Last week I spent a couple of days focusing on Twitter trying to
really nail down best practices for growth. The results of that focus – a
33% growth in targeted followers and over 400% spike in interaction and
click-throughs on our links over three days.
Here’s how we did it.
1. Follow Other Users
This is the most basic step, but worth mentioning upfront. If you
don’t have a huge following on your blog and you’re a small to medium
size business, growing twitter followers without reaching out and
following others is extremely tough. You need to reach out to others who
are in your industry or part of your target market and start following
them. If you’re providing great content, chances are, they’ll follow you
back. To do this effectively you need to find the right people to
follow – sure, simply following everyone who comes across your path
works to a degree, but they won’t be valuable followers and chances are
your twitter ratio (followers to who you follow) will be horribly
skewed. That reflects poorly on your company image.
2. TweetAdder
Meet TweetAdder, my new favorite tool for finding users to follow.
I’ll dedicate a full post to TweetAdder in the future because of its
extremely powerful follow/unfollow/message automation, but one of the
things it lets you do is search for people to follow based on keywords.
You can narrow search results based on location, what they’re tweeting
about, their profile description, and more. We used it to target
marketing execs and CEOs in the DFW area. Once you find those users,
it’s easy to reach out to them on Twitter. Localized results are always
the most valuable. It has an initial fee, but the value is well worth
it.
3. Webinars
Find and participate in webinars! Not only is it a valuable learning
opportunity, but these events usually have a corresponding hashtag for
attendees to tweet about the event, either asking questions or sharing
information to their followers. Get those hashtags and start pumping out
tweets during the event. This is where we really saw a jump in user
interaction.
If you provide social media services, find a webinar about social
media best practices. Some people might be your competitors, but a lot
of attendees will be prospects looking to increase their own knowledge.
This is a great time to reach out, retweet other users, and share your
own content and offers. For a recent webinar on using Facebook for
business (#FB4BIZ) we had a lot of visitors to our blog – and retweeting
our blog-simply because we offered additional information and reading
about the webinar subject to other attendees. If you’re a real estate
company, find home buyer webinars. If you do bankruptcy consultation,
find a bankruptcy webinar. It’s easy to do, and it becomes more
effective, the more blog content and eBooks (top of funnel content!) you
have to share.
4. Directories
Directories are a mixed bag, but they’re well worth talking about.
Some are much more valuable than others. Like TweetAdder, this will
eventually be a blog post on its own, but the concept of a twitter
directory is the same as any other directory – users can find you, and
you can find other users to follow, based on what your services are and
what your twitter is about. Our favorites are WeFollow and Twellow,
which you should add yourself to just for the passive follows even if
you never interact with the sites again. Other directories, such as
Twiends, can be used to hugely grow your followers, but often you’ll
just see a jump in numbers and not in interaction because those
following will have no interest in your actual content. The droprate can
also be very high. I would discourage using a cheap shortcut without
value, but if pure growth without results is your interest, then it’s
worth exploring.
5. Keywords and Hashtags
You knew we’d get here eventually, didn’t you? Use good keywords!
Once more: Use good keywords! If you’re tweeting your keywords, even if
you aren’t using hashtags, your tweets will show up in searches. Studies
suggest that the sweet spot with hashtags is two tashtags per tweet.
One is good, but move to three and you’ll see a big dropoff in
interaction. Hashtags earn your tweets twice the amount of interaction
as those without. (Speaking of, ask your followers to retweet you! It
can make a huge difference.) The extra bonus about keywords and hashtags
is that users who find your Twitter account this way are almost always
quality follows. They’ll engage more, and a higher number could be
potential leads.
6. Marketing Integration
Plaster your Twitter account everywhere and on everything. Every
piece of marketing material that goes out, add your Twitter Account. It
should be in prominent view on your website, it should be on your direct
mail pieces, it should be on your promotional items, and it should be
in your email blasts. Ask people to follow you and they will come. It’s
really that simple. Get your twitter account out to the world and the
world will follow.
Matt Anderson
Post from: SiteProNews