I saw this strategy on a video last week and thought that I would share. I will give credit to the person who provided me with the information as soon as I can remember who it was or where I saw it!

Anyway, Twitter is a vital online marketers stage for promoting your offers and generating leads and sign-ups. I came very late to Twitter and am kicking myself for it. I now generate a few leads daily from Twitter and am beginning to grow my following using this exact FREE strategy and I have added over 100 targeted twitter followers every day for the last 5 days and you can easily do the same.

1. Sign up for a FREE Twellow account. Twellow allows you to specify the industry or interests of the people you want to target (i.e. network marketing, mlm, etc.). It will bring up all users, in order of the number of followers that they have, and you can click to follow these people – you will see their bio and can decide if they are someone you wish to follow). Twitter does limit you to the number of new users you can follow per day and I do not know what that number is but Twellow will let you know when you have reached your max.

2. Sign up for a FREE Social Oomph Account. At Social Oomph, you can set up a direct message that will automatically be sent to everyone who follows you. I recommend to not make this message too long or spammy. I thank them for following me, let them know that I look forward to getting to know them better, and provide a link back to my blog so that they can get to know more about me. There is also a strategy that you can provide a link back to your Facebook page and add friends there at the same time as Twitter. Your call.

3. Use FREE Twitter Karma to unfollow people who do not follow you. I am finding that it is important to keep your ratio of followers and followees pretty close so, every few days I will go to Twitter Karma and unfollow those people who are not following me. Unfortunately, Twitter no longer allows bulk unfollows so this process can take a little while and is tedious. It is important though so you can follow the max number of new users on a daily basis.

4. Download FREE TweetDeck. TweetDeck, if you are not familiar, is a really cool tool that allows you to manage your Twitter direct messages, interact, and post to Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn accounts all at the same time.

5. Be Consistent With Your Tweeting. People follow those who not only share the same interests but who also tweet interesting things and you need to be consistent because of the high volume of users and Tweets flooding everyone’s pages. Use HashTags to better target your offers on Twitter.

If you follow this FREE strategy, you will be able to get more twitter followers everyday and begin generating leads from Twitter very  quickly.

As many of you know, I was very slow to get on the Twitter train. In fact, the train had already left the yard and was well into its journey when I needed to hijack a stage-coach, catch up to the train, and then hop on…this was kind of like a Family Guy episode because I have absolutely no idea how I was able to find a working stagecoach and then how I knew how to drive it? But I digress…

Anyway…just yesterday I learned about using Hashtags with Twitter to make the keywords of your Tweets stand out. There are a couple of benefits to using hashtags as best I can determine:

1. To Gain More Targeted Twitter Followers: Just like you and I (now!), people want to follow and be followed by  like-minded people. For network marketers, we want to be followed by others who are either already involved in network marketing or who are interested in getting involved. One of the best ways to gain followers is to follow…most people follow back. So, by following people who use network marketing related keywords in their tweets, we can be sure that we are not being followed by the person who tweets “I’m so bored…just hanging out” and can stand a chance of reaching our target audience…Someone who has a need or want for our product or business opportunity.

2. To Target Followers Who Are Interested In Your Product or Program: I think everyone will agree that it’s difficult to read all of the tweets from the people you follow from your main Twitter page. I use SocialOomph to track certain keywords that I’m interested in. I assume that there are other services that do this for you as well. If you know of others, please let me know. Anyway, the Hashtag will make that keyword stand out in the tweet and make it more easily found. When you find someone who is tweeting your keyword, that is a good person to follow…they share an interest.

To identify your keyword using Twitter Hashtags, you simply type # before the word. For example: “I am writing a blog post right now on how to use #Hashtags with Twitter”. Hashtags is my keyword and the pound sign identifies it as such.

I know the mega-Twitter Tweeters already know about using Hashtags, but I also know that I wasn’t the only person to just learn about them! If this article can help a few use Twitter more effectively, I’m happy!