social media to meet their business goals, Twitter must surely rank right up there with the likes of LinkedIn.  It’s free, it’s easy to set up, and there are as many strategies for building a devoted following on the service as there are users of it.

But even with an impressive companion search feature, Twitter by itself can only take you so far.  Thus, the market for third-party tools that connect to your company’s Twitter account and help you use it in new and exciting ways is large and getting larger every day.  One of the best of these, lauded by the likes of John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing, is TweetDeck.

A central feature of tweetDeck (which is also free to download; get it Provigil pharmacy here) is the ability to create up to 10 columns that allow you to filter the Twitter feeds of both people you follow, and other tweeters.  It’s this latter group where TweetDeck can help you to build a larger and more loyal follower base.  This outcome, of course, can help your business through everything from market research to coupon-based and other product promotions to increase your revenue.

Assuming you’ve downloaded and are now using TweetDeck, here are two ways to use the Add Column feature to increase your followers and, by extension, the number of folks who follow you.

First, find the Add Column button in the top-left portion of the screen.  It looks like this:

Once you click on the "+" button you will see a window that looks like this:

I highlighted the text field here because that’s where you can enter any search terms you want.  Once you do this and click Search, a new column will appear in the main desktop area that will populate with tweets containing the term you entered.

Types of terms that may be helpful to your business include:

• Those from your mission statement.
• Those that match common terms in your marketing copy.  (For example, I have columns for "small biz," "entrepreneur," "team building," and "best workplace.")
• Those that exactly match your products or services (ie, "vacuum cleaner").  Helps you listen to the needs of your marketplace!
• Geographic terms.  Helps connect you to local people with whom you could partner or otherwise do business.
• Competitor company names.  Emulate their successful Twitter marketing, and see what they’re not doing that could create opportunities for you.

Secondly, still using TweetDeck’s Add Column feature, there’s another way to use it to follow more people, and ultimately have more people follow you (more on that below).  Click on Add Column again, and this time click on the Core tab.  Here is what you’ll see:

This is a very easy step: Just click on the area I highlighted, "TweetDeck Recommends."  This will add one more column that will populate with tweeters the program thinks you’ll like.

Now the last step after going into both tabs under Add Column: In a person’s tweet or profile area in any of the new columns you’ve created, either click Follow in the bottom-right corner, or hover your mouse over their picture and click on Other Actions, User, and Follow.  In either case after doing this you should see a message in white text at the top of your screen confirming that you’re now following the person you selected in the column.

I should note that while this might seem like a lengthy process, it’s going to be much quicker for you now that you’ve set up your new columns.  Now you just have to follow the steps in the previous paragraph to follow any new people that you want.  If you accidentally double up and try to follow someone you’re already following, TweetDeck will tell you.

What’s the big-picture benefit, you’re probably wondering.  Well, all this work following a bunch of new folks is worthwhile because most of those third-party Twitter apps I mentioned earlier have settings that allow users to automatically follow anyone who follows them.  So by following the steps above in TweetDeck, you’ll enjoy both the increased marketplace "listening" capability I mentioned earlier, plus you’ll be putting in minimum effort to grow your follower base to maximum effect over time.

Can you see how this process can help your business in conjunction with a workplace culture of communications team building?  As I described here, many businesses – especially small ones, where most people wear many hats – engage employees even outside of sales and marketing to multiply their reach, and also to lend authenticity to their organization.

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