As the green community grows on Twitter, I find more and more people to follow and more and more people follow me. That is of course, how it’s supposed to work. It doesn’t however take place without some effort. And I get questions.
How do you find time to tweet?
How do you find new followers?
How often do you tweet per day?
Queries come from friends and clients and others in the green community. What I tell them all is a strategy is important. When I take on a new client, the first questions I ask are what is your objective? How do you want to use your Twitter account? What do you hope to accomplish?
As a marketing guru, I ask these types of questions all of the time. Sometimes I’m met with blank stares.
I do however believe that in order to be successful, you have to know what you hope to accomplish. This seems a bit obvious to anyone involved in a business, but in the social media world, which started as a way to make personal contact sometimes the topic just doesn’t come up.
If you are a business that hopes to use social media to reach your target consumers or raise your profile or promote your product then you want to ask these questions. You want to know how to accomplish your goals. But you also want to follow social media netiquette, which requires that you inject some of personality into your Tweets.
Once you’ve defined your strategy, you can begin to build your following. Here are 4 ways to get your started.
1. Try to tweet a few different times per day. Because your followers are on the web at different times and in different time zones, spreading out your tweets ensures you are seen by a wide variety of your followers.
2. Use Twittersearch. By entering key words into Twitter search, like “green marketing” or “green business” you can follow the conversation, retweet interesting comments and find new people to follow. ( Also check out my post on Top 10 in Green You Should Follow on Twitter.)
3. Use @reply…often. Many of my business clients complain that they read through their followers’ tweets and find them a series of one-liners on what they had for dinner and the weather. This can, of course be frustrating if you are trying to establish a reputation as a green business. By using Twittersearch to seek out tweets specifically about green business, you can find comments to which you want to respond. Even if you’re not following the person who wrote the tweet, it’s OK to retweet or respond. It’s more than OK; it’s smart.
4. Spread the word. Your Twitter stream can be sent to your Facebook account, to your Linkedin profile and other social media sites. Yes, you still need to use some different tools to keep up with your various social media sites, but by adding your Twitter stream to those that you can, you can reduce the amount of time it takes to do that.
Those are just a few suggestions to get you started. Developing a strong social media strategy and implementing it takes time, but can be surprisingly easy once you’ve spent the time up front to plan it out!
Follow me on Twitter @mcmilker
Photo Credit: coreforce at Flickr Under Creative Commons License
Thanks for sharing this post. Very interesting.. I would just like to say that in my opinion, we build our wealth through building personal relationship. After all, no man is an island. So we should get the most out of twitter and other social network sites..
Great post, Maryann. I started tweeting exclusively about green power and green transportation about 6 months ago. A few comments.
1) searching on twitter was the right way to start but pretty tough because many people are not consistent between their profile and their tweets. One says green but the other talks about movies, travel or their business. So lesson #1 for me was to be consistent between who I say I am and what I tweet about.
2) I use google reader to follow the blogs and websites of the green folks and publications I follow on twitter. Plus I have developed a list of dozens of green sites to follow with google reader.
3) I agree with your comment to tweet several times a day so followers see your tweets and @reply or RT others to show interest and common ground. I don’t do that enough.
4) feeding through feeds to facebook, linkedin and other places is also a great idea. At first, my facebook friends and family questioned why my updates were all about green power and transportation. Now, they EXPECT green updates from me.