What Is The Right Way To Grow Your Twitter Following?
I sent an email out to my newsletter before I went into launch mode for Membership Site Mastermind that was promoting the virtues of Twitter. I was hoping to introduce some new people to Twitter and increase my followers with the enticement of a behind the scenes look at the launch I was about to do.
Here is the first part of the message I sent out -
Twitter is a service that lets you communicate with other people using up to 140 character messages.
The best way I can describe it is like micro-blogging combined with instant messaging.
You’re not going to “get” it until you try it, so I’ll stop trying to describe how it works and you just go use it.
You can sign up and begin following me from my Twitter page here (it doesn’t cost anything) -
Go to that link, click the “Join today” button and then begin following my updates (or “tweets” as they are called).
You can then start sending messages and following other people too.
If you want more help, see the video from Gideon Shalwick on how to use Twitter -
Why Should You Care About Twitter?
Twitter is another contact point with your audience and as such can help you in all the ways that knowing other human beings is beneficial.
You can use it to…
- follow important people in your industry
- influence your tribe
- send traffic to your blog or website
- sell your products and services
- sell other people’s products and services
- keep up to date with friends and family
- participate in the conversation
- become famous
- and more…
Although hesitant initially, after Twittering for fun at first, I started to realize how incredible Twitter is for business too.
Simply put, you can’t afford not to use this tool if you want to stay current and be a participant in your market and not just a consumer or observer.
Participation leads to insights, which leads to you developing a more intimate knowledge of your industry, and more importantly, a more direct influence over the important people in your industry, namely -
- Other experts/mavens
- Your audience
To put this into practical perspective, I use Twitter to send traffic to my blog posts. I use Twitter to promote affiliate products (I’ve done thousands in sales already). I use Twitter to stay connected with other top Internet marketers and to connect with my people - my followers.
It’s a great tool, but like all things requires work to get going, so you should start now.
What was interesting was the feedback I received after I sent this email.
Dominate Your Market: How Self Contained Communities Create Permanent Barriers To Entry
Some of my early readers may recall that I was a Magic: The Gathering card player as a teenager. No, that’s not dungeons and dragons or role playing or anything like that. It’s closer to poker combined with chess with a little bit of lord of the rings story telling thrown in. It’s a “mind sport” as far as the PR people at Wizards of the Coast, the company that produces the game, are concerned, although I’m not sure that’s the most accurate label.
Whatever the case, “Magic” as we call it, is a serious game for some people, and besides the first two or so years where I played for fun, most of the latter years in my career as a card gamer, were about trying to win tournaments.
Tournament Magic is big, with millions of dollars given away in a pro tour that travels around the world. Some guys even play the game professionally as their full time job. I never won big money as a gamer (my highlight was representation on the 98 Australian national team at the World Championships), but I did get to visit Japan, Singapore and the USA thanks to gaming. I look back on those years as a lot of fun.
Magic Cards Are Money
Magic cards, like baseball cards, are collectible. Each card has a value, and for a long time I made my lunch money by trading and selling the cards I won at tournaments. As a typical entrepreneur, I often enjoyed the business of running a little card shop as a teenager more so than playing the game itself (unless I was winning a tournament of course!).
Wizards of the Coast (let’s just call them “Wizards”) made some very smart moves with Magic. It became a serious cash cow for them.
In case you are wondering how they keep the cash coming in, each year Wizards produces new cards so the pool of cards people play with at tournaments is constantly cycling over. This makes the playing field very dynamic, but it was also a brilliant business decision as they keep making new cards that players need to purchase in order to stay up to date.
It’s fair to say that effectively, Wizards produced a new form of currency, at least within the realm of their customer’s universe. As long as the cards have value to players of the game, they can print money simply by printing new sets of cards.
Wizards Goes One Better
I thought that Wizards had a good thing going already, but when the Internet came along, the did something really clever - they ported Magic over to the virtual world.
Online Magic is pretty much the same as offline, or real world Magic. You challenge people from all over the world to a game, you can play in tournaments to win more cards and cash and you can buy and trade cards virtually with other people.
The kicker is that the online digital cards have roughly the same value as the physical cards. You can buy packs of cards for the same price, but instead of receiving little pieces of cardboard with pictures on them, you receive digital cards with pictures on them that are stored on computers.
In other words, Wizards can now print money online, with the cost of production and distribution drastically reduced. All I can say is that is one heck of a good business model.
The Power Of A Self Contained Community
Is Twitter A Time Waster Or A Powerful Business Tool?
It’s pretty clear that Twitter is the social media star of 2009, at least so far.
In case you haven’t got an account yet, make sure you go to Twitter.com and register for free. After you have your account, you can begin by following my updates -
I won’t go into the details about how Twitter works because Gideon Shalwick (@gideonshalwick) has a video coming out about that soon to teach the basics.
Twitter is essentially a micro-blogging tool where you are restricted to 140 character posts, which are meant to be updates from your life. It’s also a fantastic inter-communication tool, which I will explain more about in a moment.
Twitter can definitely be used as an effective business tool, but it can be abused as a time waster as well. You need to find a balance, so let me explain how I recommend Twitter is best used.
It’s Darren’s Fault
I’ve been a member of Twitter since Darren Rowse (@problogger) bugged me about joining. Darren has since gone on to become a super Twitter fan, starting a blog about it (Twitip.com) and becoming the number one Twitter user in Australia with some 30,000+ followers. Beware Darren when he becomes passionate about something!
I joined up after Darren’s recommendation and started exploring the service. At first you have to get your head around how the system works, how you can send direct replies @ certain people, what a direct message is and how it differs from a reply and all the other tips and tricks.
I used a desktop program called Twhirl, which sort of functions like an instant messaging client plugged into Twitter and other similar services.
Twhirl was good, but as I found out recently, Tweetdeck is better. This desktop client is, and I quote “An application that aims to evolve existing functionality of Twitter by breaking down Twitter feeds into more manageable bite sized pieces”. Simply put, you have to use Tweetdeck as it makes Twitter much easier to manage.
Chronicling My Travels
I first signed up to Twitter while on the second half of my travels overseas in 2008, so much of my early Twitter notifications were either Internet marketing related, or “I just landed in Rome” type messages. It proved an effective way to use Twitter as people told me they enjoyed my status updates about where I was in the world.
It was during this time that Twitter become more prominent in Internet marketing circles. Suddenly all the big players where emailing their lists trying to boost their Twitter followings. John Reese (@johnreese) quickly built his following passed 10,000 people after mailing his subscribers. Frank Kern (@masscontrolkern), Mike Filsaime (@mikefilsaime), Eben Pagan (@ebenpagan), Jeff Walker (@jeffwalker), Rich Schefren (@richschefren), and prominent bloggers, Brian Clark (@copyblogger), John Chow (@johnchow), are among many others who all have active accounts on Twitter from my industry.
Even celebrities are using Twitter. There’s Brent Spiner (@brentspiner), Wil Weaton (@wilw - a massive 50,000+ followers) and Levar Burton (@levarburton) from Star Trek (well I think Star Trek actors are celebrities anyway!), Kevin Rudd (@kevinruddpm) and Malcolm Turnbull (@turnbullmalcolm) from Australian politics and of course the most popular Twitter user of all time, Barack Obama (@barackobama), with over 230,000 followers at the time of writing.
This is only a small sample of the people using Twitter, with of course your normal every day Internet user being the most widely represented group on Twitter, although I believe it’s fair to say “tweeting” (to send messages on Twitter) is definitely NOT a mainstream activity.
It’s A Lot Like Email List Building
Podcast: How Companies Use Social Media And What It Means For Bloggers
Press play to begin streaming the audio or right click the download text link and choose save as or save link.
Download the MP3 [ 30 Minutes - 10 MB]
I meant to have this out to you on Wednesday last week after I recorded it, since the prior evening I attended a Third Tuesday meet-up in Toronto, which was the inspiration for the podcast. However, you see, I bought a new macbook pro.
Don’t get me wrong, I love my new mac, but this is my first mac and since I recorded the podcast on the mac there was a BIG learning curve to figure out how to get it ready for publication on this blog. As you will hear, it’s not quite right, but the message is definitely clear enough to enjoy. Apologies for the change in volume and odd shuffling noises.
How Do You Measure Social Media?
This Third Tuesday meet-up was a good one, the topic being - How do we measure social media? - with three expert panelists (Katie Paine, Marshall Sponder and Marcel Lebrun) taking questions from the audience made up of mostly PR and communications professionals, and related consultants and small business owners.
The idea of measuring the impact of social media is akin to measuring the effect of branding. Social media, much like branding, is often difficult to directly correlate with a business outcome, despite it obviously having a big impact on business results. I won’t go into here since I do so in some depth in the podcast, so have a listen!
If you are a blogger, a business owner or a person interested in the business side of social media, you will enjoy this rambling podcast.
Thanks to Joseph Thornley and his crew for putting on a great meet-up.
Show Notes
- Introduction to the Third Tuesday event
- What we mean when talking about measuring social media
- What this means for bloggers
- Why it’s the conversation that matters most, not the influencer
- No industry wide standards for measuring social media are available
- Not many people are actively measuring, only monitoring
- There is an opportunity to provide a database of influential sites ranked by social media analysis
- Use social media to assess how your competition is perceived and use that information to compete
- Consulting firms providing social media data mining services
- What changes to ad budget spending at companies means for bloggers
- Why being an influencer in any niche is so important
Click Here to Download the MP3 [ 30 Minutes - 10 MB]
Yes I Am On Twitter
You can follow me on Twitter here - http://twitter.com/yarostarak
Did you notice the tipping point? Twitter hit the tip somewhere in the last few months and it’s clearly gaining serious critical mass.
I’ve had a Twitter account for many months but largely ignored it because social media is such an attention suck and I already spend too long in front of the computer as it is. I’ve successfully ignored Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and I thought I’d do the same with Twitter, but alas, sometimes you can’t let things pass or you may miss out on opportunities.
I like to focus on one thing and become really good at it - in this case blogging and running my business - but you don’t want to get left behind either, and since Twitter isn’t too labor intensive to manage (compared to Facebook or MySpace), I’ve decided to bend to the will of the people and get active tweeting.
Twitter looks like a lot of fun and since it’s really like blogging but without massive wordcounts, it should be easy enough to maintain.
How Many Signs Do You Need Before You Take Action?
There have been a few signs lately that prompted the decision to become an active Twitterererer, for example…
