I was asked to speak at SMX Toronto on the topic: Building Buzz On Twitter: Getting Followed & Retweeted.
What follows below is the process that I use with my clients. This is an outline of what I follow for the clients that my team Ghost Tweets on behalf of:
The first step is to Define Your Objectives! This is the key part of my process. We have generally been able to break an objective into one of these 3 categories:
- Sales
- Brand Awareness
- Support
It doesn’t matter which of the 3 categories you fall into, the process is pretty much the same, however you response times may vary for sales and support.
The next step is to Determine Your Demographic Targets. Who is your target audience, is your audience active on Twitter, can you build your audience on Twitter? There are many tools out there that will help you find some of the answers to these questions. But for me, I utilize Sysomos to break a lot of these details down.
Looking at the basic image below, you can see that for the keyword I typed here, there is already a HUGE audience focused on my keyword. Most of them are male, and predominantly in the USA and the there is a TON of engagement.
So we have determined our audience profile and our objectives. Now we need to look into our policies. Does the company allow for what we are about to undertake?
We need to understand what the companies policies are and what we can and cannot talk about, or even how we can talk about it. If the company doesn’t have a social media policy, this is where we need to start. We need to work with the organization to ensure that they have a solid policy and that everyone understands it and that it is flexible enough to allow for what we are going to start doing.
We generally break it down into two type of policies:
Employee policies, this will define what employees can or cannot do when it comes to social media. How they represent them selves, when they can engage, etc…
Posting policies: These generally refer to how we as a third party can post on the companies behalf. What we can and cannot say, where we communicate, frequency and how we deal with various situations.
Once we have all of that out of the way, we start deciding on what we are going to get involved in, we do this by developing our topics and keywords. This will give us a good starting point for finding where to engage, and who to engage with. We need to determine the topics of interest, find similar topics already being mentioned on Twitter and create a list of keywords regarding those topics. We then take a look at our keywords and analyze them for relevance!!!
Now is where the fun comes in! Competitive Analysis… Let’s start by checking out the competition. If you don’t already know who your competitors are, then quit then start researching. You should already have an existing list of competitors! However, when people are discussing your topic, and referencing other people as experts on Twitter. They are now your competition too! Influencers can be competitors! They are competing for your audiences attention! But that’s okay. You can use that to your advantage. You can engage with the competitors and influencers to be a part of their conversations as well, as long as it’s relevant. Then their audience will also see you and your level of engagement.
There are a ton of ways to find your competitors on twitter, but the easiest way (usually) is to just go to their websites or blogs and see if they have their twitter links on the site. If not, just go back into Twitter and check the keywords and their names, usually this will pick them up.
Once you have found them, start to look at who they follow and who follows them. Analyze those accounts for yourself. You can review them to see how engaged they are… Or you can use tools such as Sysomos to see their followers and the gain insights that way, such as demographics, authority levels, etc…
Although I have access to tools such as Sysomos and Radian6 and others, I still go back to old school Microsoft Excel. I like to analyze my own data. One of the key things I do is enter the competitors Twitter ID into Sysomos so that I can export all of their followers to Excel. Once I have them in there, I use VLookups to search if any of my chosen keywords are in their user name, description, or links. Then the list of people who have those keywords in their data get sorted based on their Sysomos based authority level. This is generally where I start when I look to engage with people.
Not only to I search Twitter to find Influencers, but now I need to really start looking outside of twitter. There may be influencers who are not as loud on Twitter, but have a huge following on their blogs. They can be invaluable to you growing your following. You can reach out to them, see what type of opportunities are there for you to guest blog, or comment on their blog, or maybe even sponsor their blog if necessary.
Your searching for bloggers is very similar to your Twitter search. You already have your keywords, you can use tools such as Scrapebox to speed this up! I use Scrapebox for almost everything I can! It is such a great tool for automating information finding and retrieval. It really is. It may have started as a black hat tool, but it doesn’t have to be used that way.
So people often come to me and ask how I define Twitter influencers. I usually go back to the paper on “Identifying ‘Influencers’ on Twitter” by Eytan Bakshy, Jake Hofman, Winter Mason, and Duncan Watts.
Great paper (still), basically they define it as such:
- A user’s influence on Twitter is the extent to which that user can cause diffusion a posted URL, as measured by reposts propagated through follower edges in Twitter’s directed social graph.
- The best predictors of future total influence are follower count and past local influence, where local influence refers to the average number of reposts by that user’s immediate followers, and total influence refers to average total cascade size.
- The content features of individual posts do not have identifiable predictive value.
- Barring a high per-influencer acquisition cost, the most cost-effective strategy for buying influence is to target users of average influence.
Actions, Engagements, Evangelism
So you’ve started to engage and follow people. Next step is to find their interests, can you genuinely provide engaging content regularly to your audience? Don’t start something and then not continue it. People have short attention spans! (Me too!) Keep them engaged or they will find someone who can. Retweet relevant tweets, people are ego driven, they want people to acknowledge them! Retweeting is a great way to do just that! If you are targeting the bloggers that you have found, post their links, acknowledge them with @ mentions and in general @reply when you have value to add to their conversation!
Overall the theme is to ay attention, listen and engage. Use lists/organize your audience and auto organize (IFTTT to add to lists)!
Find great content! Buffer great content! Retweet great content!
When it comes to evangelism, start by teaching the rest of your organization these same methods, Don’t forget that the people in your organization are your audience too! Engage them as you would the rest of your audience!
People leave Twitter because of lack of engagement
One of the benefits of evangelism within your organization, especially if you are a large organization… The power of the retweet and ability to affect trending topics.
So now to the tools themselves
If This Then That
I LOVE ifttt.com. It’s uses are endless. I use it to track people who mention me, follow me, mention my keywords, all sorts of things. Think about the one where someone tweets: “Thinking about buying a snowboard”, well the term buying and snowboard just triggered something in a company profile to add that to CRM to have a sales guy follow up on. Now I have someone who is interested in purchasing a snowboard, and I can reach them in a very personal way. Hey @snowboarder, I hear you may be interested. Here is a comparison of some… Can I help?
Instapaper
So because we manage so many account for companies as well as individuals, we force the use of Instapaper. We use ifttt.com to automatically take all tweets that we post under that given account and send the page to Instapaper. We then work with the individuals whom we post for to ensure that they are reading the articles and that they are inline with what they would actually post about or read themselves. We also do this so that when they meet a follower in real life, they don’t sounds as if someone is Ghost Tweeting for them.
FollowerWonk
Followerwonk is a quick way to do an analysis of you versus them… I use it to do comparisons of competitors.
GoFish
GoFish is an awesome research! Type in your keyword and BOOM a list of people who are/have been talking about that topic! Very cool for quickly building a twitter list!
LinkedIn Signal
LinkedIn Signal is another great hidden gem… You can use this again to type in a keyword and see people who have that keyword in their profile.
Scrapebox
Scrapebox is THE tool for anyone in digital marketing… The amount of data, sites, site related information I can get from this tool in a very quick manner is just awesome! If no other tools are purchased, purchase this, go the forums and and research how people use it. But beware! With great power comes great responsibility! Do not spam with this, do not autopost with this… Unless you have been in this business a while and doing things for a while the ramifications of what this tool can and will do are significant!
Google Trends
Looking for something to post, look at what was popular… Talk about it, argue about it, post about it, and most importantly tweet about it. 
Find the articles that are popular and track them.
Google Adwords Keyword Tool
Simple. If you are not familiar with Google’s Keyword Tool… Well, that’s just unfortunate. This will give you volume around your keywords, as well as suggest other potential keywords to use too! You can also look at http://ubersuggest.org/ for keyword generation.
Twitter Advanced Search
Again, like the other tools, great for finding people based on Keywords! Learn to use Twitter Advanced Search!
Bufferapp.com
This is the key to success for maintaining engagement. As you come along a post that your audience will be interested in, throw it into your buffer! You not only need to keep your buffer full, but you need to review it and play with it! Test your posting times, test the frequency of posts, review all of this data. Test it, and review it on a regular basis! See how many click throughs you get, retweets, etc…
(blurred on purpose)
Tweetdeck is my tool of choice. I use this to engage with my own audience, as well as other peoples/companies accounts. I like it because I can monitor certain lists, people, mentions, etc in a very easy way!
Sysomos
From a Twitter perspective, I use this to review profiles for engagement levels, export competitor followers to excel (gold) and gain insights to a Twitter users profile and authority levels. I also slip into Sysomos to gain insights into the Share of Voice that we have. There are a whole whack of other ways that I use Sysomos, but this is a twitter chat, so I will save those for now.
People who always have great content (in no order)
Dr. Michael Wu @mich8elwu
Alan K’necht @aknecht
Jeremiah Owyang @jowyang
Neal Schaffer @NealSchaffer
Maggie Fox @maggiefox
Rhea Drysdale @Rhea
Aaron Friedman @AaronFriedman
MyCool King @iPullRank
Cher Jones @itscherjones
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