How To Gain Twitter Followers

How do you kick off a Twitter presence? How do you gain Twitter followers? You sit there and you're ready to start but you don't have any or very few followers, what should you do?

A brand is usually on Twitter to be able to spread it's advertising messages, deals, support and offers to a large number of people.
The objectives you may want to ashieve could be retweets, more followers, click-throughs to other pages and of-course redemption of offers. You may want to be thought of as a leader in your industry, or as the company with the best customer support.
You sit there with your business or brand and you have carefully crafted a content-plan, you have listed your objective and started with Sales, Awareness or Loyalty. You have a tweet schedule and a structure about everything from Tweet timing and a content map to time limits of answering people and much more.
Now, how do you gain Twitter followers?

First of all make sure people KNOW you are on Twitter. Integrate the Twitter button on your webpage, on you blog and on your Facebook page.
Post Twitter buttons and perhaps a link to the latest tweet in your email signature, AND in your colleagues signatures too. Make sure the company is with you and support you.

Another smart thing you can do is to search topics that relate to your industry on Twitter.
Now my suggestion is to create search lists within Twitter and monitor them. Look for questions related to your brand or product, answer them and engage with them. Talk in a human way. Don't over market, don't focus just on your brand, talk about other brands and ALWAYS listen first and talk later.

Another part is to find Influencers which I would use Exportly to do. Find the people with the most followers and simply monitor them, retweet them and eventually contact them! Are they incredibly important? Make a deal with them, see if they like your brand and would be willing to collaborate with you. Reaching his or her followers can be a big deal to your brand.
You can also list your bran in so called Twitter Directories. It makes it easier for people to find you based on the sector/industry you're in. Popular Twitter directories are: http://justtweetit.com and http://wefollow.com

Tomorrow I will talk about how to gain Facebook LIKES!Tweet

The GREAT Power of Twitter Search

Another world-class bonus session today with Guy Kawasaki. 

How To use Twitter As A Marketing Weapon


I knew about Twitter search long ago, but there are some fascinating tips and small magic things you can do to use it really really well.

Twitter Advance Search. A powerfool tool. Let's show some examples that I did by myself imagining myself working at different companies.

Let's say you are a coffee chain brand, let's say your name is Starbucks just for the sake of everyone being familiar with the name. Let's say you have your office in Barcelona and you want to find out what people are ASKING about your brand to be able to answer them and engage. Only in Barcelona though because lets invent you are launching a new product just in Bcn for one week. I know I know, not likely being Starbucks but hey, let's just pretend for a few minutes.

Or lets say you are IESE, one of the biggest business schools in Spain and you wanna know what people are asking you in Madrid.

Lets say you have a company that sells soap-operas in the afternoons on a special channel and you only wanna target housewives. This is done by Google Boolean Search which Guy also explains but I have yet to try it more to be able to talk and write about it.
Voila!









Or a language portal focusing on language classes in Germany! Remember the question mark if you are specifically looking for people asking a question.

Or lets say your name is Sephora and you wanna find out the questions surfacing in Madrid to be able to answer them. Simply pur Sephora near:Madrid within:50mi ? and voila!

What should I tweet about? This is a question many new Twitters are asking themselves. At a first glance Twitter makes sence for just very few people. For most of us it seems meaningless reading about your neighbor who bought a new car.

Tweet about interesting stuff for your audience. Sure, if your name is Madonna, it's highy interesting to tweet that you got a new BMW yesterday but if you're a normal person you probably wont get many retweets on that one.
Guy tells us that what is interesting for normal people are good, useful and fun links.
If you are lets say Sephora you first need to decide what's the over all objective. Is it Sales, Loyalty or Awareness. Maybe it's loyalty and you wanna place Twitter within Customer Service, that would make sense.  Or maybe you wanna use it as a channel to communicate the latest hot tips and advices regarding makeup, perfumes, celebrities wearing Sephora mascara e.t.c.
Basically stuff that interests your target group. Let's say women 25-34 years old.
What we could further do as a marketer of Sephora is to use Forrester's tool to calculate our audiences social tech profile. Let's say we are Sephora in the U.K and our target group are women 25-34 years old. This lets us see that most of them are joiners and spectators. Joiners are fairly active people so here you could consider social media contests where you ask a person to like your page or leave your email address. Since you seem to have lots of spectators too, it'd probably be a good idea to include nice visual content that engages the potential client.

If you are a famous business school you may post links about students who have graduated and succeeded or about the latest government grants that future students could take advantage of.

People, Important note. This takes practice! Try Try Test and test again.

Cheers and Happy Monday!Tweet