Marketing your website is just like marketing any other product; you need to have multiple streams of inflowing traffic. One of those flows, that is very popular, is to use Twitter. However, traffic you glean from Twitter can only happen if you have enough followers. I am not claiming to be a Twitter expert, but I am building my online presence using this social media. Here is how I am working toward the goal of having a larger presence online.
Gaining Twitter Followers
Getting people to follow you is actually pretty easy. In fact, there are many different ways you can do it.
Buy them. You can pay Twitter to promote your page, and you pay only for those who end up becoming your follower. You can see others who are utilizing this method on the right hand side of your screen that says “Who to follow.” Those who have promoted their page are indicated. While this method will build your following base quickly, you get a lot of people who aren’t really interested in you.
Ask them. The next easiest way to get a follower is to simply follow someone else. Many people follow the standard that if you follow me, I will follow you. By selecting people to follow, you can start to build your followers in return.
Lure them. If you want followers that are the most interested in what you have to say, start posting interesting stuff. Just like organic backlinks are the best kinds for your website, organic Twitter followers are the best kinds for your social media presence. The trick here, however, is to make sure you’re not blindly retweeting, but putting some thought into what you say.
Asking for Twitter Followers
I use a combination of both asking and luring. However, I don’t want to be following just a bunch of people that I don’t care about, nor do I want them to follow me but never read my work and never look at my tweets. So I have to pre-qualify them in a way.
To do so, I will first read their bio. An uninteresting bio (“Yo this is me on Twitter”) is not going to grab my attention and I will move right along. A bio filled with a lot of jargon (“I am an introspective leader in the online b2b world specializing in synergistic engagement opportunities and working extensively with CRM software…”) is going to glaze me over. I don’t want to take the time to figure out what you are trying to say; what I want to know is how following you is going to make me a better writer, marketer, person, or other.
If the follower makes it past the bio test, I move on to the tweet test. Essentially I scroll through their last 20 tweets or so and I look for two things: frequency and relevancy. If someone only tweets every 6 months, I’m not going to follow them (unless I have done business with them in the past). Likewise if a person only tweets about the merits of raising alpacas for wool, I’m not going to be too interested in what they have to say. What I am really looking for is good solid information; something I would retweet.
On a related note, if someone tweets every half hour (and by that I mean they have used a program to schedule their tweets), I likely won’t want to follow them. They are not actively involved in their Twitter; they are actively involved in automating their Twitter.
My Twitter Followers Strategy
My strategy to gain Twitter followers is similar to many, but different because I am putting a lot of time into it. I want to make sure to follow, and be followed by, people that add value to my life (and I add value to theirs). I don’t care if I am following 100,000 and only being followed by 3,000 because as a writer in Billings, Montana, I would rather have 3,000 interested followers than many more that never look at my page.
It is work, but in the end I will come away with a great knowledge of the world. Hopefully my Twitter followers will as well. How do you market your Twitter account?