I’ve been asked by many people how did I manage to get over 32,000 followers in a few short months. Do I use spam techniques? Did I find some magic bullets? Do I practice technological voodoo? Do I implement black-hat SEO tricks?
The short answer: No, I don’t spam. But I’m familiar with APIs of many social networks and with the newest tools and apps developed for those networks. And I use my own social marketing system to take a full advantage of those tools.
- Image via Wikipedia
If you want to know the technical aspect of the story, then subscribe to my Social Marketing Secrets, and I’ll gladly share my knowledge with you.
Yet, the answer to quick and stable growth of your followers lies not as much within the knowledge of technology or marketing. It’s actually hidden within you.
You see, it doesn’t matter how many followers you are able to accumulate. What matters is, how many of them actually read your tweets and updates.
You need to have your own voice, something that differentiate you from the crowd and that makes your followers to pay attention to your tweets in the ever-growing noise of main Twitter stream.
This brings us directly to the matter of leadership. In order to stand out, you should think like a leader and act like one. It doesn’t matter whether you have 50 followers or hundreds thousands of them.
People who follow you form your own micro-community, and you become a leader de facto of this community.
Just remember that the leadership is given to you on a “trial basis”, so to speak:
- if you don’t deliver according to expectations,
- if you won’t give your audience unique content,
- if your updates lack newsworthy spin,
- if there’s no reason to believe that you’ll provide controversial/unordinary experience that they can’t get elsewhere,
- if you throw at them viral junk,
they will un-follow you, and have every moral right to do so.
You might be asking: “What messages are you referring to as a viral junk?”
There are quite a few of them, served in many different flavors. One example would be messages about daily routines. IMHO, this kind of social communications don’t bring any value to the readers.
Let’s look at a few “chef-d’oeuvre” of this genre: “I just get up and I don’t want to go to work” or “I’m so tired and I’m going to bed” or (My Favorite!): “I need to go to the bathroom”.
Yes, I know that Twitter is meant to be a tool of personal communications. But what value do you really bring to your followers by informing them about your bathroom needs?
Of course, I don’t see anything wrong with reading a “so tired” tweet once in a while if a person really provides good value, and is just wishing goodnight to her/his followers this way. But the percentage of such “daily routine” messages should be rather low.
We live at the times of information over-load when you don’t have enough seconds in the day to digest even the most useful and interesting bytes and bits.
So, I don’t know about you, but I certainly don’t appreciate when my precious time is wasted in such a barbaric way. And such “social communicator” deserves to be un-followed quickly.
If you’re wondering why you have a very small following, assess your messages. Do you really provide value or you’re just shooting the breeze?
On the other hand, if you manage to transform yourself into a social leader, your following will grow exponentially. If your resources are of the highest quality, your followers will gladly share them with their own audience.
Why? Because your followers are in their turn leaders of their own micro-communities, and when they share unique information, they provide great value to such communities.
If your information is helpful, and enough followers shared it with their audiences, there is a possibility of the positive chain reaction otherwise called the “word of mouth advertising”. “Word of mouth” not only brings in a new wave of followers, it also includes the benefit of social proof. This is very powerful.
In my experience, rare marketing strategy can compete with a “word of mouth advertising” in regard to social proof.
Just give your followers as much value as you can. So much value, in fact, that they would think: “Wow, I would gladly pay for this information!” It’s your task, as a bona fide leader, to deliver unique content and unforgettable experiences to your micro-community.
That’s all you have to do. Then the law of reciprocity and the word of mouth will do the rest, sky-rocketing your business to the new heights.
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