Twitter has captured the imagination of many on-line marketers. If you follow a lot of Tweeple, you’re bound to see many promotional links passing through your Twitter timeline. If you have managed to pick up a lot of followers, it’s a good way of reaching a lot of people very quickly with a short message. However, this technique has its limitations. Trending Topics can be used to overcome some of these limitations.

How Twitter Works
When you Tweet, your message goes into what is known as the Public Timeline. This is a huge list of Tweets, sorted in chronological order. When you log into your Twitter account, you are shown your Personal Timeline. This consists of Tweets taken from the Public Timeline that were sent by people you have chosen to follow.

When you send a Tweet, your message is added to the Public Timeline, but if nobody has chosen to follow you, then nobody will see your message. It will stay there, moving further down the line into obscurity. This is why you need followers. Without them, your messages are pointless.

Tweet Saturation
If you have 1,000 followers, you have probably followed them in return to keep them as followers. People quite rightly expect a reciprocal following, and will soon “unfollow” you if you don’t follow them.

The problem then is that if you are following those 1,000 people, your Personal Timeline is now being swamped by the Tweets of 1,000 people. The messages pass through your timeline so quickly that you don’t have a chance to read most of them. In fact, many marketers who attract a large following tend to have multiple Twitter accounts, keeping one aside for personal use, while the others are used as “mailing lists”.

Others use programs such as TweetDeck in which you can selectively choose the Tweets from people you are genuinely interested in and display them in a separate timeline.

In marketing, people often quote 2% as being a typical, expected response rate to a promotion. So if you send a Tweet to your 1,000 followers, you might expect 20 people to respond. However, that assumes that all 1,000 of those people actually saw your Tweet.

If your followers, like you, are following a lot of people, Tweets will pass them by unread. Your message will not reach 1,000 people as you thought. It might only reach 200 people, in which case, the number of responses at a 2% response-rate would be just 4. Twitter is not the gift to marketing that you thought it was.

Obviously, the more followers you have, the more will see your message, so one solution is to obtain more followers.

However, there is a smarter way to get your message across to more people, and that is by exploiting Trending Topics.

Trending Topics
On the Twitter home page and your account home page, you will see a list of Trending Topics. Twitter analyses Tweets and picks out the most popular words or phrases that appear in them. The top 10 most popular words or phrases become the Trending Topics.

When you click on one of the Trending Topic titles, you are shown a whole new Timeline. This contains all the Tweets from the Public timeline that contain the Trending Topic. If you Tweet a message that contains one of the Trending Topics, anyone currently watching the Trending Topic timeline will see your Tweet, regardless of whether they follow you or not. Suddenly you are accessing a whole new audience.

You will notice that some people are already exploiting this by Tweeting a message that is unrelated to the Topic, but adding the Trending Topic keywords to ensure it gets viewed in the Trending Topic timeline. These are obviously spam Tweets. Personally, I block those spammers. Many get reported to Twitter and their accounts are cancelled. It really isn’t worth spamming.

Use Trending Topics the Clever Way
There are two approaches to using Trending Topics. One is to make general conversation, which can attract new followers, and can be done at any time. The second is very similar but uses a more targetted approach.

Log on to Twitter and look at the Trending Topics. Click through them to view their Timelines to find out what they are about – sometimes it’s not always that obvious! Now join in the conversation! Tweet a comment or opinion on the subject. Your message has now gone out to all the people who are actively reading that topic’s timeline. As it is a Trending Topic, it’s currently very popular, so there are likely to be a lot of people reading.

Find a website that relates to the topic. If the topic relates to a breaking news item, find a news site that has an interesting article or video footage, and post its URL in a Tweet. I have picked up numerous new followers by doing this.

Read down the Topic timeline and respond to peoples’ comments and questions. Engage people in interesting conversation in that topic and the chances are that you will gain new followers.

Use Follow Friday
Follow Friday is a great opportunity. It is a Trending Topic that appears every Friday, and you can exploit it to get more followers.

For example, a newbie called JohnDoe123 Tweets a message saying “What on earth is Follow Friday?”. Tweet a reply “@JohnDoe123 Follow Friday is a tradition to recommend other people to follow”.
JohnDoe123 will be so happy that you answered his question, he’ll probably follow you, and maybe even send out a Follow Friday with your name in it, which will earn you even more followers.

Get your friends to recommend you on Follow Friday and do the same for them. It’s a good way of building up your following.

Targeted Trending Topics
The opportunities for exploiting Trending Topics in this way are much more limited, but when they arise, it can be a golden opportunity.

Check the Twitter Trending topics regularly – about once per hour is usually enough. Look out for Trending Topics that are in some way related to your niche. When one arises, jump on it and Tweet appropriate links to your own websites. I recently saw a trending topic come up which was the same subject as a blog post I’d made about 1 week earlier. Straight away, I tweeted a link to my post. Within a coule of seconds I had received 15 hits on my blog post, and hits kept coming for some time afterwards. I even found that people had Re-Tweeted my message, thus sending it to their followers and keeping it fresh in the trending topic timeline.

Using Trending Topics then, can be a very powerful tool as long as you keep on topic. People don’t like spam emails and they dislike spam tweets even more. Use this technique intelligently and you will gain followers, and reach other people who are not in your following.

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