How to Engage More Followers and Fans on Twitter

Last week, I was helping a colleague of mine implement the social media presence for one of his clients.   He asked me to do some research on getting and increasing followers on Twitter.

I guess that’s the million dollar question huh?

First off, it’s the quality of followers or following… not the quantity!

I read articles every day on Twitter from some fantastic people that I am following.  (Check out my Worth Following list here: http://twitter.com/jerbuen/worth-following)

It’s difficult to write an all-encompassing list of how to do this, but I want to share some of my random thoughts:

Promote your RSS, Twitter, and Facebook accounts with attractive icons

If you send emails to your clients or publish articles on your website, make sure to include links with attractive icons that invite people to find you on other Social Media avenues.   That way the relationship doesn’t end with that email or news article.   Get them to follow you so they continue to see your updates through their preferred social media tool.

Useful and relevant only

On Twitter, don’t be shy to tweet an article that you find interesting.  Make sure to tweet relevant and useful information, though.  Useful can mean comedic as well.   You are what you tweet.   Tweeting too much will lose followers… tweeting too little will not attract followers.

RT! (Re-tweet)

If you find something interesting, don’t be shy…Retweet it!   Give the person credit as well – it can help open up the lines of communication and they may be willing to Retweet one of your tweets in return – therefore getting more exposure and more followers.

Check out this website to find out your retweet rank:
http://www.retweetrank.com

Analyze yourself

Evaluate your Twitter behavior.   There are some tools on the web that can help you do this – Twitter graders are one example.  Here’s a good one that evaluates your twitter behavior.  This tool uses an algorithm to weigh in factors such as number of followers, power of followers, number of updates, follower/following ratio, and engagement.

http://twitter.grader.com/ – to learn more, read How Does Twitter Grader Calculate Twitter Rankings?

Note: Your twitter rank doesn’t mean everything!   It’s just a tool to help you keep in mind how you tweet.   Remember, the key is really to engage with your followers!   Don’t follow everyone just to follow.   Build REAL relationships.

Use the hash

Use hashtags with your topics.   Simply put a # sign in front of any keywords within your tweet.   Or you can put the # with a keyword at the end of your tweet.   For example, you can write “The #Tarheels win again in the NCAA# Championships! http://bit.ly/tarheels” or “RT @jerbuen Tarheels rock the tournament http://bit.ly/ngc #ncaa #basketball”.  This allows your tweets to be easier to find through searches and fall into trending topics.  Read more about hashtags and why to use them here: http://help.twitter.com/forums/10711/entries/49309

Schedule the Tweets!

This is absolutely not required, but is a nice tool to use if you wish to use it.  Let’s say you tweet a new blog post you wrote sometime before you went to bed.   Well, overnight, your tweet may be pushed to the side by the 100s of other tweets over night.   Then what happens in the morning?  Your tweet was missed.   Twitter is real-time and is fast moving.

To give your tweets more presence, set up Tweet schedules to automatically repeat the tweets that are important to you.  Here are some Tweet Schedulers that you can try out:
http://rtweeter.com/Schedule
http://www.socialoomph.com

Follow GoodBye, Buddy

When you follow @Goodbyebuddy, you will be emailed whenever someone UNfollows you.   This can be a great sanity check. If you are consistently losing followers, you may want to evaluate your Twitter behavior.  Are you tweeting too much?  Are you tweeting useful information?  Did you say something negative in a recent tweet that turned some of your followers off?

Find out your TweetEffect

Find out which of your Twitter updates made people follow or leave you.  Basically this tool analyzes your tweets in correlation with your change in the number of your followers.   I personally do not think that it’s 100% indicative of the effects of your tweets because people can unfollow or follow you coincidentally.   Regardless, it’s still an interesting tool to look at if you are seeing a pattern.
http://www.tweeteffect.com

Find the TwitterTrends

Trendsmap.com is a real-time mapping of Twitter trends across the world.  You can see what the global, collective mass of humanity are discussing in real time.  Use this to target your tweets on the latest trends.  This will help increase followers who do searches on these trends: http://trendsmap.com

ENGAGE!

If someone RTs one of your Tweets, always check the mentions and reply back with a Thank you for the RT.   Even better, follow up with a question that can start a conversation.   This helps build a network and helps conjure and retain more followers.  People like to see that there is a REAL person behind the twitter account… even if the auto-tweets are setup!

Check out my previous post on “Building a Real Network On Twitter“.   It’s short and it’s worth a read.

Others?

As always, I would love to hear from you.   I welcome your comments and additional thoughts on the topic!

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Building a REAL Network on Twitter

Whether you’re looking for a job, finding support on a new product, or having a need to share and collaborate, we can all agree that networking is important.   But how can you build a real network on Twitter?

Here are some quick and basic tips:

ENGAGE

If someone re-tweets one of your messages or mentions you in one of their tweets, then reply and say thank you.  You can even ask them about their day or ask a question about the topic to start a conversation.

STAY POSITIVE

No one wants to follow you if you’re going to talk about how tired you are at the end of day.  Bring some light into your tweets -> start a topic that invites others to engage with you.

SHARE YOUR INTERESTS

As your network builds, let your followers know who you really are.   Share what you are interested in – music, web design, sports, IT, photography, etc.   The more your followers know you, the more opportunities they have to relate and engage with you.

Have other tips?  Share them here!

Facebook as the social media giant, how long will it last?

This morning, I read an article – Why Myspace will never win – [webdistortion]

This article was good because it identified the growth of Facebook vs MySpace over recent times.  The trigger for my thought process was around Facebook vs Myspace; however, it evolved into a Facebook coupled with Twitter conversation.  Interesting how one social media diverges into the next.

I posted this article as my status to Facebook and a few of my friends replied to it.   It seems that there is more passion around this topic than I had originally been privy to.  Everyone had some very thought-provoking comments and I’m curious as to how many other people are just as intrigued by the topic at hand.  Please read their thoughts below and leave yours, as well.  Thanks!

Ben: Really interesting article. It also seems that the direction FB is taking has its own risks as well. We polled our  summer interns and found a pretty dramatic shift from last year’s group – nearly all are using FB less, mainly b/c they are turned off by the increased presence of companies, and even worse, their parents None had any idea what might be the next big thing, but were pretty down on FB.

I get that FB is pursuing a strategy of widening its base, but you have to wonder what the ongoing consequences are of losing the younger demographic. Classic problem I guess – how do you branch out to new customers without losing the ones you have?
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Me: Great feedback on this my friend. I think that FB is recognizing that and, for their sake, will have something in the works. FB advocates continue to educate the use of the privacy settings in order to keep their younger audience aware that they can still be on FB without their parents discovering their drunken photos (amongst other things).

I think the key for FB is to strategically plan a way to separate business and personal in the world of FB. If I’m a user and my purpose of being on FB is for personal use only, I do not want to be inundated by businesses trying to reach out to me, it’s spamming. If FB can craft what the users want to pull based on their objective with being on FB, I think that they can still remain top in Social Media. Also, where does Twitter fall in with all of this? Here is another link that may be of interest: 20+ mind-blowing social media statistics – http://bit.ly/10tfA5

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Jennifer: I agree with both of you; however, I feel (owning a business and all AND using FB for personal use) that FB has to do more than just privacy settings to keep the attention of a younger market. For example, I feel that there needs to be a “Do Not Solicit” campaign for online social media. My reasoning is that if people seriously don’t want to be … Read Morecontacted by a business online they should be able to have that right protected. Currently, I don’t know that there is anything like that on FB so it’s a business’s gain in the present to spam all they want (I don’t do that, of course).To Ben’s thought about ” how do you branch out to new customers without losing the ones you have?” I would have to say that’s what separates great business entrepreneurs from the weak ones. I think a more pertinent thought would be (from a business perspective) is if you have to lose a market segment of customers…which one is less profitable? You want to always market yourself towards the market segment that will be most pertinent to growing your business. In this respect I think the younger demographic definitely is more profitable in the FB world, but if businesses are looking to sell more…they might actually WANT to market their business toward an older market (or at least mid 20′s to mid 30′s). Just a thought!
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Ben: Totally agree on the spamming issue and the need for a “do not solicit” option. And yeah, you really have to go where the money is, and in general, that’s not the kids.

Interesting note on Twitter – most of the same group of interns thought it was a fad, even those that use it frequently. But interestingly, a panel of journalist that we spoke with found it to be liberating – they come across reams of info everyday, much if it that is interesting to them but doesn’t fit in with anything they are working on, or just isn’t a story by itself. They found that Twitter was a great channel to put out these little bits that otherwise would go unpublished.
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So you can see that these guys had a lot to say about the topic.  What are your thoughts?

What’s the REAL deal with #FollowFriday on Twitter?

Friday is here! In Twitter world, this means that throughout the day, we’ll see lists of people recommended to follow on Twitter.  But what is the real deal with #FollowFriday?  Is it effective or just a waste of time?

If you’re new to Twitter, here’s an explanation of what the #FollowFriday trend is about: (by @mashable)

[#FollowFriday: The Anatomy of a Twitter Trend]

Earlier this morning, @bkmacdaddy, a well-respected designer and friend, posted an article:

[Why I Don’t Want To Do #FollowFridays On Twitter Anymore]

He brings up excellent points here.  I encourage you to read his thoughts.

After reading that article, I’m still left wondering whether it’s valuable and worth the time to gather and post my #FollowFriday recommendation list every week.  Is there a real point to it?  Do others REALLY click on your recommendations to find more people to follow.  Maybe yes… if they are looking for new people.   But would it be more valuable to use something like Mr.Tweet and provide quality recommendations instead of just a list of names?

I had some conversations about this with @JohnFMoore, a friend and a very intelligent person.  We both agreed that #followfriday can encourage conversation and it’s great to note those who take the time to engage with you on Twitter.  However, if you have a list of recommendations (more than 140 characters worth), what should you do?  Should that list be posted through multiple messages on Twitter or just one message linked to your blog which provides further explanation as to why you recommend these people?

I’ve been on Twitter for only about 3 months now and right now I have 362 followers.   It’s not much compared to others who are being followed by  2,000+ people.  However, my list may continue to grow as I meet more friendly and informative people out there.   That said, my list of #FollowFriday recommendations will continue to grow with it.

So here are my questions to you all.  What are your thoughts on this?  Is #FollowFriday still a valuable trend?  Do you follow many people on Twitter?  If so, do you participate in #FollowFriday recommendations? If you’re following over 1,000+ people, how can you keep track of who to recommend?  Is it better to change our #FollowFriday recommendation lists to just one message linking to our blogs? Should Mr.Tweet be used instead?

I look forward to hearing what you think!

Simple Ways To Integrate Your Presence on Social Media

Many of us are on at least 3-4 different social networking sites for personal or business use.   As we push information out, let’s make it easier and integrate the process.  There are many tools to integrate your presence on social media.   Here are the starter tools that I like to use and recommend for anyone:

TwitterFeed

Automatically post RSS feeds into any Twitter account.   You can gather statistics on how many clicks you get and control how often Twitter is updated.   RSS2Twitter is a new alternative to this, but I haven’t tried that out yet.

Facebook: Twitter Application or Selective Twitter Application

Have ALL of your Twitter updates sent to your Facebook status using Twitter Application.   If you don’t want to post every tweet to Facebook, then use Selective Twitter Application, which allows you to be selective by adding #fb at the end.

Add your blog to Facebook Notes

Have all of your blog post automatically to your Facebook notes.  In order to do this, add Notes as a new tab on your profile.  Then, click on the settings link on your wall and add the RSS feed from your blog into the Imported Stories section.

Google Reader on Facebook

Do you use Google Reader to capture all of your news and favorite articles?   You can take the RSS feed from your ‘shared’ items and feed them into TwitterFeed to post automatically to your Twitter account.  To do this, go to Google Reader > Settings > Folders and Tags  and click View Public Page listed next to “Your shared items”.  Click on “Atom Feed” at the right and copy the URL in the browser.   Paste that URL to TwitterFeed to post all of your shared items to Twitter automatically.

Twitter for Pages

If you have a Fan Page, a tab can be added that will display all of your tweets.  Add the application Twitter for Pages on Facebook.

All this integration and automation is great, but remember… nothing is more valuable than real human interaction and the relationships that you build using Social Media.   Use these tools wisely and don’t depend solely on them.

That’s all?   There are definitely more tools out there.  What do you use integrate your presence on social media?   Please share them here!

30 Essential Twitter Tutorials for Newbies and Experts

I didn’t think it would happen in this lifetime, but I joined the world of Twitter yesterday.   I spent the last 24 hours poking at Twitter and what it has to offer.  It’s definitely more than just a social tool for micro-blogging.   There’s a lot you can do with Twitter for personal use and for business.   The website below includes a nice compilation from beginner to expert level Twitter tutorials.  “How to change your Twitter background” and “How to use the Twitter API” are just a few examples.   Please share others sites that you found useful.

30 Essential Twitter Tutorials for Newbies and Experts [Outlaw Design Blog]