Business owners spend hours and money to increase their brand visibility using traditional campaigns.
You hear a lot of stories of customers finding businesses on Twitter. But you do not know how to have a meaningful conversation in 140 characters.
You are right. Twitter does not always work.
Mostly, due to the fact that it is not always used correctly.
One of the most common misuses of Twitter is direct sell. Neglecting to grow and engage with the audience is another example.
Some industries see Twitter results faster. Some take a little bit to “warm up”. Regardless of the industry, in all Twitter engagement campaigns the increase in brand recognition, traffic, and leads always follow engagement.
I ran and documented small experiments. Here are results of this experiment:
Hypothesis: 15 minutes of daily Twitter engagement can have a significant impact on brand metrics
I already spend 15+ minutes a day engaging on Twitter (favorite, retweet, respond to my users).
Inspired by the blog on Twitter conversation starters and the prior successful campaigns we ran for our clients, I created more structured and proactive approach to engagement.
I started with a list of questions for all of my new followers.
I set aside 15 minutes a day (7 minutes in the morning and 7 minutes in the evening) to do 2 simple things:
- Send a welcome question to all new followers.
- Engage with the people who respond to questions.
Using the Twitter growth method, I’ve strategically followed users I wanted to follow me.
When they followed me back, I sent them one of my pre-determined questions. I also frequently included more than one users in my welcome message.
@RivuuSocial @lamatayeh @thebigbigslurp Great to meet you! Do you regularly engage with your social media followers?
— Maria Dykstra (@TreDigital) October 8, 2015
Responses started to pour in.
I received a few snarky comments, something about robots and automated messages.
As expected, most people really enjoyed the conversation.
Since some of the questions/answers involved well-known names in social media, influencers started interacting with the posts.
@TreDigital @wevibynusib @LoueiAli @KevinWJiang Platform by @MichaelHyatt, #TheArtOfSocialMedia by @GuyKawasaki and Launch by @Mike_Stelzner
— Marina Barayeva (@MarinaBarayeva) October 7, 2015
Better yet, after just one week of running this experiments, results were amazing
Twitter growth was off the charts: Profile visits increased by 75%, mentions increased by 284%, I gained 1500 new followers.
Website traffic increased by over 85% in three major categories
I saw the growth of subscribers accelerating. More on accelerating subscriber growth to come next week.
Furthermore, I have received a number of requests to speak and lined up a number of meetings with prospect partners and clients.
Conclusion: Spending 15 minutes a day engaging with Twitter users results in a significant improvement across a number of brand metrics.
I invite you to run a similar experiment and report your results.
