#twooc @TrinityVisionUK 21 | Page Day TWO: Find & Follow Building Your Community The small print: All this material, whilst given freely for this course, is for your use only, and not for dissemination to anyone else, even inside your own organisation. Please do recommend that your colleagues sign up for the course so that they can participate too at http://twooc.wordpress.com
Learn how to build your Twitter community with six strategies and a four-step following plan. Day two of our 12 Days of Twitter course is "Find and Follow".
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Transcript
#twooc
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Day TWO: Find & Follow
Building Your Community
The small print:
All this material, whilst given freely for this course, is for your use only, and not for dissemination to anyone else, even inside your own organisation. Please do recommend that your colleagues sign up for the course so that they can participate too at http://twooc.wordpress.com
Read pages 23-33, and let us know what you think on Twitter. Send us a tweet! When you are tweeting about the contents of the course, put #twooc somewhere in the tweet.
Following the instructions on pages 23-34:
Follow people on the #twooc course using our List: Click on https://twitter.com/AndyAllenMedia/lists/twooc/members
Choose some people to follow by clicking on the follow buttons down the list (Do this at
the end of the day to give everyone time to send their Twitter IDs to be added to the list)
Find and follow people in any or all of the six ways suggested
Search for our conversations using #twooc in the search field
E-tivity:
Tweet “Hello” and a little about yourself using the hashtag #twooc
Tools:
At any point, if you want to reference the keyboard shortcuts on Twitter, hit Shift + ? to get this menu:
Resources:
www.twellow.com
www.twibes.com
www.wefollow.com
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Day Two: “Find and Follow” - building your community
Today is a day of desk research, and reaching out to people across the world, and around the corner. Less input
from me, and more work from you.
You see how this is heading already . . ;)1 Firstly, let’s put your tweets into context:
Where do my tweets go?
Firstly, it’s important to understand that once you have created a tweet, even if no-one is following you, it goes
out into the twitterverse and can be seen by anyone. Even if you have no followers, your tweet exists, and can
be found by anyone on the internet, they don’t even need a Twitter account.
This is good because: Anyone using the internet will be able to find you and follow you (become part of your
audience or community) by searching on keywords that you use in your tweets. The theory is if you want to
have a lot of pizza-lovers following you, just tweet a lot about pizza.
This is bad because: Sometimes you want to take a tweet back. (with me, this is usually mis-spellings)
You CAN delete a tweet. So you won’t find this one I just created in @myairchair’s timeline (try it!):
To delete a tweet, click on the three dots at the bottom of the tweet on your timeline, and a drop down menu
appears. Click on ‘delete’. However, be warned, as many an inebriated celebrity has discovered, there’s no
telling how far a tweet has travelled, or how many people have seen and captured it (like I captured this one
above) before it is deleted. Once they are indexed and cached by Google, there’s no chance of deletion.
Rule 1. then, is “Think before you tweet.”
Of course, you can only delete your own tweets, not other peoples.
Tweets are LOVED by Google and social search engines like Bing, because:
1. They are keyword rich (or should be) so they are easy to find.
2. They represent the LATEST information – and this is what searchers on the internet want now.
We don’t want to know how good a holiday was in 2009, we want to know how good it was last week. Or
even yesterday, or even right now this minute. Twitter is a way of finding this information.
1This strange symbol ;) is an emoticon. Emoticons enable you to show the tone of what you are writing through these miniature faces. The secret is to tilt your head to the left – this one is a winky, showing I’m joking, i.e. asking you to make an inference. My favourites are Homer ~(_8^(|) and Marge Simpson ######:o) . Though I’ve yet to use them in conversation :) Whilst Facebook has graduated to stickers, Twitter still uses emoticons.
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This is why tweets can be indexed by Google within minutes and certainly will be indexed within hours. If you
tweet regularly, and your account is in your own name, it will come near the top of Google, and for me it’s often
at the top of Google because generally I use Twitter more than any other platform.
My Twitter account is number two for a search on me on Google performed today, and is pretty representative
of my online activity:
It’s not just our own tweets that come up. This tweet from Fiona (who was on the first 12 Days of Twitter
course) was on the front page of Google the morning of Day 2 of the course, and she was talking to
@ReachFurther. Do you see how it makes sense for Google to show this?
It allows searchers to find the latest conversations people are having about us and with us, and it’s direct from
the horse’s mouth so to speak.
So tweets are searchable, not just within Twitter, but within Google. This means that just by staying on your
topics of interest, other people will find you based on the keywords they are using in their searches to find you.
This is the essence of “Inbound Marketing” : instead of you making the effort to find people who might want to
buy your services, or read your publications, THEY find YOU based on your mutual interests.
How many people have signed up to your newsletter if you have one? Or your e-shots? It’s a hard one to win
isn’t it? Even getting the right people to connect on LinkedIn is hard work (and the topic of another course I run,
but I digress.) However, how “light” a touch is following someone on Twitter? It’s not a big commitment. It’s
the virtual equivalent of saying “I like what you have to say, tell me more.” So it’s a great way of starting
relationships that will progress through connecting on LinkedIn, reading your blog, liking your Facebook page,
subscribing to your newsletter, and then, if you want them to, picking up the phone.
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Yesterday we looked at making your 160 word Bio on your profile keyword friendly, and even choosing or
changing your username to something that’s more obvious for a casual observer to understand. Tomorrow
we’ll look specifically at what to tweet about to gain followers and friends. On Day 10 (seems far away right
now) we’ll look at advanced find and follow strategies, and on Day 11 we’ll learn how to migrate followers from
other social platforms. Right now we’re going to look at the first simple strategy for attracting the right sort of
followers, and that’s by finding them first.
Friend or Follow?
Twitter has a major difference from LinkedIn and Facebook and other social platforms. On Facebook when you
“Friend” someone, its mutual. On LinkedIn, when you “connect” with someone, you both become each others’
connections. On Twitter, you can follow anyone you like, but that doesn’t mean they become your follower. If
you do follow each other, as a result of two separate voluntary actions, they become a “friend”. Twitter shows
on your profile how many people you follow, and how many people follow you. Some other platforms will show
you how many Twitter “friends” you have.
It’s the same with Twitter conversations. A cat can tweet a King, but the King may not deign to tweet me back.
And if he did tweet me back, I’d have to be really extra-witty/interesting/famous or otherwise special to get him
to FOLLOW me back.
So, the aim of the game today is to find people to follow in the hope that they will follow you back. Once they
follow you back, not only do you have their ears and eyes, as it were, but the potential to talk to their audience,
as they may choose to pass your message on to their followers through a one-click process called a re:tweet.
One more thing before we move on. I’d like to introduce the REACH model.
The REACH model
The “reach” model can be used to measure social media success. It’s a simple measure of:
Reach How many people you are talking to – on Twitter, this can be measured by the number of
Followers you have, and the number of times you’ve been Listed
Engage How many people are talking TO you – on Twitter this is simply measured as @replies (public
tweets addressed to you) & Direct Messages (private tweets addressed to you)
Amplify How many people are talking ABOUT you, this can be measured by the number of times people
mention you in Tweets by @username, and if they use your hashtags
reach engage amplify convert hold
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Convert How many people take the call to action you tweet about. Whether that’s read a blogpost, take
part in a survey, or buy your products or services. It’s about measuring the clicks on your links.
Hold How many people stay with you.2
So today’s exercises are about the first element of the model – REACH. How many people can we get to follow
us? A “follow” being Twitter’s equivalent of permission-based marketing.
Happily, we on #twooc have a head-start. By the end of today you should already have all of your fellow course
mates following you. You can check this on your profile by clicking on “followers” under the number on the
right hand side. You can change the view so that you can choose to see the Followers listed, or choose to see
their tweets in a Timeline. Have a play.
Quick note: If you’re using an iPad or smartphone it can take a while for the app to ‘catch up’ with your follower
numbers – as much as up to a day so don’t worry if your follower numbers don’t update straight away.
In my experience it normally takes around 4 weeks to build the first hundred followers on a typical non-brand
account, so your #twooc-mates should give you a bit of a head start.
Tomorrow, I’ll introduce you to some tools that will help you measure your Twitter success.
Finding people to Follow
Let’s be clear. We want people to follow us who we may do real business with, or who might support us in our
aims. At least, that’s the purpose of this course. You may want to follow Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher and
pry into their marital affairs, but they aren’t going to follow you back. Moreover, anyone casually looking at
your Twitter profile can see who you follow, and they many not be impressed with you if you’re following a
bunch of irrelevant celebrities (and I mean, irrelevant to THEM, not just to YOU).
So, we need to find people who are talking about the same things as us, in their biographies, and in their tweets,
or find people who we know already.
Here’s some ideas:
1. Follow everyone on this course. If you click this link you’ll go to a list we have made of everyone
involved in #twooc for this month. You can choose to follow the list, which means you’ll see all the
tweets, but won’t be counted as an individual “follower” of anyone on it. Or you can follow everyone
individually by clicking down the list. Do this before you do number 2. Please tell us your twitter ID as
soon as you have it so that we can add you to this list!