About a year ago we started playing around with Twitter, posting infrequently, checking out the latest Twitter tools, checking in once or twice a week – playing around really.
About 3-months ago we decided to get serious and really begin to experiment with Twitter, commit to engaging with our market and using the tool to really foster relationships, get involved and where we could, spawn dialog relevant to our interests and business.
Since then, we have noticed some very interesting trends:
1. A 5X increase in our follow rate – not a great statistics in itself, but it’s always nice to be followed. We went from ~ 1000 to nearly 5000 followers, again this is only important in so much as these are meaningful, productive relationships
2. Much more engagement – we went from the occasional retweet or reply to our content each week to daily responses sometimes as high as dozens…each one of these show us that our market is inreasingly engaged with us, that they are watching and that we really are beginning to brand ourselves on social networking online
3. Our website traffic from Twitter has grown by a factor of 10! To me, this was the real interesting part of the experiment…and one that demonstrates to me that social networking IS highly relevant to business — onward and upward.Â
WHAT HAS WORKED TO IMPROVE OUR TWITTER RESULTS?
1. Be Active…we went from the occasional weekly post to consistent, daily posts of at least 5 each day. I am convinced that you need to have a certain level of activity to be successful. After all, as in any relationship, if you are not visible or active, you will be forgotten
2. Be Engaged…we search daily for convesations going on around topics related to our business and we make it a point to get involved in those discussions with replies, helpful tips, answers to questions, sometimes just a funny response, etc…Â This is CRITICAL – people on social networking want to be involved in conversation, they don’t want to JUST be hammered with one-way dialog
3. Be Interesting…to really connect with your audience you need to understand them don’t you? Know what they like, what they want, what they dream about, what they are frustrated with and what concerns them. It’s not really about always having the latest scoop — only about giving them content that is related to what they want to see
4. Free Content And Offers…the #1 question businesses have about Twitter (or any social networking platform for that matter) is how do you get people back to your website where they can hopefully see what you have to offer? The answer we have found is posting links to interesting/free content (videos, an article, blog post, image, etc…that is highly relevant to the discussion) or a free give away (report, chapter of a book, case study, etc…) Once you gain the trust by giving your followers something of value, your crediiblity improves and reciprocity comes into play…now they have become part of your sales funnel.Â
5. Multiple Twitter Accounts: If you cater to multiple niche markets, then separate your discussions by account. Nothing is worse than to build a large following and seem scattered as to your interests and dialog
6. Ask Questions: Each day we make it a point to not only provide content and access to valuable resources, we also ask questions…questions that tap into emotional issues our prospects have. The goal is to initiate conversations
7. Most Tweeted:Â Keep an eye on the most tweeted topics, hashtags and keywords and WHERE RELEVANT go ahead and post against those keywords…this can really give you a bump in attention, re-tweets and actions
8. Subscriber List, Blog and Twitter – Mix and Match: We have also found a great technique for getting dialog going on Twitter is to steering our weekly newsletter subscribers or blog readers over to Twitter to carry on a dialog around something we wrote. Thisresults in several new posts and dialog elements tat catch the attention of first-time Twitter readers and bring them into the fold
We now know that social networking is a critical part of how online marketing is evolving, we know that NOW is the time to get moving and we have started to see the results of a consistent, directed effort…
How about you, do you have a social networking plan using Twitter or Facebook for your oline business?
