Most Twitter users for business feel like it’s something of a chore or that it has no purpose. They log on, post a few tweets, then log back out. It’s a check on their to-do list that they want to finish as quickly as possible.
This happens when there’s no plan or objective put in place so you have a reason to tweet. If there’s no purpose, rhyme or reason to your tweeting, you aren’t going anywhere, just continuing the cycle until you get stuck in a rut.
The secret to breaking this cycle lies in one hack with four distinct steps. Twitter should be engaging, and you get more purpose out of Twitter when you have quality traffic that’s giving you more to interact with every day. Simply posting tweets won’t get you anywhere, but interacting on Twitter with followers you acquire through increased traffic will get you the success you’re looking for.
Stop wasting effort on Twitter activities that don’t get you anywhere and start generating more sales leads. Follow the 4 steps and you’ll see better quality followers and more leads rolling in.
The 4 Steps
In a nutshell, these are the four steps:
- Setting up your profile in the right way.
- Identifying target audience Twitter profiles via influencers.
- Following the right users.
- Sending DMs to new followers.
It’s easy enough to stop reading here and go do this on your own, but each step in this hack has its own set of instructions. There’s a distinct reason behind each step and a proper way to execute it. If you want to truly optimize your chances for success keep reading as we break down each individual step.
1. Set Up Your Profile Correctly
Everyone has a profile on Twitter, so it can be hard to make yours stand out. Twitter used to have more customized options, like uploading a background image, but now your opportunities for standing out are more limited. This means your venues for customization have to be utilized to their full potential.
From here, we can break this down into a variety of different profile sections:
Profile Photos
A recent study has found out a few key traits you can exhibit, or items you can utilize in your profile photo in order to give the right first impression:
- Wearing Glasses – Don’t feel compelled to wear these if you don’t have them, but don’t feel like taking off your usual specs somehow makes you more attractive to viewers. The opposite is true. Twitter users feel that those that wear glasses are more competent. The nerdy, educated stereotype is paying off for you, here.
- Showing Teeth – As compared to smiles where your mouth is closed, smiles that show off your teeth give audience members an impression that you’re influential.
- Dressing Sharply – Wearing a nice dress shirt or blouse also influences how someone perceives you on Twitter. Dressing nicely means that you’re more influential and competent.
You’ll notice a trend in the words “influential” and “competent.” The reason is that these are two of the main purposes of being on Twitter. Marketing yourself as an influencer and thought leader is how you start getting more traffic, more followers and more brand value.
Cover Photos
Your cover photo, otherwise known as a header image, is one of the other options you have for visual customization. Personal accounts have a lot of freedom to choose what kind of image they use, but businesses can have a tougher time. What is appropriate? What kind of image will work the best?
- Consider a panoramic photograph. These are longer, horizontal images that fit neatly into the 1500 x 500 pixel image dimension requirement that Twitter looks for. You can’t just pick any photo, though. You need to be in it – whether you’re standing in a crowd or looking seriously at a client during a meeting.
- Also think about a promotional photo. These are photos that are more heavily edited and act as a large advertisement. These focus on a single call to action, like buying your new product or downloading your newest e-book.
- Your simplest option involves your logo and a tagline. These headers are graphically designed and are generally very minimalist.
For specific examples of great cover photos, check out this blog post from HubSpot and see what inspiration you can find.
Profile Biography
Now we move out of the visual aspect of your Twitter profile and into the real meat. Your profile bio doesn’t have a lot of space to utilize, so you have to make what you include count for something. Being specific, Twitter bio spaces have 160 characters to work with, so they’re a little longer than a normal tweet.
If you want a simple formula for your Twitter bio, consider this three part template:
- Your first sentence should be a call to action. This is a phrase. Example: “The number one trade show company in the USA.”
- Next you should include a link that relates to the call to action.
- Your final sentence should be something that convinces them to click. Example: We help hundreds of businesses every day.
2. Find Your Target Audience through Influencers
Before you can find your audience, you have to know who your audience is. If you don’t know who all this entails by now, there’s likely more wrong with your business marketing than just your Twitter success.
In a nutshell, your audience is the largest demographic that will consistently utilize your business. This can be as specific as entrepreneurs in their 20s and 30s, or as broad as any college students in any university. Once you decide on your audience, then you can continue.
Locating your audience can be easy, but also complicated in another sense. It can be a simple task to find lots of people who fit into the umbrella of your audience, but it’s not valuable to interact and utilize every single one of them. For instance, in the example that your audience consists of college students, how can you realistically follow and utilize every college student on Twitter?
One of the best ways to find high quality Twitter users that fall into your audience pool is to locate your industry leaders, peers and your competition, then go through their follower list. You need to narrow down your pool, though, and you can do this by finding thought leaders that fall into these three categories:
- Only pick active Twitter users. They should be posting tweets on a daily basis, with weekly updates being the minimum amount of activity required.
- Find influencers that have at least 5,000 followers. This shows that they’ve worked hard to achieve followers and are connected enough to easily pull this off. They also post enough valuable content to get others interested.
- There is a caveat to the above criteria – some Twitter users get followers based on a “follow back” rule. When they get followed, they follow back, meaning their followers aren’t exactly genuine. Look for a 5 to 1 ratio of followers to following. True influencers don’t need to resort to follower growth tactics.
This should greatly narrow down the pool of users you’ll want to harvest followers from. From here you can further narrow down your pool based on a few other factors. These are based on your relationship compatibility.
The easiest way to choose influencers to follow their followers from, is to choose influencers that are your direct competition. If you market to college students, you need to find influencers that do the same. Another tactic is to think of a similar field that also shares your audience pool, like a collegiate sports clothing company.
3. Follow Active Power Users
Now you have a decent pool of audience members to look over now that you’ve picked out a handful of influencers followers. These target accounts will be how you locate the perfect users to follow and engage with.
Click on the followers tab of one of the users you’ve found. You can easily put this link into an automated program that will follow accounts for you, but this is a mistake. Instead, go through these followers and follow by hand. You don’t want to clog up your own following list with accounts that won’t do you any good.
To help eliminate following the wrong people, consider these qualifications:
- Their profile photo need to be a real person. No drawings, screencaps or other media allowed. Real, genuine Twitter users you can engage with are more likely to associate their face with their social media accounts.
- They need to speak the same language as you. It can be hard to engage with someone who speaks only French when you speak only English.
- They need to have a complete profile. This includes a bio, profile photo and profile header. It’s an added bonus if they have their extras filled out, like location and URL.
What’s the purpose behind all of this qualifying and narrowing down? Active and genuine Twitter users often check their followers on a daily basis – that is to say, the new accounts that follow them in their notifications. Otherwise, these accounts may be fake.
It’s important to differentiate the different qualifications in steps two and three – step two is how you find the right influencers to harvest followers from, while step three involves the followers themselves. This means the followers you’re targeting don’t have to have those 5,000 followers – in fact, they’ll likely have far less.
This works in your favor. The fewer the followers they have, the more likely they are to notice you’ve followed them.
This is also where your profile upgrades come in. You now offer the people you’ve followed a way to return the favor. They aren’t just following you because you followed them, but because you have an obvious positive purpose to offer them.
One thing you need to think about is how many people to follow in a day. A good range is following about 100 to 500 accounts each day. Remember the criteria – don’t just go down the line and hit the follow button to every account you see. This whole process can take about 30 minutes as you start off, but it gets easier to streamline the process as you keep it up. Eventually you can get through it in about five.
However, you do need to be aware of two follower limits Twitter currently has:
- Anyone with less than 5,000 friends can follow up to 5,000 accounts. If you have 4,999 followers, you can still only follow 5,000 accounts.
- Once you break out of this bracket, your follower limit is based on 10% – namely, you can follow up to 10% more accounts than your total number of followers. For instance, if you have 7,000 followers, you can follow 7,700 accounts.
If you max out the number of accounts you’re following, it’s time to clean house. You do this by unfollowing accounts that didn’t follow you back. Consider a time limit – go through the older accounts you’ve followed. If they haven’t followed you within a week, they can go.
4. Direct Message Your Followers
Few businesses utilize direct messages (DMs) the way that they should be used. It can be one of the most powerful lead generation tools you have at your disposal, and yet you likely aren’t using it to the best of your ability.
One genius reason why DMs are a great tool for you to utilize is that they’re something that leads to a direct connection. This isn’t just about the private atmosphere of a direct message, but also because of notifications. Smartphone users will get notified of DMs they receive, and DMs also show up in a user’s email. Basically, it’s hard to avoid a DM without flat out ignoring it.
The trick is to use the right kinds of direct messages. Businesses that do use DMs often use them incorrectly. The following types of DMs will be utilized through automation, but the trick is to not make them seem so automated. Followers will likely ignore these messages, but there are three different types of DMs that do receive high levels of engagement:
- DMs that ask a question. You already made your life easier by following users who fall into your target demographic, so you now know how to best identify with them. Ask them a question that directly resonates with the pain points your audience experiences often.
- Offer them a freebie or discount. As thanks for following you, offer them a little treat. Express your gratitude for them following you, then offer them something small yet valuable. This can be a discount code or something more, like a choice between a free e-book or webinar. Go with the latter option if possible – consumers love having a choice.
- Go straight for an ad. Sometimes all it takes is to include your Twitter bio in your DM, but give it a fresh spin. You convinced someone to follow you based on your profile, so why not try to drive the message home?
No matter which method you use, or if you pick another to try and use on your own, there is still one important thing to keep in mind. You’ll need to make the first part of your DM count, and the first 140 characters should contain the most important part.
The reason for this is two-fold. One, a long DM will likely get ignored, and the first couple sentences will be what stand out the most. Two, Twitter users have to click on a direct message in order to see the whole thing, but they do get to see a preview of the message in their DM window. The preview is just about the first 140 characters of your message.
While you’re at it consider some basic content writing tips before writing your DM. Your direct messages fall into the same category as content marketing because of their length. Hone your writing skills and see how much better your direct messages perform.
Automating Your Messages
The best way to put this all into action is to automate your Twitter DMs. Some automated functions social media marketing platforms offer are functionally useless, or they aren’t recommended. For instance, it’s already been discussed that you shouldn’t follow accounts automatically, but sending DMs can be tedious unless you don’t automate.
Plus, all of your qualifying has already taken place. Your DMs don’t discriminate.
There are a multitude of options for you to automate DMs, so start looking for automation platforms that work for you. We use Status Brew or SocialOomph for auto Dm’s.
A Quick Recap
If you’ve made it through all of this advice, then let’s go through a refresher list really quickly.
- Step 1. Optimize your profile through individualization, strategy and your three point upgrade formula on your biography.
- Step 2. Identify a handful of industry influencers that you can start harvesting followers from based on the listed criteria.
- Step 3. Start following their followers based on further criteria. These followers should be quality and genuine.
- Step 4. Craft a DM that will up your engagement and traffic statistics. Then use an automation platform to make delivering it simple.
This may seem like a lot of information, but the reality is that it’s a simple process once you get used to it. This will take anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour a week and you’ll finally see the Twitter traffic you’ve been looking for. This is a small price to pay for leads and better quality twitter followers and traffic.
How do you get more traffic on Twitter? Once you start utilizing this method, report back to us with how this method works for you. We’d love to hear your thoughts on how well it works, or how you’d further fine tune it. You can reach me or our team here.
Jason Gordon, Founder – Strong Social
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