Question: I’ve been playing around with twitter for a while now and I’m finding it really hard to win over new fans. Can you please provide some solutions
Answer: In the online world, which is where my head has been buried for the past couple of years, there is a saying that we throw around –
“There is traffic, and then there is traffic!”
Meaning that there are ways and means of buying traffic and getting people to your website, but most of that traffic could be junk and spam coming from a third world country. That’s the “There is traffic” part of the statement.
Then there is primo, quality, highly targeted, A grade traffic which is the second part of the quote….and the there is traffic! The real A grade, hot list type stuff that will do whatever you ask them to because they came from a quality stream and supply of traffic.
Well, just like in the online world of buying traffic, the same principle holds true with Twitter.
You can have followers and then you can have followers.
The point I’m trying to make and I believe it’s a very important point is that the success of you’re “tribe” or community of people following you is not directly related to the score board on the top right of the page that shows you how many people are following you. When push comes to shove, that number really doesn’t mean a whole lot.
While many get caught up in the “game” and competitive side of Twitter, It’s the quality of those leads and how responsive they are when you try to reach out to them that really matters.
A lot of people might encourage people to buy add friend following tools like hummingbird, however while most of them don’t work anymore because Twitter have blocked them, I would strongly suggest staying away from these tools because they don’t always measure up to building a quality list of followers.
Remember, it’s all about quality, not quantity.
What I’ve learned and discovered through my own experience is that building your list of followers come down to a little bit of work and some toil.
But don’t worry, because if you build the right list and build it correctly, the value of one person on your list could be worth at least 50 or 100 on another persons list.
So the first point is that you really want to be going for quality when building your list. Always keep this in mind because if you’re focused on volume, you’ll have a really large group of followers that have no value whatsoever.
And don’t worry about the hard work part, it’s really not that hard and kinda becomes fun once you get into it.
Wake up tomorrow morning and commit yourself to spending 25min a day for the next month purely focused on finding and following people who you think are quality people who’d be interested in you and your band.
Look at who’s following similar types of bands like yours and start adding them to your list etc.
Don’t do this sporadically because you’ll get all excited in the first few days and then slowly drop the ball.
Commit yourself. Set a goal and see it through.
You could possibly add 30 people in a 25min period which would get you roughly about 900 people in one month.
But again, you must make this process habitual.
The other thing to watch out for is that you don’t want to come across as a spammer to Twitter. You must be careful not to add to many people if they aren’t following you back. If the scales tip to high, you might hit their radar as a spammer.
The two suggestions above are more focused on adding to your list, making your list quality driven and both involve being proactive in finding people yourself.
However my third suggestion, and this is really where Twitter gets really fun is to start considering a strategy around creating quality tweets that other people following you would re-tweet and share with their list.
The idea here is that people on their list will hopefully appreciate and enjoy your original tweets and want to share with their friends and then their friends will follow you.
This is a little trick I like doing –
Go do www.digg.com and find articles and videos people have already “dugg” a bunch of times, so you know the content is already popular. Take the link, give it a shorter URL, tag an interesting question onto the front of the tweet and slowly start to re-tweet the content out.
The real trick here is to always constantly ask yourself – “Will my followers appreciate this?”
The tweets don’t need to always be music related, they could be quotes, funny videos or whatever, so long as they seem good enough that others will share the love and re-tweet you.
This works like a charm and if you also get into a “habitual” habit of Tweeting out a few pieces of content each day, you’ll also start to see people finding and following you automatically, purely from the re-tweets you receive from sending the tweets out.
It’s really not that hard once you’ve set up a process. Also remember to drop some plugs for your current releases, blog posts etc into your twitter feed so it seems like there is a blend between “fun stuff” and “can you please buy my music stuff”
Get it?
Does that help?
If not, comment below and I’d be happy to clarify
There are really so many more suggestions, but I think these ones are foundational.
What are some of your list building suggestions?
Comments
