Twitter followers start out being hard to come by these days. It’s just a fact–with all the spam on the site, it takes some time to get followers. To get meaningful followers takes even longer. Ultimately we want to have a connection with the people we’re there with, and we want to be providing value. The problem is, because of the mistrust of twitter there’s a lot of folks out there that are going to “spam twitter,” providing no value, just links to crap like tanning lotion or whatever.
What’s an impatient small business owner to do to get followers? Especially one that has a Twitter-ready business but no identity?
Well, I took my “PatriotConnect.Com” idea to twitter. Patriot Connect is a libertarian website provider. We build campaign websites for libertarians in a day. We use WP+Thesis, and we provide a donation-ready shopping cart + gateway. But that’s not important right now. What’s important is that we got to 100 followers in just about 48 hours. And that “base” is enough social proof that others will start following.
We did it the “Cheating” way, and of course, we’ll share that here with you now.
1.) Grab TweetSpinner (aff. link). Tweetspinner is a service I use, pay full boat for and love. I’ve got several accounts under management–it helps get reasonably connected good quality followers all generally speaking within the rules that Twitter has set. It makes you play by the rules. Don’t be a dick, don’t push the limits, don’t break it. It helps market and build a base for those doing it right.
2.) Find a list of quotes in your field. “Libertarian Quotes” or “Business Quotes.XLS” ought to do it. You can grab about anything and throw it into a MS Excel spreadsheet. This might not be trivial, it’ll take a minute or two–but I eventually found a list of quotes. you need 300+ quotes, this is the hard part. You can cut and paste into textedit/notepad to use web quotes.
When you have it in excel, use the LEN function =LEN(+A1) to count characters. You are hoping for quotes under 120 characters to get the Retweets.
When you’re done with that, go through and use the merge cells function (&) to add some industry hashtags. Hash-tags are one way of organizing twitter and worth googling if you are new here. Basically, people tag their posts for their own to find them.
3.) Create Your Own Content . Mix stuff about your website at about a 20% ratio–30% if you plan on tweeting from the get go. (I plan on tweeting only sporadically with Patriot Connect.) You can use TweetScript to dynamically generate, or you can do it manually. Since LEN was counting my charachters for me, I did it myself. I did 15 tweets about the blog, 15 tweets about posts, 15 links I love (another reason I wish I’d been a better digg/delicious/stumble curator).
4.) Organize and randomize it: The RAND function is a nice pulldown to shuffle everything you’ve made. You can then have a twitter spreadsheet of a nice mix of your found quotes and your topic if you then sort by the RAND column.
5.) the manual part: follow 15 people. Ask them to follow you back, wait till you get 3-5 folks. This might take a minute.
6.) Paste your randomized quote stream into spinner. Should be 600 quotes. Once every 2 hours. That’s 50 days of content. Once an hour is 25 days.
7.) Have twitter autofollow HASTAGS. Hastag users are very likely (35%) to follow you back automatically. You want initially liberal autofollower ratios and then you want to slide it back as you get more people. So, every 10 followers, grab one.
That’ll get you started. If you need help “getting” twitter, please let me know. I’ll find a way to get you set up on this process and get you your first 100, mostly relevant followers.
I’ll do a video when I’m done with the first video I’ve made and we’ll have fun with all that.
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