Welcome to the fourth day  of “6 Day Twitter Traffic”.

Offer value to your followers

What should you post on Twitter?

It depends. Twitter suggests you answer the question: “What are you doing?”

But, most of the time, who cares?!

Instead, rephrase the question to read:

“What are you doing that others may be interested in hearing about?”

That way, you’ll know what to tweet about so that people following you get some value. It will depend on the purpose of your being on Twitter. Maybe you want to get potential clients to buy from you.

Or you might want to establish a personal connection with your existing clients and customers.

Or you may even publish updates, newsletters, special offers, deals and new blog posts where people can hear about them.

There’s one little problem. Twitter allows only 140 characters in each post!

That means you can’t send out a sales pitch. Or an elaborate appeal. Or an impassioned presentation.

But you can send a link to a blog post or sales page on your website where you can do all this and more!

And that reminds me - please post this note about Congenital Heart Defects Awareness day as one of your tweets…

“A Day For Hearts” is on February 14th. Please show your support. Help save a child’s heart. http://www.CHDinfo.com/chdaware/

Ok, so you can tweet links. But don’t even think about constantly posting links to your own website or blog. Soon, folks will tire of your self-promotion and un-follow.

What to do?

Mix it up. Post links to other useful content you’ve come across. Share your thoughts or opinions. Point to other blogs and articles and news stories. And, in proportion, also link to your own content.

What’s more, when you link to useful content on other sites, you gain trust and respect from your followers. They’ll look to you as a reliable source of information and advice. They’ll even tell others about you - and that grows your network wider.

So, your task for today is to post 10 tweets. No more than 2 should be to your own links. The rest should follow the criteria we’ve just mentioned.

Then, for every day of the challenge, do the same thing… post 10 new links or short snippets of value to your audience.

Of course, this is in addition to the daily routine of following 25 new people on Twitter - and if you have time, and want to grow your network faster, you could do more.

The “CHD Social Media Challenge” is a project to spread Congenital Heart Defects awareness. There are 4 mini-tutorials and 1 firesale making up the ‘challenge’. You can join in and help too - click here to see how.