This article is about how to create Twitter followers. As a long time Internet marketer, I’m always cautious about jumping on board with new trends. I prefer to look at things from a ready, aim, fire, approach especially if a new trend appears to be very labor intensive. Recently I have been reading about and looking closely at Twitter. Please don’t call me a technology laggard (although sometimes I am). Despite all of the buzz about Twitter I just couldn’t find a success story I could relate to. Finally I found out a close friend of mine was having great success creating his own Twitter following. He had amassed 15,000 followers in 6 - 7 months. I asked him to share his success story with me so I could share it with you. Here are some great tips by Art, a tax professional who owns Starwel Tax Services, about how he and you can create a large following at Twitter.
“This past summer I looked at Twitter. I’ve seen it used on the cable news shows, and wondered what the fuss was. I’m a tax guy, so I didn’t see a practical purpose. Still, I signed up for an account and decided to toss out a few blurbs. I wondered if anybody would care. At first I read some of the Tweets, or messages, other people posted. There were a few funny ones, so I decided to follow those people.
I noticed that some people had lots of followers, and some, like me, had very few. I wondered how long it would take to gain a huge following. Within a few days, I noticed that the people I followed would follow me back. I started following more people, and more followed me back. So I did a ‘Find People’ search for people in my area to follow, and followed as many as I could find. Within a few weeks I had over 1,000 people following me.
That same week, Oprah joined Twitter, and nearly ½ a million people followed her on her first day. The first thing I thought was that Oprah really didn’t need such a huge Twitter following if people had access to her so many different ways. Then a light bulb turned on. With a huge following, short messages could be a great way to get people to follow a link to check out anything from an interesting article on the web to a business website.
Still, I did not want to say the same thing every day. I decided on about 30 short blurbs I could mention with my business website as the link. Some of the messages were too long to include my full web address. I found a website to shorten my website URL: http://cli.gs/. With that I created my Tweets, and set up a schedule to build my following. I would work 15 minutes in the morning and 15 minutes in the evening following people, and unfollowing those that did not follow me back within two days. I sent out tweets five or six times a day; some times from my computer, and some times from my PDA. All had a link to my website.
When someone followed me back, I would send a direct message with a link to my website thanking them for following. After two months I had built my following to about 3,500. But I noticed that traffic to my website was also increasing. I kept up the pace but soon realized that I was now working about 30 minutes morning and evening keeping up with my following and direct messaging. As my followers increased, I knew I was spending more time on maintenance. Three months into my Twitter experiment, I had 7,000 followers, traffic to my business website tripled, but I was now spending about 2-3 hours a day on maintenance.
That was not sustainable. I often saw Twitter builder programs, and decided to investigate a few. I looked into five different programs comparing cost and benefits. I settled on Tweet Adder. I liked the program because it automated all the activity I was manually doing. I could now send a message per hour around the clock, follow and unfollow up to 1000 people a day (within the Twitter daily limits) send out 250 direct messages a day, and the entire system was automated.
All I had to do was get a list of people I wanted to follow. Great followers are mentioned all the time on Follow Friday. Of course Tweet Adder has a six way search feature you can use to load names into program. Then I uploaded my 30 messages, my direct messages, and even a reply message when someone mentions me in Twitter. Once I log into the program, everything else is automated. And it runs around the clock as long as my computer is on.
Now, it takes me five minutes in the morning to check my system to be sure everything is running fine. I review and change my 30 messages periodically, but that takes no more than 15 minutes a week. I also spend about 10-15 minutes a day, reviewing Direct Messages sent to my email in case there is anything interesting. I recommend setting up a separate email account to use with Tweet Adder. I get about 300 emails a day.
In addition to the time savings above, Tweet Adder is an affiliate program that allows me to get a commission. (Here’s my link: http://cli.gs/gDYvD.) In the first month of using it, traffic to my business site doubled, my followers list topped 13,000, and the program paid for itself. So now, I add a little tweet mentioning my main business, but also my affiliate business, Tweet Adder.
My new goal is 30,000 followers before the beginning of next tax season. Sure, I’m no Oprah, but with Twitter, the sky is the limit. Wish me luck. Or better yet, drop me a tweet at http://www.twitter.com/starwel3. I always follow back.”
Google, Yahoo and Bing January 2010 market share was just announced by Comscore.com this week. According to them,”Americans conducted 15.2 billion core searches, with Google Sites accounting for 65.4 percent search market share. Microsoft sites grabbed 11.3 percent market share, up 0.6 percentage points versus November.” Click here to read the rest of their data.
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