by John Eberhard
In order to effectively accomplish Twitter marketing, you have to have a lot of followers. Then you should post messages or “tweets” (I hate that word) regularly to let people know what you are doing with your business. So how do you get lots of followers?
I use a software program called Tweet Adder to accomplish this. My own personal Twitter account now has 8,103 followers currently, and I am managing several other client accounts, several of which are close to 2,000.
The basic strategy for adding lots of followers on Twitter is to follow other people, a certain percentage of whom will follow you back. Then, using the software, you identify those who didn’t follow you after several days, and “unfollow” them. Then start again by following more people. At the same time, you start putting out messages (tweets) regularly, so that other people will see your activity and follow you.
Targeting
Tweet Adder allows you to identify people who are most likely to be your prospects, and add them to a queue to be followed by you. You can search for people based on geographical location, by certain words in their bio, and by certain words in their tweets.
Let’s say you have a veterinary practice in Indianapolis. You would target people within a certain mile radius of the city, and also people who mentioned something about pets, dogs, cats, etc., in their bio or in their tweets.
Or let’s say you make software for Mac computers. You would search for anyone who mentioned “Mac” in their bios or in their tweets.
There are a variety of ways you could approach this, but the basic idea is that you can use these tools to zero in and find people who would be your most likely prospects.
Following
Once you have located people who are likely prospects and have them in a queue, you start following them, several hundred per day. Twitter has some sort of system to determine what they think is your limit of people that you can follow per day or per every couple days. They are pretty tight lipped about how they figure out this limit, but from my observation it is between 100 and 500 per day, and apparently it is higher depending on how many followers you have.
You don’t have to worry about hitting this limit because they will just tell you that you’ve reached the limit. There is no penalty or threatening email or anything.
Un-Following
I have Tweet Adder set up so that it will identify people who have not followed you back within 3 days. Then you can tell it to un-follow those people. The idea is that you are following these people in order to get them to follow you back, so if they don’t, you remove them. You can also create a “white list” of people that you want to follow regardless of whether they follow you or not, such as celebrities, big media outlets, etc.
Your Bio
Make sure your bio is really clear and brief as to what you do or what your business is. That is so that people who scrutinize the bio to see if they want to follow you back, can see easily who you are and what you do. Don’t make it cryptic or hard to understand.
Tweeting
If you are following people aggressively, a certain percentage will follow you back. It helps with this if you are putting out tweets regularly, as some people will look at what you are saying on Twitter before following you back. But this also helps in another way.
Let’s say you are regularly putting out tweets about what you are doing with your business, and those tweets contain certain popular keywords related to your business. People will search on Twitter for certain keywords, see who is writing tweets that contain those keywords, and follow them. I discovered this early on with my own account, where I would write tweets containing phrases like “pay per click advertising,” or “web design,” or “search engine optimization.” After one of those I’d get a bunch of people following me.
As a general tweeting strategy, I have found it works well to simply write tweets that talk about what you are doing with your business. For me this is “I just signed up a new pay per click ad client,” or “I am designing a new web site for a tree nursery in WA,” or “I am working on adding Twitter followers for clients.” This develops the idea in the minds of people seeing your messages that you are the guy who does ____ (whatever your business is). And I have found that this is a socially acceptable message to put on Twitter, Facebook or other social media sites, and works much better than constant messages to “buy my products!” You can occasionally tell people to buy your products but if you do it all the time, people will just block you or un-follow you.
The 2,000 Glass Ceiling
There is a particular phenomenon to be aware of on Twitter. Once you reach 2,000 people that you are following on Twitter, it will not allow you to add any more until you have over 2,000 people following you.
So you can follow this strategy of just following people and getting them to follow you, un-following those who don’t, rinse and repeat. But, in order to get your followers over 2,000, you have to use the other strategy of putting out regular tweets with keywords in them and get people to follow you that way. That’s how I got my own account over 2,000. I have two other accounts close to 2,000 now and that’s the strategy I’m using.
Good luck with your Twitter marketing.
No comments:
Post a Comment