Web 2.0 Mar­ket­ing Tip #57: List Build­ing With Twitter

Twit­ter and Face­book are to­day’s hottest so­cial net­work and mi­croblog­ging sites. Hav­ing a mem­ber base con­sist­ing of mil­lions, there is no won­der why they have be­come great mar­ket­ing plat­forms as well. That is ex­actly why, in an ear­lier Web 2.0 mar­ket­ing tip, I men­tioned that you can use your email list to grow your Twit­ter fol­lower list and your Face­book fan base.

How­ever, do­ing the re­verse can ac­tu­ally be very ben­e­fi­cial as well. That is to say, you can use Twit­ter and Face­book to grow your email list.

Can you just imag­ine it? With Face­book and Twit­ter, you can reach out to hun­dreds of thou­sands of prospects; get­ting even a mere 5% of those you are able to be­friend will al­ready give you a big mail­ing list. You can then use this list to con­tin­u­ously pro­mote your prod­ucts and services.

But be­fore we get too ex­cited, let us see how this will work.

First, you need to deal with your mar­ket­ing cam­paign and mail­ing list. To make best use of email mar­ket­ing, you need an au­tore­spon­der. Every­thing else is just too much work, es­pe­cially if your list grows over time. This is how au­tore­spon­der works:

1. If you don’t al­ready have an au­tore­spon­der, get one such as Awe­ber.
2. Cre­ate an email se­ries that in­cludes sev­eral prod­uct pitches.
3. Be­gin cap­tur­ing subscribers.

Once you have setup your au­tore­spon­der, you can an­nounce this on Twit­ter or post a sta­tus about it on Faceook. You can’t sim­ply just say „Sub­scribe to my email course to­day!” or some­thing sim­i­lar. Rather, tell your fans and friends (on Face­book) or fol­low­ers (on Twit­ter) that you are giv­ing free, use­ful con­tent through a free sub­scrip­tion. Once they sub­scribe, you can send the promised to them and start send­ing pitches and in­for­ma­tive emails after.