Tag Archives: twitter

Podcast Episode 75: Twitter Tools to Streamline Your Social Media Marketing

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Social media is a pretty unavoidable marketing tool, but it can be really easy to waste a lot of time managing these channels. Thankfully, there are plenty of tools available that can make maintaining a social presence easy and efficient, and in this podcast episode, I talk you through a list of Twitter management tools to streamline your marketing activities.

Twitter-Tools-toShow Notes

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How to get more followers on Twitter

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English: Tweeting bird, derived from the initi...

by Philippa Willitts. 
You can follow me on Twitter @PhilippaWrites

Every Twitter user wants more followers. Whether that is to look good to their friends, to have a wider audience to promote their business to or to find more interesting people to follow themselves, it is a common theme and one that is much discussed. There are easy ways to get many thousands of followers with little effort, and there are more complex ways to build followers gradually. While the former may seem like the obvious option, the latter is in fact a better choice for long term, engaged followers rather than spammy, vanity followers.

The Easy Way

It is possible to buy Twitter followers. On certain websites, many thousands of followers can be bought for just a few dollars, and those who want to impress by having 20,000 followers, compared to their friend’s 160, can do this easily, quickly and inexpensively. However, many of the accounts which will follow you in the hours after your purchase are spam accounts, fake accounts and accounts with no real person behind them. It may look good on your statistics but it will bring no added business your way and no interesting people to talk to.

The More Difficult Way

The alternative way to gain more followers is actually a good lesson in how to get the most out of Twitter. Look at your tweets from the last few days: if you were a stranger checking out your stream, would you honestly follow yourself? Have a look at your own account. Are you engaging with other Twitter users? Responding to others’ tweets? Re-tweeting others? Or are you just blasting out your own marketing message with no regard for the people who already follow you? Looking at your account in this way will help you to see whether or not you are an appealing prospect for other Twitter users to follow.

Image representing Twitter as depicted in Crun...

If you are confident that you are engaging well with others and providing an interesting stream of information, you will have a lot more success in gaining new followers. If, on the other hand, you see that your tweet stream is predominantly self-promotion or auto-tweets then rather than starting to try and find new followers straight away, instead spend a few weeks focusing on improving the way you use the site. Talk to others, don’t self promote more than once in every 10 tweets and don’t be serious 100% of the time.

Once your account is looking better you can then start to court new Twitter prospects.

Make Conversation

One way to do this is to chat to more people on the site. This includes people who already follow you, as well as those who you would on your follower list. When people see how interesting and helpful you are they are more likely to follow your account.

Follow

Another trick is to follow more people yourself. Don’t do this in a mass, spammy way. Instead, choose people carefully who would enhance your account and people who your account will appeal to. If they get email notifications every time they get a new follower they may well check out your account straight away and follow you back.

Group Chats

Join in tweet chats. These are usually held at specified times, once a week or once a month, and they involve like-minded people having a discussion which is curated by the use of a relevant hash tag. So if your website is about freelancing, look out for Twitter chats for freelancers and make sure you participate in the next one. There is often a specified topic for each chat so make sure you will have interesting things to say and others will undoubtedly follow you as a result.

Search

Use the Twitter search function to find other people who are discussing your favourite subjects. If you are passionate about wrestling, search on the Twitter website for the term “wrestling” and you will find all the recent tweets on the subject. Say hi to the people who seem to share your interests, follow them and see if they follow you back.

Clearly, all these ways are far more time-consuming than buying followers, and you will not gain thousands of followers overnight, but the people you to find and make connections with will be far more relevant to your own Twitter account, far more interested in what you say, and far more likely to engage with you. This is a much richer way of gaining new Twitter followers than simply giving someone a fiver and waiting for your numbers to fly high. It is, after all, a social networking website. It works best when people are sociable and networking with others. While buying followers is an easy ego boost, it requires no effort and is neither fulfilling nor useful.

You can follow me on Twitter @PhilippaWrites

The Science of Social Media Timing (infographics)

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The more involved a person gets in social media, the more they will aim to work out the optimal times to transmit their messages. This is particularly true for those using it as a promotional tool, but anybody who enjoys a lot of engagement and many retweets and ‘likes’ will have noticed that there are certain times of the day or week when their followers are more likely to click their links and share them with their own followers.

The increase in popularity of services such as BufferApp is additional proof that people are aware of the power of timing in their social media posting. Using this service, a person can add tweets to be sent to their Buffer, and Buffer will spread them out and post them with strategic timing.

Dan Zarrella is a ‘social media scientist’, and while that might sound like one of those meaningless new job titles, it is one that he actually merits. His studies into the very specific factors which make a tweet retweetable, or a pin repinnable, are mind-blowing, not least in their detail. KISSmetrics got hold of some data by Dan, from a webinar he ran and turned it into three fascinating infographics.

It is worth noting that they are somewhat US-centric, as indeed is much of the web. Not only that, but while the information is incredibly well-researched and valuable, it should mainly be used to give you an idea of where to start with your own social media marketing, rather than as a set-in-stone blueprint. There is no substitute for observing and testing your own results and altering your social media promotions based on those observations – your target audience may well have different characteristics, and getting to know, and fully understand, those is what you need to do for the ultimate results in your own social media marketing.

However, that said, a lot can be learned from the following infographics, so use them as a springboard for streamlining your own social media, email marketing and blogging promotional efforts.

If you are looking for blog posts, web content or eBooks or in-depth reports about social media, hire me as your social media writer.