My whole twitter experience has been far different than my experience with Facebook or LinkedIn. I ended up giving up on Facebook - just wasn't for me, and I have had some real tangible success with LinkedIn.
Twitter has been more about fun than the serious side of things. Even so, I had to try to see just how well I could master this medium as another marketing avenue. As a B2C marketing forum I think is suits this blog, but I wasn't too sure that I would find other B2B types like myself there.
Wrong...
I started out last week with around 1600 followers. This week I am presently sitting at 2,694. I have embraced all sorts of things that I previously steered away from, and I cannot say frankly that I have been able to get to know very many of the new followers that I have picked up.
And I am pretty sure they have no real idea who I am either.
My blog traffic has stayed pretty static so far, Adsense earnings is also flat, and I am not seeing any increase in Sponsored Reviews so far either.
So up to right now the commercial side of things hasn't benefited noticeably.
But I did increase my followers by over 1,000 in a week. Maybe I can turn them from followers to friends over the next 4 - 6 weeks - who knows?
So here's how it was done.
First, setting out the search references on Twollow.com. I have set up Seth Godin, Consulting Pulse and Consulting as my keywords.
I review these every day and follow those that are not robots, auto feeds or spammers. Why? Because I am being mercenary about it. I want them to follow me, and I want (most of all) to capture retweets to their followers also.)
Second - I discovered Refollow.com. This is possibly the best relationship manager for Twitter that I have come across.
Using Refollow you can get a list of all the people following you, and of others who have high followings. I searched for the followers of Social media mavens like @Scobleizer and @ChrisBrogan.
Then I filtered them to show those with the highest following, who I wasn't following, and who weren't following me - and followed the top 100 of these.
The bet was that they would automatically refollow me...and the vast majority of them did.
The next step was one I have always thought better of, and I am not too sure that it helped much in this campaign. I went into Tweetlater.com and set up a few things related to my profile.
I now automatically follow those who follow me, and I unfollow those who unfollow me.
I also set up a series of auto DM's. The beauty of TweetLater is that you can set up a range of DM's to send out when somebody follows you. Mine include a call to action related to my LinkedIn group for consultants , a note on the revenue generating power of LinkedIn , and one related to Missions and Mantras .
I have had two return tweets telling me that hey felt like they had been spammed... not too happy about that.
The Good news: I have 1,000 extra followers in a week.
The Not so Good news: Very few of them are following me because of who I am, what I write about, what I stand for, or for the value I can bring to their careers or companies.
They are just hangers on. The 3,000 + people following @ThisisSethsBlog know exactly who they are following, and why. My followers do not sadly.
So any tweets they see from me is a voice in the wilderness, among the several thousand that they already see every day.
The Plan From Here: I now have a good base of followers. My original followers who generally came from the blog and / or retweets, and those I picked up recently.
I am going to call a halt to the campaign during the following week and start to try to win over the followers I now have. With a view from converting them from followers to friends. Because as things stand right now - they are of little value to my commercial or reputational aspirations. (Sad as that may sound)
I will keep you posted.
Update: Oh yes, I also put a retweet button on the blog which I check via a search on Consulting Pulse every now and then.
I think that is probably the best move I have made so far... feel free to retweet this post if you like!!
