Here is what has been working stellarly for me on Twitter. Your mileage might vary, but we are peddling similar products, so the strategy should apply to you too.
Building your audience:
- Follow users that you know might be interested in you. Some of those users will follow you back (some will do because they like your thing, some will follow just because. There will be some that will not follow you no matter what, those are NOT your target)
After a few days, unfollow those that have not followed you back, and follow a new bunch of people. Use Justunfollow.com to find out who are not following you back, and to weed out inactive accounts. Someone who uses Twitter very rarely will not be part of your audience.
- Do not try any "followback" tactics. I tried those for a while, and I got a short boost, but those followers are worthless, as they are not interested in your account and will not engage with it. They are not your audience, they just are after another notch to their follower belt. If anything, when starting out, follow a set amount of #FollowBack accounts, just so that your own account doesnt looks sad and empty, and then unfollow them when they have served their purpose. Be ruthless, Twitter can generate a lot of traffic for you, trash accounts will only drag you down.
You have to have a clear idea of what is your target audience, try to stick to that definition, (ie: "single adult males" be as specific as you can "single, urban, educated, adult non-immigrant males living in the European Union" )but add a few wildcards here and there. For example, your audience should be preferably male, but if there are a few women following you that is ok. However, if your audience is all female (or anything outside your target audience), then you are doing it wrong.
Getting a niche is not a bad thing. Perhaps the dutch manosphere market is small, say, less than 50k people. But if you dominate it, then you have 50k dudes getting all their game and travel related needs from you. And 50k customers, even if their are spending a minimal amount on you, are more than enought to make a more than comfortable living.
(Read this post: 1000 True Fans by Kevin Kelly. It has blown my mind and defined my business strategy. I recommend 100%, so dont be surprised if you hear me preaching about it again)
- Start out by looking for accounts from products or services that are similar to you. Mine them for followers. Stick to those who activelly engage their audiences. Bot accounts gather bot followers.
- Once you start getting more followers, you will start getting follows from bots and 'commercial' accounts ("This is the Twiiter account for Mr. Lee's Laundry") Weed them out. Its tempting to keep them just to boost your numbers a little bit, but in the end, they do more harm than good, and if someone looks at your following and sees a lot of spam accounts, they will run.
- Engage some influential account in your topic. Either retweeting them, or sending tweets their way. (ie: "RT @UncleRoosh: "Hamsters gonna ham"" "Hey @Deb, have you ever been to Hamsteristan, like, for real?") If they engage you back, you will appear on their followers timeline, which will send some people your way. (I once got a RT from Ana Serradilla, a mexican soap opera actress, and that gave me a short boost in followers and visits to my webpage)
Building your content:
-Your account needs to be active. Write a bunch of relevant, somewhat generic tweets and have them ready. That way you can just copy and paste them when needed. Use bufferapp.com to program your tweets to go out at specified hours every day. Buffer is good because you can just select and right click on your text, and add it to the queue. Tweetdeck is also good, lets you progra, tweets for specific times (11:55pm on friday, instead of 11:45 everyday, as in buffer) but the caveat is that you have to program them individually. I use both for different purposes.
Use this signup link for Buffer and we both get an extra slot. (It gives you an starting queue of 10 tweets, unless you pay for more. But 10, or 11, are more than enough to get you through the week, so you can get your tweeting done on monday and free up your time)
http://bufferapp.com/r/2d180
- About this tweet list: do not smother it with links to your content. That tires and scares away your followers. Fill it with excerpts from your book, tips and advice (ie: "girls in Hamsteristan will actually get offended if you offer to pay for their drinks" "Always keep a condom in your pocket. You never know..." etc.) famous quotes, and in the lower percentage, links to your content or wherever you want your audience to go (email list signup, Facebook page, website. etc)
If I ran the numbers from my own Twitter account, id say its:
30% excerpts from my content
30% advice, tips, and quotes of my own
10% famous quotes and motivational messages (ie "be the change you want to see in the world - Gandhi")
10% links to my webpage, blog posts, or content of my own. (I could raise this a bit, but I dont want to be one of "those" accounts, so I keep it on the lowside. Id say you could go as far as 20%. Experiment a bit and track how many clicks your links get. Around 15% of traffic to my webpage comes from Twitter)
10% links to other media of my own (mailing list signup form, Facebook fan page, etc) (I send a PM the first time anyone follows me on Twitter with a link inviting them to 'like' us on Facebook, so I dont repeat that much. I guess I should be more aggressive about it (I got a measly 400 likes on Facebook...) My strategy at the time is centered around Twitter, so I dont mind it that much. If anyone has specific strategies for Facebook, please do share.
5% links to other peoples content (news articles, interesting blog posts, pictures, youtube videos)
and the remaining 5% are retweets, responses, etc.
-Experiment a bit and find what is the best activity level and hours for your account. Too few tweets and they will get lost in your audiences timelines. Too many and they will lose interest. I have found that, for me, more than 6 a day is overkill, and anything less than 2 gets me nowhere, so I usually tweet 2 from the pre-written list, and 1 or 2 fresh, relevant tweets (keep an eye on the trending topics, its rare that there is one relevant to your account, but when there is one, ride it till it fades. Use only the trending topics that appear on the main page, anything else looks too try hard) Also, dont abuse hashtags.
- Engage you followers. Try to respond to all tweets directed at you (but dont feel compelled to respond to ALL of them), and everyonce in a while do a search for tweets to respond to. The key is providing value. ("@SomeDude "Im going on a business trip to Hamsteristan" - @NeilSKW "Hey dude, be sure to visit Hamster bar, thats where all the hot girls are")
- Another useful service to have, get an account with Crowdbooster.com (I they are not taking signups, PM me for an invite) They tell you the best times to tweet (when your followers are more active), who are your most influential followers, and they make you a nice graph showing your follower growth over time. Also, another graph showing how are your tweets doing. Retweets are good, but its better to have just one retweets form someone with a lot of followers than a lot of retweets from a lot of people with few followers. (Buffer also gives you analytics, but Crowdboosters is better)
-In addition to your tweet list, have some images and photos ready. In my experience they get more retweets. For example, photos from your travels, women (not models or slutty pics, more like "Hey, this is what the average Hamsteristanian looks like. Would you date her?") and cool places. Videos are also helpful ("Heres how to pack your entire gear into a 20L bag -*YouTubeLink")
Reviews or affiliate links could be useful only if your audience are into those ("For me, this is the best compact computer to travel: *AmazonLink") so, experiment a bit.
-Use Bit.ly to create and track your links. It tells you how many clicks each link you publish gets over time.
Building your audience:
- Follow users that you know might be interested in you. Some of those users will follow you back (some will do because they like your thing, some will follow just because. There will be some that will not follow you no matter what, those are NOT your target)
After a few days, unfollow those that have not followed you back, and follow a new bunch of people. Use Justunfollow.com to find out who are not following you back, and to weed out inactive accounts. Someone who uses Twitter very rarely will not be part of your audience.
- Do not try any "followback" tactics. I tried those for a while, and I got a short boost, but those followers are worthless, as they are not interested in your account and will not engage with it. They are not your audience, they just are after another notch to their follower belt. If anything, when starting out, follow a set amount of #FollowBack accounts, just so that your own account doesnt looks sad and empty, and then unfollow them when they have served their purpose. Be ruthless, Twitter can generate a lot of traffic for you, trash accounts will only drag you down.
You have to have a clear idea of what is your target audience, try to stick to that definition, (ie: "single adult males" be as specific as you can "single, urban, educated, adult non-immigrant males living in the European Union" )but add a few wildcards here and there. For example, your audience should be preferably male, but if there are a few women following you that is ok. However, if your audience is all female (or anything outside your target audience), then you are doing it wrong.
Getting a niche is not a bad thing. Perhaps the dutch manosphere market is small, say, less than 50k people. But if you dominate it, then you have 50k dudes getting all their game and travel related needs from you. And 50k customers, even if their are spending a minimal amount on you, are more than enought to make a more than comfortable living.
(Read this post: 1000 True Fans by Kevin Kelly. It has blown my mind and defined my business strategy. I recommend 100%, so dont be surprised if you hear me preaching about it again)
- Start out by looking for accounts from products or services that are similar to you. Mine them for followers. Stick to those who activelly engage their audiences. Bot accounts gather bot followers.
- Once you start getting more followers, you will start getting follows from bots and 'commercial' accounts ("This is the Twiiter account for Mr. Lee's Laundry") Weed them out. Its tempting to keep them just to boost your numbers a little bit, but in the end, they do more harm than good, and if someone looks at your following and sees a lot of spam accounts, they will run.
- Engage some influential account in your topic. Either retweeting them, or sending tweets their way. (ie: "RT @UncleRoosh: "Hamsters gonna ham"" "Hey @Deb, have you ever been to Hamsteristan, like, for real?") If they engage you back, you will appear on their followers timeline, which will send some people your way. (I once got a RT from Ana Serradilla, a mexican soap opera actress, and that gave me a short boost in followers and visits to my webpage)
Building your content:
-Your account needs to be active. Write a bunch of relevant, somewhat generic tweets and have them ready. That way you can just copy and paste them when needed. Use bufferapp.com to program your tweets to go out at specified hours every day. Buffer is good because you can just select and right click on your text, and add it to the queue. Tweetdeck is also good, lets you progra, tweets for specific times (11:55pm on friday, instead of 11:45 everyday, as in buffer) but the caveat is that you have to program them individually. I use both for different purposes.
Use this signup link for Buffer and we both get an extra slot. (It gives you an starting queue of 10 tweets, unless you pay for more. But 10, or 11, are more than enough to get you through the week, so you can get your tweeting done on monday and free up your time)
http://bufferapp.com/r/2d180
- About this tweet list: do not smother it with links to your content. That tires and scares away your followers. Fill it with excerpts from your book, tips and advice (ie: "girls in Hamsteristan will actually get offended if you offer to pay for their drinks" "Always keep a condom in your pocket. You never know..." etc.) famous quotes, and in the lower percentage, links to your content or wherever you want your audience to go (email list signup, Facebook page, website. etc)
If I ran the numbers from my own Twitter account, id say its:
30% excerpts from my content
30% advice, tips, and quotes of my own
10% famous quotes and motivational messages (ie "be the change you want to see in the world - Gandhi")
10% links to my webpage, blog posts, or content of my own. (I could raise this a bit, but I dont want to be one of "those" accounts, so I keep it on the lowside. Id say you could go as far as 20%. Experiment a bit and track how many clicks your links get. Around 15% of traffic to my webpage comes from Twitter)
10% links to other media of my own (mailing list signup form, Facebook fan page, etc) (I send a PM the first time anyone follows me on Twitter with a link inviting them to 'like' us on Facebook, so I dont repeat that much. I guess I should be more aggressive about it (I got a measly 400 likes on Facebook...) My strategy at the time is centered around Twitter, so I dont mind it that much. If anyone has specific strategies for Facebook, please do share.
5% links to other peoples content (news articles, interesting blog posts, pictures, youtube videos)
and the remaining 5% are retweets, responses, etc.
-Experiment a bit and find what is the best activity level and hours for your account. Too few tweets and they will get lost in your audiences timelines. Too many and they will lose interest. I have found that, for me, more than 6 a day is overkill, and anything less than 2 gets me nowhere, so I usually tweet 2 from the pre-written list, and 1 or 2 fresh, relevant tweets (keep an eye on the trending topics, its rare that there is one relevant to your account, but when there is one, ride it till it fades. Use only the trending topics that appear on the main page, anything else looks too try hard) Also, dont abuse hashtags.
- Engage you followers. Try to respond to all tweets directed at you (but dont feel compelled to respond to ALL of them), and everyonce in a while do a search for tweets to respond to. The key is providing value. ("@SomeDude "Im going on a business trip to Hamsteristan" - @NeilSKW "Hey dude, be sure to visit Hamster bar, thats where all the hot girls are")
- Another useful service to have, get an account with Crowdbooster.com (I they are not taking signups, PM me for an invite) They tell you the best times to tweet (when your followers are more active), who are your most influential followers, and they make you a nice graph showing your follower growth over time. Also, another graph showing how are your tweets doing. Retweets are good, but its better to have just one retweets form someone with a lot of followers than a lot of retweets from a lot of people with few followers. (Buffer also gives you analytics, but Crowdboosters is better)
-In addition to your tweet list, have some images and photos ready. In my experience they get more retweets. For example, photos from your travels, women (not models or slutty pics, more like "Hey, this is what the average Hamsteristanian looks like. Would you date her?") and cool places. Videos are also helpful ("Heres how to pack your entire gear into a 20L bag -*YouTubeLink")
Reviews or affiliate links could be useful only if your audience are into those ("For me, this is the best compact computer to travel: *AmazonLink") so, experiment a bit.
-Use Bit.ly to create and track your links. It tells you how many clicks each link you publish gets over time.