This week my Twitter followers top the 1,000 mark. I’m pumped! In Twitter world, this is a drop in the bucket, but in my world, ‘oh my.’ I still learning, but here is how I got this far. To grow your follower base you need to be intentional in your twitter life, both in ‘tweeting’ and gaining followers.
1. I set my Twitter policy and goals. I want to connect with as many people as possible sharing the message of Jesus.
2. I intentionally seek followers. When someone follows me, I check out their Twitter profile and bio. Profile photos are helpful, but if there is no picture, I definitely check their Twitter bio. I may check their website. I follow back unless: the photo, bio or website has sexual overtones, then I block the person. The bio and or the tweets are in a foreign language; I don’t follow the person back. I don’t feel comfortable about the person; I don’t follow or I block them.
3. I send a thank you tweet to the new follower with a message like “have a great mid-week” to show I’m responding and I’m not Lyndie-bot.
4. I follow Twitter’s suggestions. Twitter makes recommendations, which I follow using the same criteria as above. These users are most often in the publishing business.
Following begets followers.
5. I intentionally Tweet. I’m tweeting at least 5 times a day most days. I use the free plan from Buffer (www.bufferapp.com) to schedule my tweets. They go out at 9 am, noon, 5 PM, and 8 pm.
6. I started a quotes database for content, collecting over 800 quotes. I use FIle Maker 12 for the data base (www.filemaker.com.) This is pricey software, but a good data base system. You can achieve the same results with Excel or Numbers. I capture date, quote, author, topic, title of book, page number, twitter information field, URL and comments. I collect sentences from anything I read: devotions, online articles and books. After I finished Mary DeMuth’s recent book, Beautiful Battle, I asked her if there was a hashtag to use to tweet from the book. She eagerly sent back the hashtag #beautifulbattle. This is the format of tweet from Mary’s book: ‘quote’ @MaryDeMuth #beautifulbattle. Mary’s quotes create retweets for me.
In Twitter world, following protocols like @username and #hashtags help your Twitter presence.
Authors are including ready made tweets and hashtags for their books on their website to communicate to their tribe. Michael Hyatt included tweets for his new book, Platform, on his media kit page.
7. I add my Twitter contact information everywhere.
Join the fun tweeting! Find me in Twitter world at @lyndieb. I have no connections to the products listed other than as user.