In life and business, being a follower isn’t necessarily a good thing, as a matter of fact it can get you in trouble or keep you behind the 8 ball when others are innovating. On Twitter however, if you aren’t following your potential customers, you are missing out.

Follow Everyone, Almost

To engage customers and potential customers in conversation, you generally have to hear what they are saying, and the only way to do that on Twitter, is to follow them. When someone finds your business and becomes a follower, you should be following them back unless they are a spammer. You don’t have to follow everyone automatically, but you should be evaluating everyone that follows you to determine if you should follow them.

Separate

As you can imagine, if you market yourself on Twitter you could have thousands of followers, and it would be very difficult to follow their conversations in any meaningful way, not to mention almost impossible to interact. The biggest benefit of evaluating each follower is that you can decide how to classify them using the List feature in Twitter. For instance, on a book review account I would have lists of readers, writers, and locals. Now I can just click on my list of writers and see only what they are tweeting and respond, then click over to my readers, making it easy to keep up with the conversations.

Interact

And then you should be interacting with them, even if it’s mundane daily experiences that don’t have anything to do with your business. Why? Because you are building a relationship. People want to see your business as a personal entity, they want to relate to you, so telling someone you hope they feel better after they tweet that they just came down with the flu is building a connection. They are going to remember you. They are going to pay attention when you post a link now. If your Twitter account is just a list of your blog links and self promotional material, no one will believe you are interested in them.

Twitter can be a great way to grow local small businesses, but you can’t tweet in a vacuum, you have to put yourself out there. Frankly, if you aren’t being social, why are you even using social media?