- It’s easy to build a crowd. You can build a significant crowd in a short time. How significant? Well, as an experiment I have built a fresh crowd around the Lead Generation courses that I teach, and in 9 months the crowd has swelled to over 40,000 people. And I didn’t spend a cent to get them!
- Twitter followers are engaged. Why? It’s quite simple, really, there is nothing else to do on Twitter. No pretty pictures, no cake recipes from fake friends to look at. Instead there are real meaningful conversations to be part of. And there are easy ways to weave your marketing message into those conversations if you know how to do it.
- They’re responsive. A lot of people on Twitter use it in ‘real time’. So when you send a message out, you will get responses within minutes. How are your email response rates in comparison?
So, how do you go about harnessing this great power?
First, you have to really carefully define who you are, what you stand for, and what your target market is. And doing that with excellence is the topic of my next article. Because if you get that wrong you may as well not bother. Next, you have to have something relevant and engaging to say. Twitter is a medium where more IS better. Does that mean hard work? Not at all! Do you write press releases? Most press releases contain 10-15 Tweets within them, simply pick out each sentence, reformat a bit and you have a post for Twitter. Do you write blog posts or newsletters? Same formula. If you have a significant newsletter it may indeed contain enough tweets for the whole month!
Finally (and this is most often completely overlooked), you have to create engagement. Every post has to give your audience something to do. A great video to click on and watch. A great quote or funny story to click and share with their friends. A blog post to click and read. And... a great offer for your product or service which they will be naturally inclined to.... click. Because that’s what they did with all the other posts you did! You get the picture.
By Mike Boorn Plener