How To Get The MostOut Of Your

Professional Twitter Account

3 Simple Rules

Honesty. Value. Engage.

Honesty

Honesty gets followers. Celebrities who are honest and vocal such as CM Punk get disproportionate numbers of follows.

Honesty gets a higher quality of follower.

Follower quality can be determined by:

• How interested they are in your service or product.

• How likely they are to engage with your campaign – by, for instance, retweeting your tweets.

• How many high quality followers they themselves have.

High quality: Personal accounts, real celebrities & artists, relevant businesses.

Low quality: “Team Followback”, low-status ‘celebrities’, less talented artists, bots, gimmick accounts.

Adding value comes in many ways. All of them mean people are more likely to follow you.

Use #ff, or “Follow Friday”, to give value to influential people who aren't following yet.

Retweet – people, not bots! Offer opinions on current events, industry

trends, link your own blog posts. Do link to other people's blog posts.

Value

Some Types Of Value• Funny/witty tweets.

Attract: taste-makers, funny tweeps, members of the public who may or may not be interested in your brand.

For: building a list of followers, b2c businesses with products or services that have a wide appeal but are difficult to write about, cult/viral status.

• Platitudes.

Attract: social media types, bots, authors, bloggers, freelance workers, consultants, human resource managers.

For: building a list of power-user followers, getting easy exposure & retweets.

• Industry commentary, opinion, statistics, etc. – information.

Attract: business clients, extremely interested customers.

For: High click-through rate, conversions, building credibility.

Engaged Value

• Generally, by engaging with people in social media, you are also offering value.

• More followers and retweets = more social currency. Giving someone social currency is an offer of value, and many on twitter will repay that value by engaging with you.

• Engaging with people is much easier in general if you have something cool to show them.

Engage

Join in conversations. Answer questions. Ideally relevant to your field! Protip: You can find questions by using

hashtags such as #question, #FAQ and #help to search Twitter.

Alternatively, use a site like Quora and link it to your Twitter profile.

‘Mention’ people similar to you, but not in your exact niche, using the ‘@’ sign.

Example:

@StarchedShirts: The new range from @FancyCufflinks is cool! Check it out! http://www.fancycufflinks.com/

@FancyCufflinks: Thanks! RT @StarchedShirts: The new range from @FancyCufflinks is cool! Check it out! http://www.fancycufflinks.com/

Twitter Maths*

*Don't worry, this is simple enough that even I can understand it!

5-1

The typically suggested ratio of self-promoting tweets to “other” is 5-1. What does this mean?

If you write a blog post, and link it on Twitter, tell people about it. Then ask them what they're up to,

or find out yourself.

You should be able to find a conversation worth joining, a website worth sharing, even a success

that you've had recently.

Once you've made 5 tweets like this, consider posting about another blog post you've made, or a

cool product you sell!

BUT

From my own experience, you can take this down to 3-1 without any significant damage, especially if

the stuff you're promoting is compelling!

Daily Tweets

Statistically, the best days to tweet are the Two W's – Weekends & Wednesdays.

The best times to tweet are at noon and at 6 pm.

These will get you the best click-through rate.

A simple and successful minimum tweeting schedule:

Make 5 posts a day. Center them around noon and 6pm, as on the previous slide.

Follow 2 new people every day.

Join in with 2 conversations a day.

Answer 1 question every day. Find them using the hashtags, as explained earlier – being helpful guarantees interested Tweeps!

The Twitter Checklist

Make between 1 and 3 tweets per hour – no more than that!

If you can keep up that schedule, you're doing well.

Use Hootsuite to plan out your tweets in advance.

Hootsuite ain't perfect though.

See that third simple rule from earlier, “Engage”?

Yeah, Hootsuite can't do that for you, sadly.

When the day comes that it can, I for one will welcome our new robot overlords.

Until then, you'll still need to be around to field tricky questions and join in conversations.

Summary

Write at least 5 tweets a day offering an honest, valuable opinion.

Aim for noon and 6 pm. Write at most 3 tweets an hour. For every 5 tweets offering value, write 1 tweet

of pure self-promotion. Make that 3 tweets if you have cool stuff! As well as scheduling these with Hootsuite, you

must engage with your clients and customers. Join at least 2 conversations a day, one of

which should answer a question.

Honesty

Value

Engage

Credits

You can follow my non-professional, personal Twitter account at @JimmyMacGregor.

My personal blog is at http://learningtogetolder.wordpress.com.

Email me at Ouroborus.Jimmy@gmail.com.Special thanks to:

Social Media Revolver – http://www.socialmediarevolver.com, Follow @KrisOlin.

Kissmetrics - http://www.kissmetrics.com.

Image by Cuito Canavale under a Creative Commons licence.

Strategy Internet Marketing – http://www.strategyinternetmarketing.co.uk/.