Twitter is my favourite social media property.
Why? Because you can reach out to anyone. You’re not constrained by ‘friendships’ or ‘groups’. It’s wide open. And it’s fast! I love the 140 character limit. It means I can be very brief without ever appearing rude.
We built our Twitter handle @getspokal to over 22,000 followers and regularly drive over 1000 new unique visitors a month to our site through Twitter, so it’s fast, open, and effective.
You can do that too – in as little as an hour or two a week once you get the hang of it.
Step by step: Here’s how you can get 1000 visitors to your website in 30 days.
1. Create your profile if you haven’t already. Make sure it’s filled out and attractive. Read this for guidance.
2. Tweet about topics related to your industry (not about things you do, sell, or articles on your site).
Tweet about articles you’ve read that you find interesting. Be human. Don’t try to be a generic faceless corporation. Don’t be afraid to show your personality. Tweet at least once a day. 2-10 times is even better. Even if you have no followers, do this first. You have to build up your account.
3. Participate on Twitter by tweeting at people in your industry and retweeting some of their tweets.
4. Follow other people and companies in your industry. Use twitter search. Follow a few hundred new users every day or two. You can also find other people in your industry, and start following people who follow them. Only do this after you’ve begun tweeting, and have say 10-15 real tweets (not retweets) on your account related to your industry. You can also find people by finding people that your ideal customer would likely be following, and going through the list of people who follow them, or by searching for relevant lists on Twitter itself. the search bar will return all of these, you don’t need to do anything special.
5. (kind of a free step!) After a few days a 10-20% or so of the people you follow will be following you back.
6. Keep following until you’re following 2000 people. Then stop.
7. Keep tweeting relevant content, preferably none of it yours unless you have something really great.
8. After a week, you can optionally unfollow everyone not following you back. You can use something like Tweet Adder which will make this process faster, or just do it over time.
9. Now you can start occasionally tweeting about your business and content. No hard sell, and make sure that 80% of what you tweet about isn’t about your business. You want to build relationships, and become a source of information. An authority (even a minor authority – we all have to start somewhere).
Now, the temptation may be to rinse and repeat this. Don’t. Sorry to say, but Twitter checks for exactly that kind of behaviour, and will suspend your account, so this is a one-time only shot to give your account that initial kick to get going.
If you’ve done the math, you’ve probably figured out this won’t result in 1000 visitors. Alone, it won’t, but it’s the first step to get there. In an upcoming mail we’ll show you what to do next.
This works. We’ve done it, and grown our Twitter following and website traffic massively in just a few months. At first it seemed kind of silly to me – following people to get them to follow you back. Like many things in life – twitter is a game.
The point of following is much the same as the point of SEO – making sure the right people find you. Then pushing out quality content (most of it not yours) makes your handle more valuable, because you’re acting as a curator to your followers. Do this well and your follower count will steadily increase.
Get started today. This can be a quick 20 minutes when your brain needs a break, or on your phone while you’re waiting for someone running late. It can be fit in the middle of just about anything, done from any device, so there actually ARE enough hours in the day for this one. You can’t say that for many marketing activities.
We’ll follow up with more advanced strategies that you can use and that will frankly work better – once your account has some activity.