Tweet Week: Avoiding the Empty Nest Syndrome
Welcome to Tweet Week, day five. Today, we’ll look at the empty nest syndrome, and how it can be avoided.
You Have a Twitter Account, So Now What?
Everyone told you you just have to be on Twitter. So, you signed up. You followed your friends. Now what?
Now you have the empty nest syndrome, which is that feeling you get when you first sign up for Twitter and you have few, if any, followers. Are you just tweeting to yourself? If the only people following you are your friends, is that worthwhile since you probably have regular contact with them outside Twitter anyway? What’s the point?
The point is to make some new friends. In other words, you need to socialize. That’s what social networking is all about, right?
How do you do that?
With Twitter search!
What used to be hidden away and/or offered only to a select few is now right there in your sidebar. Just enter your keywords, and you can see who is talking about those topics. Read their tweets, check out their profiles and read their other tweets, and determine if that is someone you’d like to know. If so, go ahead and follow them. If not, check out the next person.
Once you’ve found a few people, if you want to take it to the next level, you can check out their followers. If they often talk about the topics you selected, odds are that their followers are interested in those topics as well. So, if you interested in those topics, and their followers are interested in those topics, it’s a reasonable bet that those followers might be interested in you as well, especially if you plan on talking about that topic a lot. Thus, you follow those followers.
With targeting like that, you can expect that anywhere from one-third to two-thirds of those people will follow you back. If you want to take things further, you could follow the people that follow those people.
It really depends on to which extent you want to take this. To determine that, you really need to examine what your objective is on Twitter. Is it to meet new people? To make new friends? For marketing? To learn new things? A combination of any or all of those?
How you answer those questions will be an important part of how many followers you’ll want (or need) to have.
Once you get a sizable following (if that is necessary as part of your goals), you’ll also discover a snowball effect begin, where the more followers you get, the easier it is to get more followers. Many people use the tactic of following people with a large number of followers so that other people doing the same thing will follow them as well. Often, that will give you followers that aren’t targeted, and aren’t necessarily interested in your topics (since they are following based on the size of your following and not based on your niche). However, as mentioned earlier in the week, followers are free (currently–and hopefully that doesn’t change!) so it doesn’t cost you anything to have those followers. So, there’s some value there as odds are at least a small percentage of them will prove valuable to you (whether in friendship, learning, sales, etc.) and you didn’t have to do any additional work to get them!
So, once you’ve got followers, the next important step is keeping them! And, how you do that is a topic for another day of Tweet Week, so please stay tuned!
I just put up a big billboard with @hollydale on I90 … expensive, but rewarding!