With the popularity of our posts about how to optimise your pages to gain twitter followers (found here) I have been requested to post further tips to enhance your twitter experience. This post will be a general overview of my experience with twitter and what I have learned from using it.

I signed up to twitter 3 years ago and like everybody (maybe not celebrities) when they start Twitter, I found it a struggle to gain followers. I had basically signed up to it to see what it was all about. I didn’t really understand the potential it had, and like most people I would tweet randomly and hope that people would find my musings interesting and follow me. It wasn’t surprising that I didn’t get many followers and if I did they weren’t relevant to what I wanted, I hadn’t found my purpose or voice….

At the time I was primarily a web and graphic designer and I was starting to get requests to design social media pages for businesses and naturally my interest in social media marketing took off. (I now work as a professional social media manager and obviously run this blog)

Twitter for me, now had a purpose, it could be used as a platform to gain and share knowledge, to market myself and engage with other social media enthusiasts. So following this I set up my own twitter page again.

My original aim was to gain as many RELEVANT followers as I could in one month.. The first thing I decided to do was follow people in the same industry as myself who have an abundance of followers and see what they were doing that made their pages so successful.

My first realisation was at how often they tweeted. Power users tend to tweet and re-tweet up-to-date content regularly, engage with a high percentage of their new followers (My guess was that they didn’t engage with everybody as not every person who adds you would be relevant to yourself) and inject sparks of their personality into their tweets.

Following these observations I started to implement these behaviours into my own tweets and subsequently saw the amount of followers I had double in the space of one month. This correlation is no accident, twitter is a platform that you have to work at to gain the results you want, you have to post smart and often, engage with users and re-tweet relevant content to capture your audiences attention and gain that all important follow.

So basically in a nutshell in order for twitter to work for you to gain relevant followers you should do the following:

1. Have a purpose and a voice.

2. Think about your audience and what they what knowledge they would like to gain.

3. Write and post your own content (A blog is a great way to do this)

4. Engage with people (It is a social platform after all)

5. Don’t use it to only promote yourself (80% content 20% promotion is the tested and proven amount)

6. Be yourself.

If you follow these steps you will see that your twitter following will increase, with relevant followers, giving you more business opportunities, a wider circle of people in your industry to engage with and an opportunity to gain increased knowledge on your industry through research for content to share and other peoples shared content.

What have your experiences been with twitter? Do you have any other tips for success? Let me know in the comment box!

The socialjamm team.
www.socialjamm.com
www.twitter.com/socialjamm

With over 175 million twitter users it can be hard getting people to follow you,half of the battle if getting people to your page, the other half is keeping them interested and getting them to follow you. A great way to gain instant interest (and hopefully a follow) from viewer of your page is to design and implement a custom twitter background.

A custom twitter background allows you to:

1. Stand out from the crowd:

A custom Twitter design separates you from every other standard twitter background.

2. Strengthen your brand:

It can tie in with and strengthen your brand, as long as you use the same brand colours and logo. This means that viewers will find it instantly recognisable with your other branded marketing materials.

3. Add more contact information:

You can take advantage of the extra space available to you to include contact information which you couldn’t fit into the 160 characters twitter limits you to in your bio. (see this post to optimise your bio http://socialjamm.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/how-to-optimise-your-twitter-bio-to.html)

4.Market Social Media and Blogs:

You can also use the space to market your other social media channels such as linkedin / Facebook / Youtube / Pinterest or your Blog if you have one, driving more traffic to those sites too.

5.Promote a Special offer:

The space can also be used to promote a specific offer that you are offering, a good call to action can entice people to buy your products or visit certain websites etc

6.Show off Your Personality:

Using images is one of the best ways to convey your personality, and this is an opportunity to let your personality to shine through.

The following 2 profiles have been designed by myself for my own profile @tim_eem and @socialjamm:

We will show you how to design a custom twitter brackground in our next post. So take these reasons and brainstorm what you would like to include on yours!

The socialjamm team.
http://www.socialjamm.com/
www.twitter.com/socialjamm