I don't want you spending & wasting a bunch of money on social media, websites etc... You are investing your most important asset, your time, into building your online social media presence. Use it wisely.
Again I’m not a guru but I’ve been doing it for a while now and have found out some stuff worthy of sharing. There’s a ton of hype, a ton of people selling stuff out there but there are only a few tools I use regularly and fewer still that I’m willing to pay for.
As you are starting out building a Twitter following one free tool worth getting hold of early in the process is www.socialoomph.com This lets you set up a couple of neat features.
The one I used first is to set up an automated Direct message system (DM for short) Basically when anyone follows you it sends them a Direct message privately, outside of a public Tweet.
Put what you want in there. A “Hey how are you?”, “thanks for following me check out my blog www.bit.ly (remember that free url shortner with the tracking and statistics built-in!)
Some more engaging ones I’ve seen “Hey how’s the weather there now?” or you can offer them a free trial sample by sending them to your website http://bit.ly/fnSNyV The objective is to attempt to engage someone in a conversation, to pique their interest…
Don’t spam, it’s kind of like a first date, get to know them first.
There are a ton of other tools in Socialoomph I won’t dwell on yet, tools that vet your followers automatically or will auto followback, schedule queues of tweets in the future etc… Have a poke around when you have time.
In my previous post I mentioned www.justunfollow.com which I use religiously to unfollow those who haven’t followed back within 24-48 hours. That’s the longest I give people just simply because my purpose is to build a larger audience more quickly and I'm not prepared to wait if they don't followback promptly.
I’ve “whitelisted” some of the people I want to follow even if they haven’t followed me so I don’t keep unfollowing them every time I purge my non followers.
I use justunfollow to monitor my organic growth by seeing how many new fans my different strategies generate.
When I’m purging my non followers, if I’m taking the time to be selective in my unfollows, I will give those with larger audiences 5000+ followers longer to follow me back than someone with less than a thousand; anyone with only tens or hundreds of followers is an automatic unfollow.
Unless they are following at or around 2000 accounts in which case I assume they are in an aggressive building mode and are more likely to follow me back shortly.
I prioritize as unfollows those who have more followers than friends or who just don’t follow many people. I talked a bit about ratios of followers to friends in the previous piece. I certainly prioritize those who follow more people than they have friends but a ratio within 10% below is still worthwhile following. More than that, unless there is a connection or special reason, it’s probably not worth having them clutter your unfollower count as they are less likely to ever follow you back.
Follow those who will, or are more likely to, follow back.
This is especially important when you are at a smaller number of followers if you are at or around 2000 followers you can only follow an additional 200 people. You should make sure those 200 people are following you back quickly or replace them.
I found a really neat new tool a couple of weeks ago which I am still evaluating but seems to be doing what I want it to. www.tweetbig.com gives you a 7 day trial for $1 then costs around $20 a month. Which is steep but it has added 2500 followers to my account in a little over a week.
It lets you pick 15 relevant key words and searches twitter for those tweeting about them. You can then choose to follow those with the most followers or the best follower ratio or most recently added or the most current activity. Even more clever it lets you follow 15 of your most effective competitors or whose following you like and want as your own. It searches amongst them and recommends people for you to follow.
I log on each day and see who it’s recommending and within ½ an hour can choose 500 people to follow for each of three twitter accounts based on who has the most followers and best ratio.
What has been working for me is following everyone with more than 20,000 followers irrespective of ratio. Less than 20,000 if they have an 85%+ followback ratio less than 10,000 I will only add them to my queue if they are at 95% or better. I then go and look at the sort by ratio and follow everyone down to 95% ratio. I also look at the activity report and follow anyone over 95% and similarly with date added.
Tweetbig follows people slowly over the course of the day and seems to follow up to 500 new people a day if you keep your queue topped up. As you hit your follower ratio cap at 10% more than follow you it stops following. So I go into justunfollow each day and priority unfollow enough to keep it ticking over which doesn’t take more than 5 minutes.
Tweetbig does have some other tools like auto unfollow time bomb but I think justinfollow is way easier. Auto-followback doesn’t seem to work but I think justunfollow works better anyway.
That’s probably enough to chew on for now. Next post I’ll show you how to manage your content most effectively and efficiently…
Got any questions tweet them to me @fixteas or @markwrightmba - Hey why not add me to one of your follow lists &/or add these accounts to tweetbig see who of my followers it recommends for you??!
Cheers,
Mark
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