GROWTH HACKING YOUR BRAND

USING TWITTER 

3 Easy Steps To Maximise Your Marketing

 

 

In this episode Keith Keller (@KeithKeller) & Tracey Gayner (@AskGadgetGirl) talk about about  GROWTH HACKING YOUR BRAND USING TWITTER MARKETING.

Keith & Tracey talk at length about “TWITTER MAGIC 123” 

(1) Follow First

(2) Follow Back

(3) Follow Up

TWITTER MAGIC 123

 

Keith Keller: Hi there, this is Keith Keller, Melbourne, Australia and this is Twitter Tips for Tourism Part 4. This is a podcast on how to use Twitter to promote your tourism brand wherever you are in the world. New Zealand, Australia, Bali, Sweden, anywhere! Twitter is something at the moment with 300 million users.

Last week we talked about that, we talked about where they are in the world, and whether those people from those countries are coming to your country, and whether they need a holiday, and whether you should be chatting to them on Twitter.

Today we’re going to talk about the idea of, how do you get more followers? How do you get more engagement? What’s the magic? Am I actually, have a coined to phrase:

 

“Twitter Magic 123” (Follow first - Follow up - Follow Back)

 

Now, we’re going to talk about that at length today with my very, very good friend Tracey Gayner, (@AskGadgetGirl) in Auckland. How are you doing Tracey, and tell me about your stories since we chatted last. Lots of new things I hear.

 

Tracey Gayner: Hi Keith. Yes, very, very interesting stats so far. I think since then, on average I get around 200 odd followers a week. So, using the Twitter magic 1, 2, 3.

 

Keith: More importantly, this is the set I’m really excited about. On the 20th of April you had 171 followers now, less than 3 months later you had nearly 3000 followers. 3000 followers in 3 months, using a very, very simple system.

 

“Follow 30 People Per Day For 30 Days – Rinse & Repeat”

 

It’s simple. It takes you less than 30 minutes doesn’t it?

 

Tracey: It certainly does. But, more than that, you always said to me, ‘make sure that the people that you’re following are the people that you would be interested in engaging with and chatting to, and talking to. The reason is, because after you follow them and they follow you back, than you need to follow up.

 

Keith: This is what we’re going to play out today. We’re going to play out this idea of, what I’m going to teach you today, you can do yourself in less than 30 minutes a day or every few days.

You just got to find the time in your schedule. Whether you’re at the bus stop, or you’re getting a coffee, or you’re at the airport. Wherever you are in the world, you’ve got to find that time, on whatever device suits you. All my teachings are designed to be around the fact that, I know you’re busy. I don’t expect you to sit on a laptop three hours a day.

You just got to find that time. Last week we talked about Twitter tools, and a very cool site called TweepsMap. I’ll start introducing this site more and more because I use it almost everyday now. It’s so robust for finding the stats for global content. So, today we’re going to talk about follow first, follow back, follow up. Let me start with follow first. I really, really recommend that when you start, you start with 30 people a day for 30 days.

You would of followed about 900 people within a course of a month. 3-400 of them are following you back. In Tracey’s case, 2 or 300 a week using that model. Than you’ve got the possibility of chatting to them, working with them as a JV, a Joint Venture.

They might come to you as a blogger, they might come to your town, they might come have a coffee, be in your town, you might do workshop with them. How are you using this idea of following first? How has it fundamentally changed the way that you use Twitter?

 

Tracey: I use follow first with trying to find people that I would also like to start a conversation with, and people who interest me, especially with looking at their profiles first. Some of the profiles are written really, really badly.There is no way would I like to follow somebody who just puts something like, I think you sent one that you saw, what was the one that you sent again?

 

Keith: It’s the worst bio in the history of the world. It says: ‘That’s for me to know, and you to find out’.

 

Tracey: Did they want some engagement? Did they actually want people to talk to them?

 

Keith: Yes. Did they want people to follow them, or did they just say, ‘oh, sucked in, you know, you find out. I’m not telling you.’ You know when you say, “you look at the buyer”. You’re looking consciously and deliberately for people to follow, that are interesting to you.

 

Tracey: Yep, so if they’ve got something like, that they do social media, or that they do blogging, or that they are interested in technology, especially technology in my case, and what they do, what they like, what their preferences are.

Then go through perhaps some of their feed, what their likes are. Then you think, ‘well this person might be really interesting to know, let me just click on the right hand side where it says follow’.

 

Keith: One of the questions that I get all the time, and I’m very interested in your thoughts here, is, where do you find these people? Do you use lists, or do you follow the followers of other people? How do you go about finding those 30 people to follow each day?

 

Tracey: There’s 3 different ways that I do it. The first is, and that’s a really good question…the first one is searching. So, I might search at the top, hash tag tech(#tech) or hash tag something that I might be interested in that day(#…).

The second one is definitely following the followers of others. So, if I like a particular person, then maybe I’ll go and see who they’re actually following, especially if it’s a company.

Of course the third one is the followers who are already following me. I just go along and see who they’re…well, that is the following of others. When you’re searching, it doesn’t just have to be the topic, it could be a person, so it might be something like The Huffington Post, and if you like what their articles are, or in my case, the verge or something like that, or sea net. Then you can go into who they actually follow.

 

Keith: To those who haven’t done it before, it might sound like a lot of time but actually it’s not. It’s so quick isn’t it? It’s so easy.

 

Tracey: Yeah, it doesn’t take very much to follow the followers of others, but I don’t press follow unless I check their profile or their bio. I don’t really want to have someone that I thought, ‘well that seems like a nice picture, I’m just going to follow them’.

 

Keith: Like anything, you’re taking a little bit of extra time to follow quality people. Quality people in the sense that they’re related in what you’re wanting to talk about, and you’re getting a higher percentage of people following you back because you’re doing the initial research fronted.

 

Tracey: Yeah, the other thing is too is that, I noticed that I’m getting less unfollowers. So, at the beginning when I didn’t know what I was doing. I just was following people ‘cause I didn’t know how to follow properly. Now that I know how to follow people first, and I check their bio’s, on average maybe 11 people a week or less are now unfollowing me.

 

Keith: Yep that’s brilliant. Well that really is the first step, and the reason that I’ve made it first is because it is so counter-intuitive to what we’ve been told Twitter is. There’s this large follower account, you know, this pride thing to say, “I’ve got 20,000 followers, isn’t that cool?”.

The second part is you follow back. Now, what I personally do, I actually build this into my routine every day, but you don’t have to do it every day…is I follow, or I check everyone that’s followed me overnight. All (?) I check last, which is usually the night before.

If I get, say 40 new followers, which is about right, sometimes more, sometimes less, I get 40 new possible leads.

Forty new potential clients, 40 new potential JV’s, 40 new potential guest bloggers, 40 new potential coffee chats or skype calls. So, what I do is I cherry pick the ones that, as you said, are related. I love podcasting, I love being interviewed on other people’s podcasts, I love Twitter, I love social media, I love various things.

If people actually are related to that, than I follow them back. Is this what you do too? Do you actually check the people that have followed you from the previous day?

 

Tracey: Yes I certainly do. First thing in the morning I check who’s followed me, then I follow another, you know, like if I…doing 30 a day, then maybe I only do 15 in the morning just in case so I can see who else is following me during the day. Then I’d schedule my tweets…so it does take about 30 minutes to an hour depending on, “oh look how distracted I get from what is in their feeds”.

 

Keith: How deep that rabbit hole is.

 

Tracey: Yeah.

 

Keith: I mean, the reason I talk about these in various allotments, is because I really do want you to think consciously about 30 minutes a day. You can do this. Thirty minutes every morning or every night, depending on what your routine is. You can, it’s possible. This is very, very interesting, and this is what a lot of people also don’t do and that is, the following up.

Organically, naturally, in a non AUTO DM type way. 

Let me be very, very clear on what I’m saying here. Please DO NOT, in big capital letters:

 

DO NOT USE AUTO DMs.

 

They piss every person off that I’ve ever met, ever. The only person that is advantaged, is you, because you’re saving time. So, once you get your head around that you can’t auto DM, your question is, “well, how am I going to fit in talking to 40 people every day?”.

You don’t talk to all of them, you talk to some of them. Of the 40 people that have followed you, you might find that 5 or 6 of them are really, really relevant.

Some of them are trying to sell your followers, some of them have got nothing to do with anything that you’re interested in, and you don’t have to follow everyone back. But those 5 people that are very interesting to you, and this is how you stand out, this is how you manage it…

If you send an auto DM, you have saved time. But, you go into that void, you go into that vault of other’s that are sending me annoying DM’s.

What do I do? I delete them. I never ever, ever, ever read them. It’s annoying to me because I’ve got to delete them. It’s a task that I’ve got to do.

So, what I do is, I actually consciously and deliberately find maybe 3 or 4, maybe 5 or 6 people each morning and I chat to them. “How are you doing? What’s the weather in Dublin like today? I notice you’ve got a podcast, can I share that for you?

Would you like to come on my podcast? I notice you’re a blogger, would you like to guest blog on my site? Have you got any videos I can share? If you’re ever in Melbourne, would you like to have a coffee?”.

This is the stuff that actually takes the most amount of time. But, this is the point of being in business.

Real people talking to real people. We chatted about this during the week. Tell me your experiences of doing this and how you were able to sort of go out of that realm of, “oh no, what am I going to say. No-one’s responding.”

‘Cause you now get almost exclusively all your guest bloggers this way, don’t you?

 

Tracey: Yes I do, pretty much all of them. It’s about seven articles a week that I can load up as in, getting ready to edit, and everything else does come from that. What I did first was, I wrote a script for myself, and then I cut it down so that it actually sounds like me.

I was trying to follow other scripts and then in the end I was like, “I’m just going to do it really simply”, and did it that way instead. It’s been extremely good for me…it’s been great actually, I’m really thankful that I have done that, and that I have actually approached people.

 

Keith: The thing that’s really interesting is that your model of the world is that you love featuring other people as guest bloggers, which I do too. That means you want, or need seven articles, one a day for seven days. I do, typically, three a week. I need three people I need to get friendly with, to send me articles.

If I didn’t do anything, I’d never have any guest blogs. So, what I personally do, and I really recommend that you do this…when people follow you and you follow them back, I go and have a look at their sites, and I see if there’s any synergy, and I try and embed that into the conversation.

“Hey I notice you’re in Dublin, what’s the weather like there today?”. Or, “I notice you’ve got a podcast. Send me some of those and I’ll tweet them for you”. Or, “I’ve noticed your blog is unbelievable, I’ll surely share some of those today, but have you thought that you could guest blog on my site?”.

When you think of this idea that Twitter is this really lovely place where you could be of service to others, and you start there, you have this enormous potential that will make friendships that will last a lifetime.

Let me wrap up, because I do have the tendency to ramble and I wanted to specifically keep these podcasts in very digestible chunks, we want you to follow first, and follow 30 people for 30 days. If you really love this idea, what I actually recommend is Twitter 60. Follow 60 people a day for 60 days.

That can get a little cumbersome and time consuming, but you do get more followers as a result. I want you to follow back, I want you to check the people that have actually followed you and make a deliberate and conscious decision whether you want to follow them or engage with them, or block them if they’re spammers.

The third one is, I want you to follow up. I want you to actually go on to their website and actually start real conversations with real people. Then I want you to get back to me and tell me about how many miracles that have occurred, because this is where the miracles happen.

Why don’t you wrap it up for us Tracey, and tell us how this has panned out for you in these last few weeks, and what you’re learning as a result of these Twitter podcasts and this experience that we’re having together.

 

Tracey: I didn’t think right at the beginning that it would go so quickly as you said, you know, from April until now, it’s only nearly middle of July. In the past couple of weeks I’ve learnt so much more about analytics and the tools to use, as you suggested.

I use different ones to Keith’s, so that’s been interesting too to see what’s happening. I’ve learnt not to be as shy with some of the blog posts that I have done. I did experiments, I’ve done experiments since meeting Keith.

We’ve done lots of different experiments. Last week I did one where…I didn’t blog my stuff as much as I would normally, and then…you know, the week before, and then last week I did it every 4 hours. One of the posts that I had written about, three to four weeks ago, had 43,000 impressions.

The very first time that I put it up it was only about 1000, and 800 people that read it. Twitter has been this amazing space and place, not only for a learning curve for me, but also a place for me to say, “hey world, here’s my blog, here’s what I do”, and people accept it around the world. My greatest following is in the U.S. The U.S. and the United Kingdom and then Canada.

 

Keith: I’m very, very excited about what you’re doing. Tell people how they can find out about your blog. ‘Cause your blog, you were saying, you’re blogging almost everyday now, and you’ve got a really wonderful newsletter that you gives you basically a once a week information of all that you’re learning, and you’re learning like heaps and heaps of new stuff everyday. How do people get your blog?

How do people get to your blog, and how do people get your newsletter?

 

Tracey: Sure, so my blog is simonsays#chat. I write for a place called monkey101.co.nz, and our blog is blog.monkey101.nz, and on that front page, and on every single article that you read of ours, the sign up to our newsletter, you just enter your details in there, press subscribe and lo and behold each week you’ll receive one condensed version of approximately 3-4 articles.

 

Keith: It’s really, really quite a sensational vine because you’re doing all the heavy lifting, you’re doing all the hard yards, you’re actually going out to the world and finding what’s going on,  condensing it into one little digestible index, completely free.

It’s a win win isn’t it?

 

Tracey: Well it’s free and fun. There’s just so much that I’ve learnt from it. I love learning about different people’s ideas, some of their kick-starter campaigns.

Every time we talk, Keith, I find out a bit more analytics or tools that I can use. It never…Twitter is basically my learning space.

 

Keith: That’s brilliant. So, next week we’re going to keep this going, this is part four. I reckon we’ll rattle this out at about ten, but we might just keep going. I’m going to spend a great deal of time talking about my favourite Twitter tools, and my favourite Twitter apps, ‘cause that’s the different thing.

Tracey uses different ones to me, so I think that’s really interesting. We’re going to pull apart how we’ve been able to decode all of this magical data that we’re been getting, and how we can make it into meaningful data that allows us to move forward, because with Twitter, what you want to know is how many people came to your site.

Of all those people, how many people signed up, people into podcasts, how many people have watched blogs, what are they doing, what do they want? You want to give people more of what they want, and less of what you think they need. We’re doing that all with tools and apps, and data. Very, very cool isn’t it?

 

Tracey: It sure is. I’m looking forward to next week. I definitely know that I’ll pick a couple of more tools up, from my own tool box as well.

 

Keith: Ok. We’ll see you next week then.

 

Tracey: See you then.

 

TWITTER TIPS 4 TOURISM (The Story So Far) 

 

 

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