How to Win Friends and Influence People
1 ) YOUR AUDIENCE
Decide who your audience is, friends, industry geeks, lowest common denominators ; ) and speak to THEM. If you mix your audience/messages you’ll risk losing followers fast.
2 ) WHO ARE YOU?
No one will want to follow you unless you have a home page that reflects who you are.
To kick start your page, you need to consider the follow:
- Upload an avatar ASAP! Something interesting would be nice, but nothing beats an actual picture of yourself. Followers will connect better, if they can put a face to who they are following.
- Use a background that identifies ‘you’ as an individual. Something that encompasses who you are in a glance. A picture says a thousand words, and since you are only allowed to use 140 characters, I’d suggest using a background image as leverage. Use text to add additional information, such as website links and other useful visual aids.
- Write a few disposable tweets, so when visitors come to your page they will know what you are about.
3a ) MAKING FRIENDS: Finding something in common
To build up a follower-base, YOU have to make the 1st move, so go to www.search.twitter.com enter a key word like ‘cars’ or something you are interested about. There you will see what everyone is talking about. The #Trending words etc.
- Browse the people you think you might connect with and follow them in the hope they follow you back.
- Here’s the trick: Follow these people for a few weeks, and if they start to follow you great!
- You can then decided to either keep following them or not down the road. But if people who haven’t started to follow you fill your page with junk, cut those sukkaz loose asap!
- A good way to find following information out is via http://dossy.org/twitter/karma/ – the site looks a little unpolished, but I hear good things about it, and I use it.
3b ) TO RETWEET OR NOT TO RETWEET!?
There are two ways to retweet an interesting post from someone else.
- If you click the retweet button, you will directly pass that persons message on to the people that follow you, their avatar will be in place as if they tweeted from their own acc. not you (although it will say in small text ‘retweeted by you’) This a great way of introducing someone you follow to your peers.
- The other way to retweet (RT) is to copy and paste their post into your text box with the prefix RT ["Your own quick comment" RT @TheirUsername "their comment"]. – This way, your followers see you as the poster. You should always give the OP (original poster) credit – for example [RT @stevenbrunton "I like turtles"]
3c ) #FOLLOWFRIDAY (#FF)
Friday it’s about promoting an interesting Twitter user and helping them get followers.
- “#FF” on Twitter means “Follow Friday” – where you recommend that people follow someone, and hopefully in turn they, and others, will return the favour. This can look quite messy on your twitter feed, usually clogging up someones page with numerous post like this would be enough to cause to unfollow, but on Fridays, I think it is sort of expected.
- Don’t worry about sending #FF love to the same person each week. This is sometimes a good way to create a stronger relationship with them.
- Try and #FF people that you follow/follow you, especially people that might return the favour.
- I do a #FF with as many people as I can squeeze in to the 140 chars.
It’s always best best to #FF interesting people, but if you want to be a stone cold marketeer take this into consideration:
- How many people follow them ? The more the merrier.
- How short is their name? The shorter the name, the more names you can fit into a single #FF tweet ; )
4 ) LISTS
These are just labeled filters. You can make a list like ‘Special Guests’ or whatever, and your list (not you) will follow all the people you would like to highlight within that ‘subject’.
- You don’t NEED to be personally following these people, you can just add them to your LIST and track them from there.
- Other people can join your list, without having to follow you, just as you can follow someone else’s list that potentially follows 100′s of tweeps, without damaging your own personal follow count.
5 ) YOU HAVE MAIL
- To the right of your page you should see @YourUserName – This is where public posts mentioning your name are filtered and collected. Sometimes they are messages directly to you, but for all to see, unlike direct (PRIVATE) messages.
- Direct Messages are just like internal twitter email, which can only be sent to people who follow you. If you follow them but they don’t follow you, you can’t send a msg. But on the other hand if they follow you but you don’t follow them, you are able to send them a msg.
6 ) TRENDING
These are key words that people look out for. You highlight them with “#” before the #word. they can be found using www.search.twitter.com
7 ) TWITLONGER
If you find 140 chars isn’t long enough to express yourself, try www.twitlonger.com – allow it to connect to your twt acc.
8 ) TWITPIC
If you want to share photos go to www.twitpic.com – again, allow it to access your twt acc.
9 ) SHORT URL’s
Try using www.bit.ly to shorten your URL’s, it saves you editing time and character space.
10 ) DID I SAY SOMETHING WRONG?
Wonder who has stopped following you? Were they important? Sigh up to www.useqwitter.com to find out who you’ve lost.
11 ) THANKS FOR FOLLOWING!
Remember to thank people who follow you.
12 ) SELF PROMOTION:
Always looks for avenues to attract followers. Attach your twitter handle to the end of emails, youtub3 posts. Anywhere you can! ..and f you like, you can follow me HERE : )
13 ) Fin.
Have fun! The more you put into twitter, the more you’ll get out of it!
http://www.hdslrbootcamp.com/giveaway.php
