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Bottom Line Management Snippets, Musings & Rants

The 7 Steps I Used to Get My First 1000 Twitter Followers

10/21/2015

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Let’s get real.  How many of us will grow our Twitter accounts to 300,000 in 90 days?  And if you did, would they be valuable prospects?  In late August, I decided to spend Q4 growing my online presence, primarily focusing on Twitter and LinkedIn.  In this post, I will share how I grew my Twitter account to 1000 followers.
 
So why should you or I care that I now have over 1000 followers?  Your number of followers is merely a vanity metric (a metric that makes you feel good but doesn’t actually directly translate into more business).  Twitter Engagement Rate (TER) is a directional metric (a metric that shows you people are starting to pay attention).  Your key performance indicators (KPIs) are measures that directly lead to business. I started with a vanity goal of reaching 1000 followers by the end of 2015 because you need followers to create engagement, and you need engagement to achieve KPIs.  Now that I have reached 1000 followers, I am starting to set KPIs.  My first KPI is to engage with 5 prospects from Twitter by year-end and convert one into a paying client.  As of this writing, I have my first prospect.
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These graphs show my growth in impressions (the number of times my Tweets were delivered to someone’s feed) and engagement rate.  An engagement is defined as the total number of times a user interacted with a Tweet including retweets, replies, follows, favorites and more. Your engagement rate is the number of impressions divided by the number of engagements.   Most articles I’ve read state the average engagement rate is .5-1% engagement rate.  But when calculating those averages the studies are usually analyzing large brands with hundreds of thousand followers. Since I doubt I will ever have 300,000 followers, I need to focus on a larger than average engagement rate.  My most recent 28-day average of 3% is a good start, but my goal is to move it up to 5% by year-end. 
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Here are the 7 key strategies I used to accomplish this growth.
  1. Create a persona for your ideal Twitter follower.   Simply stated a persona is a description of characteristics or a profile of the person who is most important to your business.  I am a business coach and consultant and my target clients are startups.  Therefore, I am looking for followers who are founders or co-founders of an early or mid-stage startup. I enjoy working with extremely motivated individuals who are always learning. Although much of my coaching is over the phone, my ideal client is still in the Chicagoland area.   These characteristics are key to which accounts I choose to follow.
  2. Find and follow at least 200 users per week.  There are way too many Twitter tools to describe them all but after evaluating a few I landed on Crowdfire.  The free version works very well for this task by using their feature called Copy Followers.  You select someone who you already follow on Twitter and Crowdfire creates a list of their most active followers.  You then choose which of their followers you want to follow. Did you follow that?!  In my case, I first identified Twitter users that are business coaches, startup incubators, co-location spaces, and early stage venture capitalists.  And since my ideal client is in Chicago, I used Copy Followers only on those individuals or organizations that reside in Chicago.  I then selectively followed the Twitter users who were founders, co-founders, CEOs, entrepreneurs or executives. Bonus Tip:  Make sure you have an interesting and relevant profile. Review other people’s Twitter profiles that are similar to your profile and who have thousands of followers and then create a unique profile statement for yourself.
  3. Send a direct message back to each and every user who follows you.  Crowdfire will automate this for you for free, but every direct message ends with "via Crowdfire.”  You can remove that for $9.99/month.  My direct message shares a link to my blog. 
  4. Tweet at least 5 times per day at the times when your followers are most likely to see it.  I read that a Tweet has a life span of 18 minutes.  Expect that each Tweet will only be seen by up to 5% of your followers.  There are many tools online to help you find the optimum time to Tweet.  Let a tool like Crowdfire automatically schedule your Tweets or use a tool like Tweriod to tell you the best times.  Personally, I like to use a combination.  As I am reading something online that I find valuable, I use Crowdfire to schedule the Tweet.  I also try to read my Twitter feed a couple of times a day, during a time that is popular with my followers and retweet or create my own post.  Bonus Tip:  Most experts recommend keeping your Tweets to 122 characters to leave room for others to easily retweet them without having to make modifications.  
  5. Shorten your links so you can track how many clicks you get.  I chose bit.ly for this as it both shortens my URLs and provides simple analytics.  Bonus Tip: Studies have shown that 2 hashtags at the end of a Tweet engage the most people. 
  6. Use Twitter analytics to track your overall impressions and make sure your overall impressions and ideally your engagements are increasing over time.  If they are not, you need to take a closer look at your number of Tweets, their time, and their content and analyze what is working and what isn’t.  Twitter is not a one and done tool.  You need to keep at it and keep iterating.  Bonus Tip: Studies have shown that Tweets with images double your engagements.
  7. Use Crowdfire’s Nonfollower feature to unfollow accounts that don’t follow you back within a few days.  Technically, you can follow 2000 more users than are following you but I like to keep the differential under a few hundred.  Repeat this process every few days. Find 100 new interesting people to follow, give them a few days to follow you back, and if they don’t, unfollow them. 
 
And that’s all there is to it.  Now I’m off to meet with that first prospect that found me on Twitter.  Wish me luck.
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​WHEN Should You Give Feedback?

10/13/2015

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Susie was late again for your weekly sales meeting. Tom delivered a client presentation with three typos in it. Mark is already a week late with his code for the critical new feature release.
 
In the examples above, do you find yourself more likely to ignore this issue or to confront them directly? Think back to the most recent time someone on your team, a direct report, peer or even a boss, disappointed you. What did you do? If you are like most of us you were ticked off, vented to someone not directly involved and then went on with your day, hoping that it wouldn’t happen again.
 
In Crucial Conversations® there is a concept that states if you do not address an issue the first time it happens it may become a pattern, and, if you don’t address a pattern it will affect your relationship. Think about that for a moment. Go back again to the same example you thought of in the prior paragraph; the one about an individual who recently disappointed you. Have they ever disappointed you before? If yes, it’s a pattern. Do you think differently of them now? If you are in a position to delegate or assign tasks, do you assign them different tasks? Do you avoid them? If you answered yes to any of these it has already affected your relationship.
 
So what’s the solution? It’s simple to state but a lot harder to act on. When something happens, address it the first time it happens. Don’t wait for it to become a pattern or worse, for it to affect your relationship. Ask to talk them and start with the facts. For example, the fact may be that they had committed to complete the code by last Friday and it still isn’t complete. Share your story. Your story may be that you are concerned that they aren’t prioritizing this activity or that they have too much on their plate. Ask them to share their story. It may match your story or be completely different. Either way, you now have the basis to have a discussion and find a solution that works for both of you.
 
To learn more read Crucial Conversations® by Vital Smarts. I’m not connected to them in any way; I just like and learn from their materials:)
 

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What Does Bill Gates Say About Business Coaching?

10/2/2015

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 Most everyone agrees there is increased complexity within leadership roles today and the need for resiliency to address change, as the CEO of a Fortune 500, the founder of a startup, the member of any management team or an individual contributor has never been stronger. “Leaders who maintain confidence and resilience in high-pressure situations can make the difference between organisational success and failure." (Reid 2008). Learning to work at your peak with those with different styles and attitudes can make the difference between a good leader and a great one.
 
Leaders have developed a stronger awareness of their own attitudes and other’s perceptions that might be holding them back or making the path forward more difficult.  Coaching brings clarity to decision making by giving us the opportunity to think aloud and with a partner who can probe to help you think deeper and who brings their own experiences and resources to the process.  Our environments are moving extremely quickly and without creating planned time slots for thinking, the day can pass you by while you spend all of your time and energy working and responding to urgent requests.  Coaching allows you to slow down and work on the business and the business strategy while assessing and learning skills necessary to reach you and your team’s peak performance.  Erik Schmidt is quoted as saying that getting a coach was the best advice he ever received.  Bill Gates, in the Ted Talk clip below, simply says everyone should have one.
Top Image courtesy of Renjith Krishnan at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
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    Cindy Pogrund

    I'm not an writer. I'm just passionate about lessons I learned in the trenches regarding leadership, management, coaching and startups.  And a few miscellaneous topics here and there.

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