Twitter, Slow & Steady (part 1),
July 27, 2009
My slow approach to Twitter
A presence or participation in Social Media is becoming one of the major concentrations for marketing a business, and the general understanding in media forms like Twitter is that more followers = better. I agree that the point of Twitter is to make connections, and the medium enables a person to network with more people in less time than traditional face to face events/opportunities. Those that are truly successful are able to pull people to their websites and newsletters by clicking links in their tweets.
I have been developing my Twitter network with the intent to “network” – not sell myself or my services. This is a different approach, I think, from those who use Twitter as a strategic marketing tool.
I am now at over 500 followers @EdgeVA and while that is a relatively low number, consider these stats published by Sysomos in June 2009:
- 93.6% of users have less than 100 followers, while 92.4% follow less than 100 people.
- 5% of Twitter users account for 75% of all activity
I haven’t concentrated heavily on growing my Twitter following, nor have I used a “guaranteed system” to grow my account. Instead, I have been working casually at developing relationships within my network as a real person. I tweet when I can take some time (a couple times each day) to read the tweet stream, comment on what interests me, and @ chat with my “tweeps”.
I consider myself to be “organic”. Marketing and hype, while effective for many, many people, doesn’t feel like me. When it comes to tweeting, I know that I’m not a scheduler; it feels like cheating. The pressure to schedule a bunch of natural looking tweets to make myself look more active and involved (when I’m not) is too much pressure. That doesn’t mean I am against tweet scheduling per se; I just know that it does not work for me.
My “strategy” has been simply to follow those people that I find interesting. I had an easy start as a virtual assistant; as an industry, VAs (in my opinion), are web savvy and appear to be using Twitter and other forms of social media without resistance.
Had I been relying on friends and family to start on Twitter, my experience may have been vastly different. None of my friends and family (that I am aware) even have a Twitter account, much less actively participate or update. Apparently, that’s not unusual: PEW found (In February 2009) that only 9% of Twitter users are from rural areas. Not surprising, really.
I do use some applications to make Twitter more manageable, and I do use tools to find new people to follow. I’ll detail my favorite Twitter tools in the next post, so stay tuned! In the meantime, leave me your comments; I’d love to hear your thoughts.
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Charlie
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