Twitter Module 3 Session 2: How Do I Get People To Follow Me?
Table of Contents Are You Easy To Find? 1 Did You Optimize Bio For Keywords? 1 Are You Tweeting Regularly? 1 Is Profile Follow Worth? 2 Interacting with followers? 3 Leveraging Follow Friday? 4 Are Conversations Widely Visible? 4 Incentivize People To Follow You 5
Welcome to module 3, session 2: how do I get people to follow me? This is a really great question that I get asked often and that s, what does it take to get noticed. How do I get more and more people to follow me? I am out there, I am following other people, I am posting updates, but how do I get more and more people to follow me. Are You Easy To Find? One of the first things that I would ask you is are you easy to find. Are you using your real name on Twitter? That is something that comes up in searches when people do a search for particular people, is the real name, as well as the Twitter name, or your Twitter handle. So, I would ask are you using your real name and that is important for people to be able to search for you. Did You Optimize Bio For Keywords? The second question that I would ask is did you optimize your bio for keywords. Have you used the particular keywords that you want to be known for, or that represent who you are and what you do. Did you use those keywords in your bio? Did you optimize your bio for those keywords? That is really important, especially now, when we are seeing more and more Twitter profiles coming up in Google Search results. People can do a search for a person, or for different keywords and we are seeing Twitter profile starting to pop up in the Google Search results now, so it is becoming more and more important to optimize your bio for those keywords. Keep that in mind and that can definitely add to your ability to be found more easily. Are You Tweeting Regularly? The next question that I would ask you is are you tweeting regularly. Anybody who has ever built a business from the ground up, or built a business from scratch, knows that it takes some time before you gain awareness in the marketplace and before people in your market are able to identify your business and who you are, and what you do. We all have an advantage in this day and age with social media, where you can gain a lot of awareness, very, very quickly. We experience this with our own business, with our own agency, especially through Twitter, a little bit through Facebook, but mostly Twitter actually has been the one that we have seen the greatest amount of results from and we regularly get new leads through Twitter. Probably every week at least, we are getting a new lead through Twitter, so it is very powerful and being consistent is the key. 1
The timeline in Twitter is extremely short. For most people, your shelf life of a tweet is maybe three, or four, or five minutes and if somebody hasn t seen your tweet in that length of time, it s disappeared below their timeline and probably isn t going to be seen. So, you can tweet very, very regularly throughout the day. Some stats are saying that between one and four tweets per hour is effective. Some people are saying 10 to 12 to 25 tweets per day. It really comes down to testing and tracking, obviously, what is going to be effective for you. But, don t be afraid. Don t think that jeez, I need to tweet at least once a day. No, no, no, no. You want to tweet like once an hour. You want to tweet often. So, coming up with a schedule and a plan will allow you to tweet more regularly and come up with a formula. Maybe that s every hour I am going to tweet three times. I am going to tweet out personal that I am thinking, or that I am working on, maybe it is business-related, but something that you are thinking, or that you are working on. Maybe you are going to tweet out a link to somebody else s content that you found. Maybe you found a couple of blog posts and then, maybe one of those other tweets is going to be a tweet back to your own blog, to one of your own blog posts, whether it is a new blog post, or it is a old blog post. Just come up with a formula that works for you that s doable. I am going to show you a tool because I know a lot of people are thinking jeez, you know, I don t have time during the day to be hopping into Twitter three times an hour, or even once an hour. I don t have time. I am busy. I am going to be showing you some tools in some upcoming modules that will help you with things like scheduling and automation to make this a little bit easier for you, so you can kind of set it up and put it on autopilot a couple of days at a time. Tweeting regularly is definitely going to help you to get found. I have noticed it with our own accounts that when we tweet a few times a day, we get decent results. When we really ramp things up, and we are tweeting six, seven, eight, ten times a day, maybe once an hour throughout the work hours, we really see big results. Is Profile Follow Worth? The next thing that I would ask you if you are having trouble in gaining new followers on Twitter, is if your Twitter profile follow worthy. Basically, what that means, or how this breaks down is, first off, are you posting informative, resourceful content. Are you posting things that people want to read, that they will find interesting, that helps them to make a better buying decision for the products and services that you are selling. Are you trying to be a partner with potential customers, rather than a salesman? Being more of a consultant and help people buy smarter and be more effective and efficient. The better the content, the more informative and the more resourceful the content is that you are posting, the more followers you are going to attract. 2
I have said this before; I have got roughly about 20,000 followers on Twitter. They are not following me for my good looks and charm, as much as I kind of hope they would be, they are not. They are following me because I am a resource for my industry. I am a resource for all things inbound marketing. I am sharing content on how to get your emails open and how to put together an effective landing page, how to grow your marketing list, how to generate more leads for your business. This is the kind of content that I am pumping out all day long, every day, and it is not just anything that I find. I am taking the time to filter out and find only the good quality information and that s what I am sharing. Because of that, I have gained a lot of followers for that because people look at it and they say, well, I could be wading through all of these buckets full of information myself, or I can just follow Jeff, who is basically filtering it for me. That can be done in any industry. Any industry can do that. You can do that for your own industry; you can do that in your own market and become that resource, become that go-to person. So, make sure that you are posting informative and resourceful content, especially in the beginning. This is going to be really important in the beginning. Interacting with followers? The next thing is are you interacting with your followers. If all you are doing is sharing links to different content, or sharing links to your own content, that is still not good enough. People are on Twitter to have conversations. It is a networking social channel. So, that is one of the things you need to do, you need to interact with people. Ask people questions. Hey, what are you up to this weekend? Hey, what s the most recent book you have read? I am going away on holiday and I want to take a new business book with me. What do you recommend? Stuff like that. Ask people their opinions. People love to share their opinion. So, interact with people, ask them questions, engage people, find out what makes them tick. Everybody has got the story. Ask people what their story is. Get people talking about themselves. So, interact with your people. It is also important to interact with people that you are following as well. Reach out to the people that you are following and ask them questions and the same thing, engage with those people. You want to do that with your own followers, but you also want to make sure that you are focused on reaching out and engaging with people that you are following. What you will find sometimes is, you may identify somebody that you really want to be connected with on Twitter and you follow them, but they don t follow you right away. So, by doing that, by mentioning their name, asking them questions, engaging and sharing their content, eventually, they are going to follow you back because they see you as being an asset to their community and that is how you want to position yourself. That is really how you gain the attention of an influencer online, is to be an asset to them. To be a giver, and go after them and be of service to somebody else and you will get what s yours. Karma will come around and givers gain. 3
That is the rule of thumb which social media is givers gain. You will get it in return, but you have to give first. Again, make sure you are interacting with the people that you are following. It s especially important if they are not following you back yet. Leveraging Follow Friday? Another thing that you want to ask yourself is are you leveraging Follow Friday. There is this tradition on Twitter that on Fridays, people use the hashtag Follow Friday, or more commonly (hashtag) #FF, which stands for Follow Friday. Basically, it is them saying to their network, go and follow so and so. Now, there is a right way and a wrong way to do this and unfortunately most people do it wrong. Most people will put #FF and they would list as many names as they can fit into 140 characters. That is great now that you are mentioning those people and those people might get the warm fuzzes because of that, because you are saying, hey, go follow this person. But, I myself and I know there are others out there like me, we look at that and say okay, well, why. Why do I want to follow those people? If you are like me, you have a cluttered timeline already, as it is. I think I am following 20,000 or 16,000, I don t remember, but there is a ton of people in my timeline, why do I want to add more people to it. So, the right way to do a Follow Friday is to only mention one name in your Follow Friday and give a reason why people should follow that person. #FF @JohnDoe, because he knows everything there is to know about purple widgets. Now, you have given me a reason, oh, hey, I am interested in purple widgets, I should follow John Doe, so I can get his valuable information about purple widgets. So, give people a reason for following other people. If you are doing it that way, it is okay to do a number of different mentions. You can pick one, maybe pick two, or three people every Friday that you want to do a shout out for and tell your followers to follow that person. Are Conversations Widely Visible? Another thing I would ask you is are your conversations widely visible. Now there is something to keep in mind here and that is, whenever you put somebody else s username in a tweet, it is called a mention. Now, when you put their username at the very beginning of what you are saying, it is called a reply and the only people that will see a reply show up in their timeline are the people that are following both you and the person that you are mentioning. So, when their username is at the front is of the tweet and there is nothing else before it, it is a reply and it is invisible to everybody, except for the people that are following both of the people that are in that conversation. Now, if they go to your timeline and they look at your mentions on your profile, they will see those on your profile, but it won t show up in their timeline, unless they are following both people. 4
So, a little trick to get around that, to get more visibility on your conversation is, if you are replying to somebody, put a decimal point, or period, right before their name and what that does is that moves their username into the body of the message, or the body of the tweet that you are about to post, and it then makes it a mention, which is visible to everybody, rather than only visible to the people that are following both you and that other person. Again, to summarize, a reply, that is the username at the beginning of the tweet is only visible to the people that follow both you and that other person in their timeline. To get around that put a period or decimal point in front of their name and that then becomes a mention, which is visible to all of your followers in their timeline. Incentivize People To Follow You Now, another thing that you can do is you can incentivize people to follow you. Here is an example of American Airlines and they did this contest called Tweet to win 30,000 miles. Basically, what you had to do is you had to put in a tweet message, you had to follow them and tweet now using their hashtag. You had to be sure to follow them on Twitter and they were going to pick 30 of their followers that put up that post and they would win 30,000 miles. So, they put together this promo and this is what happened. They got 18,000 clicks through this contest. They had a 70% increase in their followers to their Twitter account. That is huge 70% increase. They had a 43% increase in the number of retweets that they gained, so they had way more engagements, way more people retweeting the things that they were talking about and what they had to say. They received over 27,000 entries on their micro-site. That was a really great promo for them. They had to give away some air miles for it, obviously, but a really great promo idea for them. They gained a lot of awareness, a lot of clicks, and many more followers. The one thing to keep in mind here is, yes, those are impressive numbers. The one thing that I want to draw your attention to, though, is the retweets because this is something that people commonly overlook. When somebody retweets your tweet, your update, it is going out to all of that person s followers, so think about that for a second. I can t remember the most resent stat, I think it was 120, or 160, but most people on Twitter have, we will say, about 120 to 160 followers. So, for each person that retweets what you ve posted, it is going out and has the potential to be seen by an additional 120 to 160 people. So, if you get 10 retweets, do the math that is 1,200 to 1,600 more people that get to see your tweet message. So, a 43% increase in retweets is huge. They would have ended up without a lot more followers because of that. 5
So, be creative. What promo or an incentive that you could put together. Figure out a hash tag, maybe create a landing page specific for Twitter, specific for the contest, think of some contest and go ahead and give it a shot and see what kind of results you get. That brings us to the end of session 2. In session 3, we are going to be talking about how to start conversations and an effective way to build relationships with people using Twitter. So, we will see you in session 3. 6