Twitter is quickly becoming a broadcast medium. While many people speak about it as a social medium that encourages communication, it is not. It is a broadcast medium that allows its users to freely respond to those broadcasts by sending and receiving messages called tweets. This is still a powerful and effective model, but it is less of a conversation than people are talking about. In Twitter, an author leads the conversations and interactions with his subscribers, who are also known as followers.
Do you want to be an effective Twitter author? Let your brand be one of those leaders by following these helpful tips:
Before anything else, you need to understand and design your business goals. You want to approach Twitter in a way that is profitable to you from a relationship standpoint, and profitable to your audience from a trust and authenticity standpoint. Make sure that people who follow you are genuinely interested in your content, could take action, and buy your products and services at some point in the future. A blind follow is not a useful follow at all. That’s why I find the practice of automatically following everyone who follows you a worthless practice.
Here are 3 steps you can take to increase your valuable Twitter followers and audience:
- Find
- Engage
- Activate
Find interesting thought leaders
Now that you have set your business goals, the first step is to find industry leaders and follow the conversations that are related to your business and to your consumer's area of interest. Relevant keywords and subjects could guide you in searching for topics that you’d like to get involved with and in finding people who are discussing those topics. In order to identify a quality tweeter versus a spammer, review a person's Twitter history of tweets. Take time to look at their profile and the types of things they've been talking about. Don’t pick someone who is clearly following anyone and everyone. You definitely do not want do that. Yes, they could increase your numbers, but 100 high quality followers is better than 1000 followers you get via an auto-follow scheme.
Engage the thought leaders
After you have identified those key thought leaders, score them as high, medium, or low priority. Target the high priority ones; the ones you think are the most important or the most credible. Then, write them a mention message to get them to engage with you. Direct message can’t be sent to a person on Twitter unless they are following you, so make it a public message where you mention them. Engage them in a conversation, and just ask their opinions about a particular subject. Do NOT talk about your brand product, offer a free sample, etc. You want to approach the individual as someone you want to have a real conversation with. If you only have product/service sales in your mind, this will show through in your conversations. Be authentic!
Asking a simple question on Twitter can generate compelling conversations and quality content without having to prepare or write anything else. Your awareness within Twitter is built by those people who follow and respond to your contributions. As you deliver high quality insight, you’ll gain some credibility with your audience. They will open-up, re-tweet some of your content, or ask you questions where you can display more of your expertise. If people follow you because of your questions and content then it will be a valuable connection you have established.
Activate users with content and a call to action
Finally, our third tactic is to activate your audience interests by finding a prominent person to interview on Twitter. Search for a hot celebrity or media person and do a twitterview (a twitt interview) with them about some key subject matter. Your topic should be geared towards your end-audience’s goals but, it also needs to speak enough about that person - their interests, their needs, and their desires. Allow them to respond to you in a casual yet informative manner and build some unique engagement that way. Most importantly, you need to ask your reads to act upon the infomormation you have provided them. Nearly every tweet should have a single step action for people to take. Make it a retweet request ("pls RT"), ask a question, or direct them to a link. This is crucial if you hope to understand what types of content and value cause people to activate and take action.
Above all, be genuine
I think one thing that traditional marketers don’t understand about social media is how to keep the business as simple and as honest as possible. You need to reach out to your audience as if you're helping out a friend. Make them feel free in getting involved with one-on-one conversations. Be reminded that those people also have audiences, and if you can affect one or two people every couple of days on Twitter, that exponential factor is going to become more effective for you overtime. If you have ten highly engaged followers one day and you managed to get them re-tweet something important to ten of their followers as well, you can instantly begin to build your reach beyond your follower list, and really begin to use Twitter as a smart marketing tool more than just a broadcast medium.