With over 284 million monthly active users, Twitter is a hot favorite of businesses and bloggers alike. Twitter streams about sixty million tweets per day which makes it pretty easy to get lost amidst popular Twitter users and big social media companies. Having said that, its obvious that every pro was once a beginner. If you want to increase your Twitter following and have a rather engaged audience here’s the 14 days guide to do better Twitter.
I have summarized the guide from a beginners point of view so if you already are using Twitter you can take the first steps as a checklist for your Twitter profile.
Day 1: Set up your Twitter profile and cover photo like a professional:
As the age old maxim goes “The first impression is the last impression”, set up your Twitter profile picture and cover photo that doesn’t look amateurish.
a) Set up a head shot of your own as your profile picture. Setting up profile pictures of your favorite cat or rabbit might appear cute but will not help in the long run.
b) Upload an attractive cover photo. You can put your services or company objective here but in an elegant way.
c) Write a compelling bio of yourself. Remember you have only 160 characters to tell your story so make sure you utilize your Twitter bio to address your potential audience. You can add the keywords you want to appear for when searched. Putting a hashtag before them can increase visibility. Don’t forget to add fun tags about you as these will make your profile appear more human.
Key Point: Don’t forget to add your website link to its dedicated section. You can use a custom URL of a landing page to funnel your leads generated by Twitter.
Day 2: Set your goal and make a list of top twenty Twitter users who your followers might be following.
On day two, make your twitter goals more precise than ever before. Set up clear points as to what you want. Ask questions to yourself like:
Are you looking for 10k followers? Or do you want to get freelance gigs from potential clients? Etc.
This will help you in the next part which is to identify influencers of your niche on twitter. Make a list of at least twenty such twitter profiles that your audience might be following. Technically they are the pro twitter users of your niche. Just follow them.
Day 3: Create and curate content that adds value to your followers.
On day three, collect content that you need to feed your followers on Twitter. You can curate the content from other sites and users that according to you are related to your niche and would help your audience. You can also publish your own articles from your own blog or other social profiles too. Use an amalgamation of quotes and images on your posts. Tweets with images have greater reach. Remember our aim is to be social not just post and push articles. So include stuff like festival wishes and other trending tweets sometimes.
You can use tools like Hashtagify to access the trending hashtags and copy them to the notepad for using it later in your posts. Remember hashtags increase your post visibility and life.
4) Follow more people by using Twitter’s who to follow function:
While there are other tools that give you an insight of people whom you should follow, we will concentrate on Twitter’s own “who to follow” feature. This is both free and easy. Logically about 30% of the twitter accounts you follow you back. So if you are dealing with eBooks you can search for people having that keyword.
Now make a habit of following at least 500 accounts each day. Typically 150 users will follow you back so if you follow this ritual for a month you can get almost 4500 followers who belong to the same niche as you do. I suggest using mobile for this as it’s just a click’s effort that’s needed on mobiles. It ultimately saves our time.
Key Point: You can only follow 2000 more accounts than the number of accounts that follow you, so be careful. You can regularly unfollow people that do not follow you back (more on that later!).
Day 5: Use quotable lines or tweets on your blog posts.
Having quotes and one liner advices on your blog post can be utilized by motivating people to tweet them. You can use a plugin like Social Warfare to give highlight portions that can be tweeted directly from the post itself. Here's how Social Warfare works:
Day 6: Create a landing page on your website.
Sending your twitter followers to a blunt homepage is as bad as not sending them anywhere. Yes we all have a set aim for twitter followers and we should not delay funneling them to do the work. So, create a separate landing page for users specifically coming from twitter. Greet them and let them know you know that they came through twitter. This will help users feel welcomed and they can perform your next task easily. The task can be anything you set, from signing up a mailing list to joining your forum or trying a product too. Don’t be over demanding.
Day 7: Flaunt your Twitter account everywhere you go:
If you are thinking to promote your account by getting your skin inked, let me stop you. Neither do you have to wear Tees that shout your username (yikes!).
What I am saying is, you should use your Twitter handle everywhere you exist like your Facebook page, your Google plus account under the profile and also in email signature. This will let people know that you are on twitter too. Some of them who are rather active on twitter will prefer to use your handle to communicate.
Day 8: Unfollow non followers and other inactive people:
Unfollowing the not so worthy followers who don’t respond to you can be a good choice and it will leave room for following more engaged and worthy followers. You can do it in bulk using the tool SocialBro, and others like SocialQuant.
Day 9: Analyze your existing Twitter followers:
You have to study your followers and then shape your strategies in a way that you can generate more response from them. For this you have to analyze them and make an excel file on certain topics that you want to use for further tweeting.
There are many factors your analysis should concentrate on of which some are as follows:
1) Top interests of your followers- This will help you to relate to them and shape your tweets that cater to their taste. Results will be a better loyal audience. What benefit will tweets about fashion give a user when most of his followers are professionals and interested in sports’ who’s who.
2) Your followers’ region: Knowing location of your followers can help you to detect the time when they are active and thus help you refine your tweets.
3) Quality and type of engagement:
When you are investing in something you got to check your return on investment. You should also analytics to find the number of retweets you are getting. Same is with replies and favorites.
It will then help you to check if your content is valuable (people will share valuable stuff to their own followers), or resonating (tweeps usually hit the favorite option to say they can relate to what you say), or if your content is making someone interested in starting a conversation (people will reply to your tweets).
For more on twitter analytics refer this:
Day 10: Take the direct response approach:
Now that you are well established with your initial twitter proceedings, just apply the direct response method. Here you need to just go searching for people whose tweets contain some keywords you focus on. Then you go to their tweets and reply them directly offering a solution to their queries. Be decent on your approach or you will be flagged as spam.
This way you can come across a global audience who wants to be helped and thus you can show your authority by helping them.
Occasionally you can add your link to related post in the replies or your affiliate link but should notify the user about this.
Day 11: Reach out to influencers:
This is by far the best time to engage influencers in your niche by directly interacting with them. You can do it in the following ways:
A) Share their stuff: Everyone likes being helped and if your efforts are genuine they will notice you in no time.
B) Ask them questions: or thank them for a value their tweet provided. They are sure to reply you and from here you can take the relationship to the next level.
C) Cite their work in your post and let them know it: You cannot always rely on WordPress ping backs and track backs, moreover letting the person know you have cited their work personally can work wonders. So just fire a tweet to them about it. Chances are 10-15% of them will share your stuff across their channels as a sign of courtesy. What else we want!
Day 12: Start scheduling your tweets:
Now that you have analyzed your audience, their demography, the time they are most active on twitter, just tweet at a time convenient to them. I know it’s not possible to virtually satisfy all time zones and be awake till dawn because some of your followers might be having lunch at their side of the globe.
If you want to be use twitter like a pro use tools like Buffer and Hootsuite to schedule your tweets much prior. Hootsuite has a feature that schedules your tweets automatically to be published at a time when your followers are most responsive. It does so by analyzing many factors from your activity.
Day 13: Use Twitter lists to your benefits:
Twitter lists are an awesome feature of twitter that acts like a directory.You can use twitter lists to categorize followers, and people you follow based on a certain metric.
Use twitter lists to analyze how you are seen on twitter. Yes just see the lists that you are a part of and guess how you are perceived on the twitterland. Suppose you are a SEO personnel you should be a part of lists that relate to blogging, link building, SEO, or webmaster but if you are in a group called top ten movie reporters, its high time to change the content you share. Similarly if you want to increase your twitter reach just grab someone’s list and make it yours or go to someone’s public lists and follow people you like from there.
Here is the complete guide to using twitter lists.
Day 14: Leverage your hard earned twitter followers:
The main advantage of twitter is that it has much larger organic reach than Facebook. You can now use it to broadcast your content and product launches across the global arena and that too for free. We do have paid or promoted posts on twitter too but that’s when you have a solid target. You can also use public chat sessions like #ViralChat and #BufferChat to get in touch with like-minded people on twitter and later take the relationship to a professional level.
Over to you,
This was my 14 days guide to do better twitter or rather say do twitter like a pro. You are hardly going to need any other guide than this to start your twitter endeavors. Do tell what tips you follow to increase your twitter followers and to establish yourself as a pro on twitter, in the comment section below.
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