I find myself often helping to share my succesful and unsucessful twitter insights with other startup founders at 1871, and thought I would write a post for the entire community to be a bit more efficient. My startup can credit a great deal of our recent success to relationships and traffic generated through the twitter platform, and I find it valuable for both b2b and b2c products. The most important reason that this platform is so valuable, in my experience as a bootstrapping entrepreneur, is the crazy value that you can get for free.
To me, twitter is primarily about relationships, and this can be applied in many directions. I always encourage people of small startups to manage their own account (instead of outsourcing to a media firm or intern) because each new follower has potential to be a client. That being said, this platform takes a ton of time and commitment to be done correctly, and is not for everyone. It is not something that you sit down for a weekend and just get it up and running - you need to incorporate it into your daily activities, even if only for a few minutes each day.
Twitter is also about connecting with influencers on other platforms and traditional media, because almost anyone that runs a popular blog or communications group spends time on twitter. I first connected with a blogger on twitter about being a “green father”, and that blogger featured our iPad app on TreeHugger. This led to 20,000 app downloads in one week, along with follow up posts by CNET and Lifehacker. The impressive aspect about this twitter relationship and the influencer that wrote a single blog post was that it blew away the impact that paid search, press releases through a local marketing company, and Facebook advertising had on my downloads.
To begin using Twitter, I find it helpful to start following several sources of news that are relevant to your startup. Twitter can be used as a robust, customized news source - aggregating recent news trends in your own relevant world. I love reading the paper in the morning, but twitter is like getting a newspaper delivered to me with only articles I might be interested in reading.
I remember reading about the tsunami in Japan on Twitter, and wondering why it wasn’t being covered by television or radio news. I even turned on NPR and thought it must be a fake rumor if it wasn’t being covered. Of course, I eventually realized that news just travels faster on twitter than traditional media, and the tsunami obiously did happen.
For a small business, the link sharing on twitter is so important. You want to avoid only talking about yourself and your product and add content that is important to people that might want to use your product. For me, that is easy as I am personally passionate about startups and love to share environmental content. I incorporate it into my daily life, and the ability to tweet articles and content that I find interesting from my iPhone and iPad make it very easy.
I don’t spend an hour a day on twitter, instead, when I come across something interesting, I spend five seconds tweeting it. Occasionally, amidst all of your tweets and relevant posts, you can get away with a self promotion of a product or special, and hope that others retweet or an influencer features it. Twitter advertising recently had $100 in free ads for Small Business Saturday (which you can still do!) and I learned a ton through that money. Over several weeks, I posted about 15 tweets to get people down download our new app, a Personal Energy Meter. I changed the language slightly in each tweet, and studies the click through rate of each post. What I found is probably common sense to any large expensive marketing agency, but was invaluable to me. As you can see from the image, just adding asterisks to either side of *free* led to a 4x clickthrough rate of my post!
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Finally, a few tools to help you grow twitter. I do not recommend automated services for growing twitter lists. I think they will grow your followers (which is important) but will not grow relationships, which is more important. Instead, don’t be shy in adding followers. It is not like connecting with someone on Facebook or LinkedIn - you can follow anyone and it isn’t a big deal. In fact, there is an unspoken rule on twitter that it is polite to follow people back. The more people you follow, the more that are likely to follow you back.
In fact, I use ManageFlitter after I reach a certain number of followers to “unfollow” those that do not follow me back. This is important because you can only follow 2001 accounts, until you get 1821 followers. Then your limit is slightly increased each time a new follower joins, so I don’t like to waste my time following someone that is not interested in what I have to say as well, unless it is a really important source of information. You can also filter and “unfollow” people that don’t have a picture, don’t post frequently, or other factors that you might want to filter on this free service.
Hootsuite is another incredibly valuable free platform at programming tweets if you are going to be out of town, or just want to load a bunch of posts over a week at one specific time. However, be careful to keep an eye on world events, as you don’t want to be accidentally posting something irrelevant during a national tragedy.
Last but not least is creating traceable links to be used on twitter, and consistently throughout your social media span (I use bit.ly). This helps you know who is using your links, and where they are being applied. This is better than analytics in some ways, as it helps you to see when and if your tweets go viral (term used loosely) and have a greater implication than what you expect. One thing that I was surprised to learn with analytics and traceable links - a good post on BuiltInChicago is one of the greatest sources of traffic that I have found.
Feel free to follow @verdel3c, and send me a Direct Message (DM ) if you’d like me to retweet (RT) something important to you. I promise to follow you back. To give credit where credit is due, @jennsaround taught me everything that I have learned about twitter and social media and is a great resource for startups.
