So you now have a growing follower base, how do you:
- Keep them
- Enhance your profile with these people
The answer to both of these questions lies in the same point. Twitter users follow and engage with people who they believe have something valuable to say. Look at the top 10 Twitter accounts in terms of followers:
- Niall Horan – Horan@NiallOfficial
- Emma Watson – Watson@EmWatson
- BBC Breaking News – @BBCBreaking
- Mesut Özil – @MesutOzil1088
- BBC News (World) – @BBCWorld
- Stephen Fry – @stephenfry
- Radamel Falcao – @FALCAO
- Jessie J – @JessieJ
- Premier League – @premierleague
- Ricky Gervais – @rickygervais
Although they come from a cross section of categories (News, Pop stars, Actors, Sport etc) they all have one thing in common. People value (for whatever reason) what they might say. Before I go any further I should make the point that this post is aimed at our core readership (SMEs interested in business to business marketing). As such, the strategies discussed might not be appropriate for everyone, At its simplest, Twitter is a communication tool, how it is used depends on what you are trying to achieve. Now we have cleared that up, back to the plot… Twitter users follow someone because they value what they might say, and this needs to be central to your strategy for engaging with your Twitter Audience. Taking our central mantra “You are an expert in your field, make sure people know it”. Your aim on Twitter should be to use it as a platform to communicate your knowledge and thus attract those who find it valuable. On this basis Twitter is a communications media pure and simple, the key is what you are communicating. This then comes back to our other mantra “Marketing should be joined-up”. If you have read and bought into this philosophy, you will already be generating great content, adding it to you website via a blog/news feed, and communicating this to your contacts via email and other media. Twitter then simply becomes another tool for communicating this content. Tweeting links to this content becomes your base feed (maybe once or twice a month). But realistically, you should be looking to tweet daily or at least 3-4 times a week. For most people, generating this level of content is unrealistic, so the key (among other things) lies in re-tweeting. As you are building a reputation for being an expert in your industry you should also be aiming to become a trusted aggregator of industry news & comment. By following other (higher volume) twitter users (eg trade magazines, other companies within the industry, general press etc) who say things some of which are relevant to your followers you should have a consistent source of content that can be re-tweeted. However this is not simply a way of filling the gaps. Re-tweeting is vital to any healthy twitter strategy as you must always remember its not all about you. You are trying to create a stream of interesting content, and like it or not this is not going to be a constant stream of stuff about your company. Re-tweeting broadens the spectrum of your content, which is a great thing to do. If you get it right, these retweets will add to your reputation. This coupled with spur of the moment tweets about relevant things that are happening day to day, should result in a regular flow of tweets from your account that your followers will find interesting. In reality, following this process is only part of the process, as Twitter delivers other tools for enhancing a communications strategy (Direct Targeting, generating real time conversations/use in customer service, segmentation etc) but that is part 3! To finish, and because you will always have those times when you don’t know what to tweet. You might find this post interesting.