Syrupd Web Design - Stickies: March 2013

We are not all rock stars or movie stars, so we cannot just jump onto twitter and expect to have a massive following of millions one week into the process of tweeting. You have to start by being honest with yourself, how interesting am I? If you have an answer to that question then you will now how much of a following you can get.

The main thing you always need to remember when you are going for finding your masses, is the type of audience you want to attract. Someone with a more general interest is going to attract more followers than someone who’s tweeting about their chewed bubble gum collection. Although interesting, not many people want to hear about that or the flavours. However if you have a solid opinion about something interesting or can deliver news like the paperboy then you have a better chance at playing the game of tweeps roulette.

Here are some basic rules that you need to follow to create your public and gain minions.

Patience!

I can get you 10,000 twitter followers overnight! But, only 25% of them are active and of that 25% they all live in countries that don’t speak your language.

That’s the catch people! Don’t pay someone to get you followers! Not only is it a black-hat, disrespectful method it is also a waste of your hard earned money. If you want to waste your cash like that I’ll send you a postage-paid envelope and you can just give it to me.

Gaining followers is sort of like gaining street credit. You have to earn the respect of your initial followers and more will come – and not overnight! Set yourself a realistic goal. Mine is 100 a month. Plain and simple, if I find half way through the month I am not going to meet my personal goal then I look back at what I may have done boring or wrong in the last 15 days. As your numbers grow then so should your goals. For example if I have 20,000 followers then I should be able to see my audience raise by another 1000 a month with some effort.

Think of the simple side of how you gain followers, if someone if following you then you will potentially show up as a suggestion for their followers. So the more people following you the more times you come up as a suggestion. Like the old fashion one friend tells two friends who both tell two friends concept.

Engage vs. Influence

This is the tricky part. Who are you and what does your audience care about you? Myself, I am a human so people expect human interaction. Some others are a corporation so they expect it to be faceless and newsworthy. You need to sit down and figure out your Engagement with followers versus the influence you have over them.

We’ll use Pepsi-Cola as an example. If you were to find them on twitter you would only expect that they are going to blab about their products or sell-out style advertising because that’s the presence they already have. There is nothing wrong with this, it is just the natural expectation you should have with following them.

Now we will use Justin Bieber as another example. Although it may not actually be him doing all his tweets 100% of the time when you follow him you expect human interaction. He may not respond to you mentions, but when you read back through the tweets you see human conversation. This gives us the engagement factor.

The two extremes that you have to get to work together are these and it can be a tough formula to create sometimes. The best way it is to Post often during peak times for where you audience stretches. I post in the morning for my eastern followers and more at noon for the waking pacific followers. Then I toss in some in the afternoon & evening to satisfy the rest. Find other tweets that spark your interest and retweet them with a comment or just plain out reply to them. You’d be surprised how many people are ready for a conversation.

Content, Content, Content

This goes back to asking yourself if you are interesting. Well, are you? The content you put into your tweets will equal the interest people are looking for.

The key thing is pick a topic and stick with it. I post about social media and web design related material and do my best not trail away from it. And when I do I even put that it is off topic in the tweet.

You can trail off topic depending on your audience. I like to post the occasional geek related tweet because I know I have people that are interested in it in my follower-base. Take some time and look at some of the people that would potentially follow you and read what they tweet about.

Find your content from various sources. You can use a tool like Google Reader to watch multiple blogs and have fresh news daily. Retweet what others are talking about, but don’t overload it because then all you are doing is using other peoples words over and over again.

You can also write words of inspiration. Not everything has to be a link you found on the internet with a tweet button. Sometimes a little insight is refreshing for people to read and you will be surprised what you say can get a retweet.

#Overload!

Don’t over do it and don’t under do it. Find that happy medium of tweeting during the day that keeps people interested but not annoyed. If you have gained and lost followers, this is usually why. Nobody likes an overtalker and the same goes for an overtweeter.

Hashtags are useful, but not needed for every word in a tweet. You want to make a rule of thumb of how many is acceptable? How about 1! You are using a hashtag to show relevance to a topic, that’s all. So if you are posting something about a freebie, then just use a #freebie comment, not #free #freebie #nothing #totallyfree (see how annoying that is)

Don’t tweet overload. Posting 10 things in a row can be annoying to your readers as well. Separate things by a few minutes or you can use a tool like Sprout Social to schedule your posts.

Have Fun With It!
Twitter is not for complaining, it’s a modern forum of chatters. Nobody wants to hear your gripes and be dragged down by negativity. Post interesting things, fun things and happy things and you will see that people will love what you write!

Good luck and happy tweeting! @SyrupD

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