Hello, and thank you for stopping back. Today I'm going to go into details on what we should be looking for on Twitter in order to grow our followers and our businesses, for they are both essential ingredients to a happy life. Well, maybe not, but we will pretend for the moment they are and see where it takes us.
Let's say I send out a tweet for someone's watercolor that they just painted or perhaps one of my books. My tweet will go out to all my followers. Since I have lots of nice followers, a good percentage of them will retweet my tweet. In other words, they will send out my original tweet to all their followers. That first tweet of mine is like a snowball rolling down a hill gathering both momentum and mass as it goes.
Some of my tweets are retweeted hundreds of times. I've never actually taken the time to do the math but I would think it doesn’t take long before my original tweet has reached millions of people. And who knows? Maybe someone in all those tweets and retweets might fall in love with that watercolor or my book and buy it. It happens all the time... well, maybe I'm exaggerating... maybe it doesn’t happen all the time. But it happens.
That's the key to using Twitter to market yourself and your wares... retweets are like free advertising. Do for others and they will reciprocate. In that vein, remember to help them help you. Keep things simple for them... don't spend all your time retweeting other people's tweets and none of your own stuff. Sprinkle a few of your own into your timeline. People like to help those who help them but they aren’t going to spend all day searching for something to retweet.
Be nice. Make it easy for people to help you out, and they will. We'll go into that a little deeper as we progress through these pages, or at least I'll try. Sometimes I mean to do something and it slips my mind. What was I saying now? Oh, yes... be nice. Keep that in mind and we'll get along splendidly. If someone tweets one of my tweets I want to tweet theirs too but I'm not going to search all night long to find a proper one.
What do I mean by finding a proper tweet to retweet? I want to help that person grow their business whatever it may be. Maybe they're a singer and so I'll look for one of their tweets about their music. Don’t make it difficult for me. Don’t think that you are so magnanimous that all you are going to do on Twitter is tweet other people. That defeats the whole purpose and makes life harder than it has to be.
Tweet your own stuff periodically. And I don’t mean tweet a dozen tweets in a row about your merchandise and then follow it up with 80 tweets for other people. No one will be able to find your tweets unless they scroll way down your page. That is what I call making life difficult. Instead, intersperse your tweets with retweets for other people. Mix it up. Do us all a favor. Make your tweets easy to retweet.
Always end your scheduled retweeting session with one tweet of your own product. That way, when someone comes to your time line to pay you back for the generosity of you tweeting them, it makes it easy for them. No one wants to spend an hour looking for the one tweet that might pertain to your particular business. Me, if I come across someone like that, and I cannot find a suitable tweet of theirs to share with my followers, it simply doesn’t happen.
I know why people are like that. They tend to think: oh, if someone actually reads something I wrote, I just know they'll hate it. If someone looks at one of my pictures I just painted, they'll tell me how truly awful it is and bring me down. I don't need that. Well, I'll here to tell you that it's going to happen so get used to it.
I've talked to people who are embarrassed by what they do... writers with their name on the book cover so small that you need a magnifying glass to find it. They tell me things like: oh, I prefer to stay in the shadows and let my story speak for itself. I tell them: no you don’t. You are embarrassed to let anyone know that you wrote a book because they might not like it. And then they never speak to me again... but if I put a fire under them, that's okay.
Because guess what. Everyone is not going to like your stuff no matter who you are or what you do. Even the greatest artists in history had their detractors, people who put them down every chance they got. Most of the time it happens because those people are envious... they don’t have the stones to do what you're doing and they know it. So forget about it. Tweet your stuff and be proud of it. Slather your name all over everything you do.
At the same time, though, don’t go completely overboard and make it all about you. I've been on timelines where that is all there is... tweets about them. Do I retweet them? If they retweet me, I do, sure. But do I seek them out? No way. I want someone with a diversity of tweets that I can retweet.
Now, before you start to get the idea that I'm just another do-gooding moron out to make a quick buck for myself and my local grocer by writing a book about using Twitter as a marketing tool for whatever you happen to be peddling, let me give you a little background on myself...
(to be continued)
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