You probably heard that Twitter marketing is an absolute MUST for all businesses. In fact, there are lots of ebooks, digital products and software that are supposed to enable you to make a huge amount of money off Twitter. I’m not disputing that Twitter is a very powerful marketing platform. Many of these products ignore one powerful truth about Twitter and tweets. What is this powerful truth that leads to many marketers on Twitter failing? The truth is Twitter is a business-to-business platform. That’s right. Forget about everything you’ve heard before. Forget about Twitter being a powerful way to convert the huge number of consumers. Forget all about that. In fact, if you try to approach Twitter from that perspective, you will join the vast majority of people that have tried to sell on Twitter. You put simply, you will fail. Due to a variety of reasons, Twitter is not a business-to-consumer platform. You have to look at Twitter as a business-to-business marketing platform. If you approach Twitter that way, you increase your chances of success dramatically.

Twitter is a B2B Platform-It Isn’t a Business-to-Consumer Platform

The main reasons why Twitter is not a business-to-consumer platform are as follows: Most consumers burn out after a relatively short period of time. A huge number of Twitter accounts actually don’t even make any tweets and a large number of consumers accessing Twitter through mobile devices. Put all these factors together and you’re not going to make much money off Twitter if you treat it as a business-to-consumer platform. Does this mean you won’t make money at all? Of course not. There are a lot of cases where people do make money selling to consumers. However, if you try to approach your Twitter marketing business this way, you will constantly have to chase after consumers and basically hope that it will be enough new consumers to replace them after they burn out. This churn and burn strategy is short-sighted. It also takes up a lot of your time, effort and energy and you don’t really get much confidence in the future that you will have much of a marketing business. You will always feel that you’re running on a treadmill. If you look at Twitter as a B2B platform on the other hand, you can be assured that you will have a long lasting business. Keep reading below why it makes a lot more sense to treat Twitter as a business-to-business platform instead of a platform that allows you to sell cheaply to consumers.

Influence Is The Fuel of Successful Marketing on Twitter

It is easy to look at Twitter as a place where mega-celebrities like Lady Gaga, Shaquille O’neal, Lebron James, Justin Bieber and many others have huge numbers of followers. The reality is that most of these followers don’t do anything-least of which is buy stuff. A lot of Twitter users are really engaged in empty and meaningless gossip. This is not exactly a formula for success. Even if you were able to chase down these consumers, chances are you’re not going to get much success. The key to Twitter is influence. The reason why Justin Bieber has millions of followers is because he has influence. The same goes with Lady Gaga and other celebrities. Learn from this reality. If you are targeting a particular niche, it’s a good idea to build up influence. The more influence you have, the more credible you are in the eyes of your target audience. The more credible they find you, the more they will trust you. On the internet, people will only buy from you if they feel they can trust you. That is the bottom line. That is the truth. So to make a long story short, influence is the fuel of successful marketing on Twitter. You have to build influence so people can eventually trust you enough to buy stuff from you. I cannot put it in any simpler terms. You have to focus on influence. The moment you’d look at Twitter from the perspective of building influence, the discussion then shifts to treating Twitter as a business-to-business platform. Why? Trying to build up influence with consumers is really just a losing game because as mentioned above, most of these people burn out after a short period of time. In fact, most of these people use mobile devices and the conversion rate of mobile devices is still quite low. This is a losing strategy. It’s a better idea to look at Twitter as a place where you can build influence with other businesses and just as importantly, influential people in those businesses.

Influence Expands Your Reach

The main reason why business networking works so well in the offline world is because people tend to buy from people they trust. When you join a business networking group and you get referred by a member of that group to his or her contacts, those contacts are more likely to trust you because you were referred by somebody they trust. The same dynamics play out online on Twitter. When you spend a lot of time building influence and you gain trust in the eyes of other influential people. The people that they influence will be more likely to buy from you. In other words, influence expands your reach. Make no mistake about it, building influence on your own takes a long time. It takes a long time to get people to know you. It takes a long time to get people to like you and it definitely takes a long time to get people to trust you. When you use Twitter to basically piggyback on other people’s influence, you take a shortcut as far as the traditional know-like-trust-buy process is involve. You can cut in front of the line so to speak by focusing on building influence with the right influential people.

Influence Gets Industry-Targeted Backlinks Which Drive Search Traffic

One of the most direct ways using Twitter to build influence with influential people in your niche is that if you share enough compelling content, chances are you will attract the eyeballs of the right set of influential people. These influential people will not just share or retweet whatever it is that you tweeted. They will take an extra step. These people may own blogs or influential websites which would publish a link to the materials that you shared. See how this works? The moment you get them to trust you enough to think that you are a credible authority, they would build lakes to your site. The more backlinks your website gets from authoritative or influential sites, the higher the chance that you will get more search traffic. Why? Google is placing a lot more importance on natural links from authority sites. Since you didn’t build these links yourself and they weren’t automatically generated and the sites are highly influential and important in your niche, chances are good that you will get more search engine traffic.

Follow Only People That Matter

If you want to be truly influential on Twitter, you can’t just follow every random bomb you come across on Twitter. That’s not going to move the ball forward. When it comes to your effort, you have to have a system where you follow only people that matter in your niche. So how do you know? Well, thankfully there is a free online tool that you can use to figure out the social authority of people in your niche. This free tool is called Followerwonk.com. It is a free tool offered by Moz.com. Followerwonk enables you to zero-in like a laser on people that are interested in your niche. By typing in a keyword that is very specific to your niche, you will find a long list of Twitter users that are focused on that niche. While this isn’t nice and nifty, Followerwonk’s real value is that it ranks these people based on their authority. Followerwonk takes a look at how many of these people’s tweets got retweeted and also how many followers they have. Why are retweets important measures of authority? Well, you wouldn’t retweet somebody’s tweet if you thought that tweet was a garbage, right? It follows that the more retweet a particular account’s broadcasts, the more trustworthy they think that account is. You can rank the list of people that are interested in your niche based on social authority on Followerwonk. Obviously, it makes sense to follow only people that have a high level of social authority. This means that more likely than not these people have real authority and are worth engaging with.

Engage People You’re Following

Once you follow these influential people, this is where you need to roll up your sleeves and start doing real work. You need to engage the people you’re following. This means that you’re going to have to send them lots of @ messages. You send them targeted @ messages that engages them. You’re going to ask questions. You can offer comments and suggestions based on the stuff that they shared. Regardless of what you do, get their attention in a professional and respectful way. The more you do this, the more you get become familiar to them. The higher the likelihood that they might follow you back. You need to spend quite a bit of time engaging important people in your niche. It may not pay off immediately. However, if you lay the right groundwork, it can pay off quite handsomely. Why? As mentioned above, build a backlink they could link to your website. They can retweet your tweets to their loyal followers. And most importantly, you become familiar to them as a trusted source. Once people trust you, they might voluntarily bring business opportunities your way. All sorts of positive things can happen as long as people trust you. Engaging influential people that you’re following is a crucial step in you making serious money off Twitter.

Build Credibility With Your On-Target Tweets

While it’s tempting to post cute pictures of kittens on Twitter, if you really want to safeguard your credibility and with your niche audience and you want to be perceived as an expert, you might want to not do that. Instead you might want to just focus on tweets. You might just focus on tweeting content that is directly related to your niche. I’m not talking about you coming off as very serious or humorless, but at the same time, you need to stay on message. You need to stay on target. If you are targeting a specific audience in a specific niche, stick with that. Don’t distract your message. You have to remember, every tweet you send out on Twitter, either builds up your brand or retards your brand. It’s your choice. You need to build such a solid brand that people will trust you and you need to build such a solid brand that the moment you tweet, a lot of people that are following you will, without thinking, rehit the retweet button. This is a tall order if you’re going to be posting lots of off topic materials. Sure, a lot of the stuff that you’re posting might be funny. A lot of that stuff might make you cry. A lot of that stuff might make you feel good. But at the end of the day, you’re building authority and when you send a stuff that is off-target, you’re basically confusing your followers. This is not a good move.

Don’t Be Afraid To Reach Out With @ Messages

Once you feel that you have established a decent level of authority with people that you’re following and many of them are following you back. At this stage of the process, you should consider reaching out to them. You can reach out to them in terms of asking them for interviews. You can reach out to them in terms of asking them to retweet your post or maybe publish your guest blog post on their website. Regardless of the business proposition, don’t be afraid to reach out. Why? You earned it. You are already an expert. You are already an authority. You are already perceived as part of the “Who’s who” in your niche. Don’t be shy. Hit the @ button and try to make business happen. You would be surprised as to how many opportunities you can take advantage of.

When it comes to online marketing, Twitter is no joke as much as Twitter gets bad press from people that don’t understand how it works. If you view Twitter the way it should be looked at – a business-to-business platform – you can make serious coin. There’s a lot of serious business happening on Twitter. There’s a lot of serious business opportunities being taken on Twitter. The key is to build authority. The key is to build expertise. The golden key to all this is influence. Keep the tips above in mind so you can finally turn your dreams of Twitter riches into reality.