Out of all the major social media platforms, the one people have the most trouble seeing the value in is Twitter. As an internet marketing speaker and trainer, I run into many small (and large) business owners who have a Twitter account, tweet on a regular basis and have even built up a fairly large following. However, while large numbers of followers and retweets might be a real ego boost, there should be more to a successful Twitter campaign than that!
The real question is not how many followers you have, but whether or not you are getting any real results in terms of new clients or more business.
I’d like to share a Findability Makeover I did with popular speaker and executive speech coach Patricia Fripp. Patricia grew her Twitter following to well over 3,000 in one short year. Pretty impressive, right? She tweeted regularly, used her keywords appropriately, and yet, to her knowledge she had never received so much as one bit of business from Twitter.
What was Patricia Fripp missing in her Twitter approach?
- Know your end game or overall objective. Patricia launched enthusiastically into social media without first understanding her overall objective. After a bit of discussion, we clarified her objective: Getting clients from Twitter by driving more traffic to her website, and giving these potential clients incentives via articles and giveaways.
- Set up analytics. This was a vital ingredient for Patricia. Without it, she was, shall we say, tweeting in the dark. Installing Google Analytics (a free program) allows Patricia to track how many visitors to her website come from Twitter, how long they stay on the site, how many pages they read and whether or not they are new, unique visitors to the site. And it can track conversions as well.
- Test your tweets. My advice was to schedule a month’s worth of tweets at a time, using a program such as Hootsuite or Ping.fm. These tweets used various different calls to action, keywords and links, each with its own tracking code. Using a program like Google Analytics, it becomes quite simple to see which type of wording, which calls to action, and which keywords are actually meeting her objective – that of bringing her Twitter followers onto her site.
Initially, this is time consuming… it does take more time than the no-plan-at-all approach, but once you find what works for your particular business, the rest is pretty simple. If you are already tweeting anyway, why not do it effectively?
To read the full, step-by-step details of this Findability Makeover, check out Chapter 8 of Thumbonomics, the Essential Business Roadmap for Social Media & Mobile Marketing. Top secret tip: “Like” my Facebook page to receive a free audio download of Thumbonomics. https://www.facebook.com/MarketingSpeaker
Warm Regards,
Heather Lutze
Author, Internet Marketing Speaker, Trainer and Consultant
About Heather:
Heather is the acclaimed speaker, trainer, and consultant who literally wrote the book on search engine marketing. Two books, in fact—The Findability Formula: The Easy, Non-Technical Approach to Search Engine Marketing and Thumbonomics: The Essential Business Roadmap for Social Media & Mobile Marketing. Her writing and in-demand keynotes are delivered with the same witty, “no-geek-speak” style that has managed to demystify internet marketing for countless business owners. Breaking free of corporate “cubicle” jobs over ten years ago with a dream of entrepreneurship and a computer in the basement, Heather built her business, The Findability Group, into a multimillion dollar company. Today she leads a dedicated and slightly obsessed team of search marketing pros—their mission—to connect clients with their perfect customers online.