Twitter is a great way to reach an audience. However, it’s really hard to get to the first
thousand people – the point where your content can drive organic growth. So, I spent a couple weeks learning the ropes
on Twitter and in just ten days I built up over a thousand relevant
followers.
Each day I’d spend less than an hour on twitter
- following the simple five step process laid
out below.
At the end of this process we
were able to drive over 300 visits from complete strangers to seed
Contastic's initial user base.
1 – Build Your Profile
This is your elevator pitch.
In 160 characters you need to explain who you are (one sentence) and
what you’re doing (one sentence). Each
should be packed with the most eye-catching details about yourself that will make
someone want to follow you.
2 –Follow Other's Followers
Following another user generates a notification for them and
has a good chance of encouraging them to follow you back if it is
relevant. I identified a couple similar companies with significant followings and then would systemically follow 1-200
of their followers a day. Followers are ranked on Twitter chronologically, so
each day you can through to see their new followers (at the top) and scroll
down to find older ones. I work top to
bottom (newer followers are usually more engaged).
3 – Favorite Relevant Tweets
When you favorite someone’s tweet Twitter also sends them a
notification.
This is another way to get
on a user’s radar to generate a follow.
TargetPattern is a great service that enables you to quickly favorite hundreds of tweets a
day from relevant topics.
As a bonus their
analytics are pretty good, so you can get a sense for which keywords drives the
highest engagement.
4 – Make Friends
Since we’re on Twitter to engage real people with our
product (just just get a big number of 'vanity followers') it’s important to respond quickly to everyone that contacts you. I ended up sticking with the web interface
since mobile/secondary providers/email were very unstable and ended up in
tweets being lost most of the time.
5 – Content
As you develop a real following your content becomes more
important. The name of the game is to
generate content that others will share.
At the end of the day that is how you can grow your account from one to
ten thousand followers.
Unless you’re already famous nobody cares about your
opinion. Focus on statistics, news or
images. Generate value by curating or creating facts that your audience will
find useful. That’s what get’s widely
shared (and grow your followers). And
even when posting as a company, follow the 9&1 rule – you need to tweet
nine interesting general comments for each post about your company or product.
As you post be sure to strategically use @ and #. @ will notify a user hat your tweet is about
them – generating a higher chance of a share.
A # will go out to everyone following that topic – again generating more
shares. It’s especially important to
focus on groups you belong to (Schools, Companies, Professional
Organizations). These groups are more likely
to be supportive of you and share your content.
A Quick Note on Twitter Practicalities
While Twitter sends notifications to users for most system
activities (follows, favorites, @mentions), the intent is not to allow people
to spam the entire system constantly.
So, when putting the steps into practice err on the side of patience
rather than volume. While the technical
limit is 1000 follows per day,
consistently doing that will certainly get you banned. The reason this took me 10 days (without
getting banned) was that I did just a bit every day – manually and organically
building relationships. For more see:
Also, once you follow 2000 people you won’t be able to
follow anymore.
Use
JustUnfollow to cull
the list of folks who haven’t followed you back after a couple days.
Happy Tweeting!
