Bear in mind that with an audience of only 1,000 I had a single tweet get picked up go viral and generate 150,000 customer leads! But we’ll talk about what and how to communicate later. First let’s start building your audience – cool?
I don’t want you spending a huge amount of time and effort on this (1/2 hour a day max!) and don’t overthink this.
Twitter has some simple rules. You are allowed to follow a maximum of 1000 people a day. You can follow up to 2000 people before you hit a cap. Beyond 2000 you can only follow 10% more people than follow you. So if you had 2000 followers you could follow 2200 people. 10,000 followers you can follow 11,000 people.
The goal as I defined it was to get a large audience of somewhat relevant people. Who are relevant people? That’s the million dollar question. We’re in the network marketing business, we’re looking for fellow entrepreneurs, we’re looking for customers and business partners. We have products that save money, reduce carbon footprint, reduce harmful pollutants in our environment, help us age more gracefully and keep us healthy, help us lose weight. Who could we really exclude?
What I did, for what it’s worth, was to think about relevant topics, individuals who speak to those topics, companies and competitors who sell to our potential audiences AND who have large twitter audiences themselves. I would follow those individuals AND follow the individuals that follow these people AND more particularly follow those people who follow those people who themselves have large audiences.
An example of this crazy “logic”: If I believe that entrepreneurs and those interested in bettering themselves and their current situation might be a good audience for me who could I follow?
How about Tony Robbins, the self help guru? @tonyrobbins
Well, if I look him up on who to follow in twitter and do a search for him, there he is, click on his profile and lo and behold he has 1.9 million followers all (or most) presumably interested in his content.
I’m going to click to follow Tony, If I like his stuff at this point I may want to add him to a separate list of inspirational stuff so I can easily access his content later on. (click on the first little box and a drop down menu lets you create a new list like self help, motivation, MLM… or select one you’ve already added.)
Now, here’s the laborious bit. Click on his followers and follow the people following Tony. They are listed in the order they followed so those at the top of the list are most recent. Which means they’ve been on Twitter lately and followed Tony as well.
I work down the list and follow everyone who looks faintly relevant to my pretty broad demographic. I don’t follow those with no logo, with Cyrillic, Arabic or Chinese script. Not an overtly discriminatory tactic, merely I can’t communicate in their language of choice. When I started out I was very selective who I followed. I of course wouldn’t follow porn (which rules out an awful lot) I don’t follow overtly political and religious sites. I’d even go as far as to open up their profile and only follow them if they had a large audience of followers themselves, tweeted regularly and had a “good follow back ratio”. I quickly found this tactic way too time consuming and made little difference to my follow back growth. In fact if my assumptions were wrong I’d probably rule out perfectly good candidates!
Whoa! What is a follow back ratio all about! Well take a look at Tony Robbins as a great example. He has a huge audience. 1.9 million people receive his tweets. BUT he only follows 483 people. Until I really am a guru who appears on his radar who he deems it worth following it is unlikely that he will follow me back. So he will not add to my audience. So, wheras he is a good source of the demographic I’m looking for if I follow him, he will add to my follower count but not to those that follow me. Given that I am limited to follow 10% more than follow me he will not likely help that ratio.
However, a peculiarity is that if I follow Tony, other people, much like myself, searching for Tony’s demographic will find and follow me in the hopes that I will in turn follow them back.
As a rule I always follow back those who follow me. And most do the same (Unless your Tony!) If you look at the list of your followers as it grows you’ll notice a large number who you follow. You will also see a bunch you aren’t who have found you because of who you follow (or they like your photo)
So, action plan.
Day 1 follow 1000 people using some of the above strategies. On each of the Tony Robbins type accounts you choose to follow the audience of I tend only to follow the first 4-5 pages – 50-100 people. That way, given my odd kind of logic, they are more recently on Twitter and more likely to follow you back quickly.
Day 2 follow another 1,000 people, or as many as it allows you to.
Day 3 follow as many more up to your 2,000 person cap.
You will probably find by day 3 that you have several hundred and maybe as many as 1,000+ followers. This is going to depend somewhat on the types of people you’ve followed. Now you are being limited by the 2,000 person cap. You are following a thousand or so people who have as yet not followed you back. Don’t take it personally, sure some may hate your content, your logo or your photo but mostly they haven’t been on twitter since you found them or haven’t noticed you following them.
How do you make room to follow more people and grow your audience? You unfollow those who don’t follow you back. This is a time consuming and labour intensive process on twitter.
There are several 3rd party tools unaffiliated with Twitter that can help. My current favourite is www.justunfollow.com A basic account is Free but a full feature account is $5 a year (well worth it – and I have zero vested ineterest). The FREE tool let’s you list your non followers and unfollow 100 people per day (24 hour period). So if you have 1000 non followers it’ll take you 10 days to unfollow them all. Each time you unfollow 100 you can follow 100 more new people.
The pro version will let you unfollow everyone who didn’t follow back. It also has a priority unfollow feature which lets you unfollow only those with the least likelihood of following you back (like Tony for example). It also lets you whitelist Tony if you want to keep following him because you like his stuff or because lots of quality new people are finding you among his followers. I sometimes get greater return by unfollowing and following back so I appear higher up his new follower list – just saying.
The other cool feature is that it lists your new fans – people who are following you who you aren’t yet following back. It is so quick to follow fans back and unfollow non followers using this tool vs Twitter & I’m all about efficiency!
So, if you follow these instructions for your new Twitter account for a week, especially if you go justunfollow premium, you will have approaching 2000 followers hopefully largely targeting towards the chosen demographic profile that fits your goals.
If you've followed my advice and your not happy with your results tweet me and claim your free FIX
Next article I’ll show you some more cool tools that help you further automate this process and talk about communicating with and engaging your audience.
Cheers,
Mark Wright
No comments:
Post a Comment