One of the things I've been looking at lately is how to build an engaged Twitter following. Anyone can build a following through the dreaded mass-follow technique but it will not be very engaged or valuable in the long run. There are several tools and services out there that promise to dramatically grow your Twitter following this way and I recommend not using any of them because 4,000 unengaged followers is worse than 400 engaged followers. Or 40, really.
But to gain this type of engagement you need to be intentional about what you are doing on Twitter. It's pretty easy to get into some bad habits and end up with a tweet stream that even people you know will find boring (and I'm speaking from personal experience here). So I thought I would look at two successful people on Twitter I have followed for years to uncover their process. Each of these gentlemen have build very large and engaged Twitter presences through intentional action.
My first case study is Chris Brogan, the noted social marketing thought leader. He seems to spend a lot of time on Twitter but is very precise about how he approaches what he does on the service. I followed his tweets for approximately 24 hours to get an idea of the type of content on his tweet stream and put these into 4 buckets: Conversational, Status Updates, Promotional and Retweets/Shared Links. As you can see from the chart, Chris spends most of his time in direct conversation with his followers (78%). This is no easy task since at the time of this post he has over 126,000 followers of which he follows an astounding 90%. He tends to use his status updates for announcements, questions and statements, not what he had for lunch. Lastly, he is only overtly self-promotional 5% of the time. Of course, this is just a slice of time and these numbers could be slightly different tomorrow but I don't think the overall direction would be much different if I followed him for several more days.
The second person I looked at is Rick Bakas who works at St. Supéry winery in Napa. I looked at his personal Twitter account for this analysis which he built to over 40,000 strong before he got into the wine business. As you can see in the chart, Rick uses Twitter in a slightly different way. Over 50% of his tweets are conversational with retweets and shared links being used more than Chris does. This is mostly due to the volume of followers and I'm sure Rick would increase his conversational activities if his following was as large as Mr. Brogan deals with. Interestingly, Rick uses promotional tweets almost three times that of Chris but is still close to the 10% that most of us recommend as a target.
So I've learned that the best way to build a significant and engaged Twitter following is to be mostly conversational and share interesting links either directly from the source of through retweeting. As a guide, I would shoot for over 50% of your tweets to be conversational with 20% used for sharing links or retweeting, another 20% for asking questions and general status updates and no more than 10% being promotional (this includes announcing new blog posts).
If you are just starting out, you'll want to begin by following people with a shared interest. There are resources like Twitter lists and wefollow.com where you can find people to follow tagged by interest. To find conversations, use Twitter Search and drill into the advanced search in order to find relevant conversations. You can also find Twitter Search built into popular applications like TweetDeck. I think a great place to start is by answering questions or responding to threads based on relevant topics.
Whatever your plan, have one and devote as much time as you can to it even if it's just 30 minutes a day. You will find Twitter a lot more engaging and will most likely grow your followers in the process. I'm going to start being intentional with my Twitter accounts and will report back what happens along with some other tips for getting the most out of this service.
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