Day TWO: Find & Follow Building Your Community The small print: All this material, whilst given freely for this course, is for your use only, and not for dissemination to anyone else, even inside your own organisation. Please do recommend that your colleagues sign up for the course so that they can participate too at http://twooc.wordpress.com 21 P a g e
DAY 2: Outline Activity: Read pages 23-33, and let us know what you think on Twitter. Send us a tweet! When you are tweeting about the contents of the course, put #twooc somewhere in the tweet. Following the instructions on pages 23-34: Follow people on the #twooc course using our List: Click on https://twitter.com/andyallenmedia/lists/twooc/members Choose some people to follow by clicking on the follow buttons down the list (Do this at the end of the day to give everyone time to send their Twitter IDs to be added to the list) Find and follow people in any or all of the six ways suggested Search for our conversations using #twooc in the search field E-tivity: Tweet Hello and a little about yourself using the hashtag #twooc Tools: At any point, if you want to reference the keyboard shortcuts on Twitter, hit Shift +? to get this menu: Resources: www.twellow.com www.twibes.com www.wefollow.com 22 P a g e
Day Two: Find and Follow - building your community Today is a day of desk research, and reaching out to people across the world, and around the corner. Less input from me, and more work from you. You see how this is heading already.. ;) 1 Firstly, let s put your tweets into context: Where do my tweets go? Firstly, it s important to understand that once you have created a tweet, even if no-one is following you, it goes out into the twitterverse and can be seen by anyone. Even if you have no followers, your tweet exists, and can be found by anyone on the internet, they don t even need a Twitter account. This is good because: Anyone using the internet will be able to find you and follow you (become part of your audience or community) by searching on keywords that you use in your tweets. The theory is if you want to have a lot of pizza-lovers following you, just tweet a lot about pizza. This is bad because: Sometimes you want to take a tweet back. (with me, this is usually mis-spellings) You CAN delete a tweet. So you won t find this one I just created in @myairchair s timeline (try it!): To delete a tweet, click on the three dots at the bottom of the tweet on your timeline, and a drop down menu appears. Click on delete. However, be warned, as many an inebriated celebrity has discovered, there s no telling how far a tweet has travelled, or how many people have seen and captured it (like I captured this one above) before it is deleted. Once they are indexed and cached by Google, there s no chance of deletion. Rule 1. then, is Think before you tweet. Of course, you can only delete your own tweets, not other peoples. Tweets are LOVED by Google and social search engines like Bing, because: 1. They are keyword rich (or should be) so they are easy to find. 2. They represent the LATEST information and this is what searchers on the internet want now. We don t want to know how good a holiday was in 2009, we want to know how good it was last week. Or even yesterday, or even right now this minute. Twitter is a way of finding this information. 1 This strange symbol ;) is an emoticon. Emoticons enable you to show the tone of what you are writing through these miniature faces. The secret is to tilt your head to the left this one is a winky, showing I m joking, i.e. asking you to make an inference. My favourites are Homer ~(_8^( ) and Marge Simpson ######:o). Though I ve yet to use them in conversation :) Whilst Facebook has graduated to stickers, Twitter still uses emoticons. 23 P a g e
This is why tweets can be indexed by Google within minutes and certainly will be indexed within hours. If you tweet regularly, and your account is in your own name, it will come near the top of Google, and for me it s often at the top of Google because generally I use Twitter more than any other platform. My Twitter account is number two for a search on me on Google performed today, and is pretty representative of my online activity: It s not just our own tweets that come up. This tweet from Fiona (who was on the first 12 Days of Twitter course) was on the front page of Google the morning of Day 2 of the course, and she was talking to @ReachFurther. Do you see how it makes sense for Google to show this? It allows searchers to find the latest conversations people are having about us and with us, and it s direct from the horse s mouth so to speak. So tweets are searchable, not just within Twitter, but within Google. This means that just by staying on your topics of interest, other people will find you based on the keywords they are using in their searches to find you. This is the essence of Inbound Marketing : instead of you making the effort to find people who might want to buy your services, or read your publications, THEY find YOU based on your mutual interests. How many people have signed up to your newsletter if you have one? Or your e-shots? It s a hard one to win isn t it? Even getting the right people to connect on LinkedIn is hard work (and the topic of another course I run, but I digress.) However, how light a touch is following someone on Twitter? It s not a big commitment. It s the virtual equivalent of saying I like what you have to say, tell me more. So it s a great way of starting relationships that will progress through connecting on LinkedIn, reading your blog, liking your Facebook page, subscribing to your newsletter, and then, if you want them to, picking up the phone. 24 P a g e
Yesterday we looked at making your 160 word Bio on your profile keyword friendly, and even choosing or changing your username to something that s more obvious for a casual observer to understand. Tomorrow we ll look specifically at what to tweet about to gain followers and friends. On Day 10 (seems far away right now) we ll look at advanced find and follow strategies, and on Day 11 we ll learn how to migrate followers from other social platforms. Right now we re going to look at the first simple strategy for attracting the right sort of followers, and that s by finding them first. Friend or Follow? Twitter has a major difference from LinkedIn and Facebook and other social platforms. On Facebook when you Friend someone, its mutual. On LinkedIn, when you connect with someone, you both become each others connections. On Twitter, you can follow anyone you like, but that doesn t mean they become your follower. If you do follow each other, as a result of two separate voluntary actions, they become a friend. Twitter shows on your profile how many people you follow, and how many people follow you. Some other platforms will show you how many Twitter friends you have. It s the same with Twitter conversations. A cat can tweet a King, but the King may not deign to tweet me back. And if he did tweet me back, I d have to be really extra-witty/interesting/famous or otherwise special to get him to FOLLOW me back. So, the aim of the game today is to find people to follow in the hope that they will follow you back. Once they follow you back, not only do you have their ears and eyes, as it were, but the potential to talk to their audience, as they may choose to pass your message on to their followers through a one-click process called a re:tweet. One more thing before we move on. I d like to introduce the REACH model. The REACH model reach engage amplify convert hold The reach model can be used to measure social media success. It s a simple measure of: Reach Engage Amplify How many people you are talking to on Twitter, this can be measured by the number of Followers you have, and the number of times you ve been Listed How many people are talking TO you on Twitter this is simply measured as @replies (public tweets addressed to you) & Direct Messages (private tweets addressed to you) How many people are talking ABOUT you, this can be measured by the number of times people mention you in Tweets by @username, and if they use your hashtags 25 P a g e
Convert How many people take the call to action you tweet about. Whether that s read a blogpost, take part in a survey, or buy your products or services. It s about measuring the clicks on your links. Hold How many people stay with you. 2 So today s exercises are about the first element of the model REACH. How many people can we get to follow us? A follow being Twitter s equivalent of permission-based marketing. Happily, we on #twooc have a head-start. By the end of today you should already have all of your fellow course mates following you. You can check this on your profile by clicking on followers under the number on the right hand side. You can change the view so that you can choose to see the Followers listed, or choose to see their tweets in a Timeline. Have a play. Quick note: If you re using an ipad or smartphone it can take a while for the app to catch up with your follower numbers as much as up to a day so don t worry if your follower numbers don t update straight away. In my experience it normally takes around 4 weeks to build the first hundred followers on a typical non-brand account, so your #twooc-mates should give you a bit of a head start. Tomorrow, I ll introduce you to some tools that will help you measure your Twitter success. Finding people to Follow Let s be clear. We want people to follow us who we may do real business with, or who might support us in our aims. At least, that s the purpose of this course. You may want to follow Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher and pry into their marital affairs, but they aren t going to follow you back. Moreover, anyone casually looking at your Twitter profile can see who you follow, and they many not be impressed with you if you re following a bunch of irrelevant celebrities (and I mean, irrelevant to THEM, not just to YOU). So, we need to find people who are talking about the same things as us, in their biographies, and in their tweets, or find people who we know already. Here s some ideas: 1. Follow everyone on this course. If you click this link you ll go to a list we have made of everyone involved in #twooc for this month. You can choose to follow the list, which means you ll see all the tweets, but won t be counted as an individual follower of anyone on it. Or you can follow everyone individually by clicking down the list. Do this before you do number 2. Please tell us your twitter ID as soon as you have it so that we can add you to this list! https://twitter.com/andyallenmedia/lists/twooc/members 2 Be aware that some people will follow you, just to get you to follow them back, and if you don t follow them back, (and even sometimes if you do) they will stop following you. They are just doing a followerbuilding exercise. Don t take it personally. 26 P a g e
2. Across the top of your Twitter home page, click on the #Discover tab. This tab features current topics being discussed on Twitter and suggests users to follow based on the people you already follow. If you have done 1. already, this will include the followers and friends that people on this course have in common. This is what our Who to follow list looks like right now, but it changes every view. The more you follow people, the more this list will populate with people who match your interests, which is another reason to stay on topic. 27 P a g e
3. Follow people who follow your competitors (some of them are likely to follow you back). Go to their profile pages, click on their followers list, and follow them. Everyone has a unique Twitter URL 3 so you can go directly to anyone s page once you know their Twitter name by typing : http://www.twitter.com/username OR you can drop the www and just put http://twitter.com/username 4. Follow the big Influencers (those with many followers) by going to the search bar at the top right of the home page. Type in a keyword to bring up a list of known twelebrities for that subject. As you can see in the screen shot below I have searched for social media training, for the resulting search Twitter has identified accounts that will be of interest to me. On the left hand side in the search menu, you can see that Twitter is showing me just people who have the words Social, Media and Training in their bios. If I chose Timelines I would see a list of the tweets containing those words. If I put Social Media Training in quotes, I d only get bios with that exact phrase in them. If you click on Advanced Search at the bottom of the search menu, you can start getting really specific. It starts to be really exciting, in fact, when you begin to find conversations and make connections this way. Go have a play but don t forget to come back! 3 URL stands for Universal or Uniform Resource Locator which is a web address starting http:// 28 P a g e
5. Use Hashtags People use hashtags to create conversations across Twitter that include people who don t follow each other, or don t normally listen to each other s conversations. So a while back @ReachFurther was tweeting through The Apprentice, which has several #hashtags, including #twitprentice #apprentice and #theapprentice. You can see @Goetzy and I were discussing this, and not only that, but our conversation was retweeted by @twitprentice, bringing us to the attention of their 1500+ followers. More on retweeting later in the course... You may also like to join in live on Dragon s Den using (imaginatively) #DragonsDen much more fun to watch and listen online whilst the show is on 9pm BBC2 Sundays. Then you ll be joining in the phenomenon known as sofalising or dual-screening. See if you can get the Beeb to retweet you! Our very own hashtag: We re using the hashtag #twooc, and you should put this in your tweets if you want them to be included in the wider conversation of the course members. Only use it for comments to do with the course, please. You can see the current conversation if you type #twooc (or #TWOOC same results) into the search bar. At the top of the search results screen, notice that you can toggle between Top or All tweets make sure you look at All tweets so that no-one gets ignored! 29 P a g e
6. Use Directories. Twitter is a bit of a disorganised rabble (that s right, it s not just you who thinks so!). Many kind people have created directories of Twitter followers which work in different ways. Go have a look at them, and find and follow people: www.twibes.com www.wefollow.com www.twellow.com Can you find any more twitter directories? Please tweet them if you can along with the hashtag #twooc. If you have any other tips on finding people to follow, tweet them @lizcable if they are short, and I ll include them in Day 10 - Advanced Follow strategies. Thanks! A Simple Twitter Following Strategy So you now have the basic building blocks of your following strategy. Use these four focuses to plan your attack. You can t follow too many people at once (see later) so you will need to actively follow a few a day, a week, or a fortnight, as you go along, so these pages will help you stay focussed on your ideal audience: 1. Keywords Use the keywords that you use in your Twitter profile bio and all your online content in order to make sure you can find the relevant people online to engage with. Users put keywords in their bios on Twitter to make sure that they are found more easily on search engines. You can also look for the same keywords appearing regularly in a user s tweets to identify them as part of your audience. Start making a list here and you ll find more as you discover the phrases used by your ideal audience on Twitter. List of Keywords (can be phrases): 30 P a g e
2. Competitors You need to watch (but not necessarily follow) your competitors on Twitter in the same way that you would want to see what they re doing offline, not only to track what they re doing on Twitter, but also to see who they re following, who they re doing business with, and who is following them on Twitter. If you follow the people who are following your competitor, they may well follow you back, and ta-da! you are now talking to your competitor s audience. List of Competitors: ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 3. Influencers You need to follow and build up a relationship on Twitter with the users that are the most influential in your field, or a field that could be related to your business. This does not always mean that they are the users with the most followers, but that they are the users with the followers that you want to reach. These users could include influential journalists, industry publications or professional bodies. Engaging with these Influencers is about reaching their audience, so later we ll talk about how to get their attention; they are also very useful in terms of seeing who follows them, and who they are following so you can try to reach that same audience. List of Influencers in industry & field: 31 P a g e
4. Location You need to make sure you are following people in your geographical locations. There is little point in creating relationships online with people with whom you cannot do business with, unless it is to fulfil other strategies. Find the most influential Twitter users in your desired location and see if there are ways to engage them, and you may build up a relationship with them meaning they may re-tweet some of your tweets to their followers. List of locations, Influencers, and areas of expertise: ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------- We ll come back to this framework when we look at advanced following strategies and some other tools to help find people to follow on Day 10: Advanced Following Strategies. Of course the people you really want to engage with will be Influential in your Geographical area, and tweet regularly using the Keywords you want to be found for. Being found revisited Now you have done the following exercise, and had a good hunt for the right kind of people to engage with on Twitter, does this change anything for you about how you want to be found? What judgements were you making as you looked at people s profiles? What judgements will people be making about you? Is there anything you d like to change? What directories will you join, and under what subjects? What hashtags, if any, will you put in your profile bio and in your tweets? 32 P a g e
How many people can I follow? Twitter sets boundaries on how many people you can follow. This is not a finite number, but a ratio of follower to following. This ratio changes from time to time, but at the moment you can only follow up to 2001 until you have 2000 followers yourself. So this Weetwood Writers account had reached its follower limit when we took this screenshot: and this is the warning you get when this happens: How desperate does it look, though, to have 5 followers, and be following 2000? Think about the impression this gives, and just follow a few more I d say no more than 50% more than you have followers. Twitter also watches out for follower churn that is, it will find and penalise people who follow and then stop following significant numbers of users, in an attempt to bait people to follow-back. Having a clear-out is all well and good, but do it every couple of weeks or so, or in very small chunks at a time. There are ways of automating this that we ll look at in the more advanced sections. Until then, I look forward to seeing your first tweets online today don t forget the #twooc hashtag! Happy tweeting, @LizCable 33 P a g e
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