Twitter is a social media phenomenon, there's no doubt about that. For how much longer is any ones guess, but right now, if you're not participating; you're missing out on valuable personal training business opportunities.
If you have thousands of followers already you may find value in this article to find thousands more, however for those of you who may be new to Twitter or are having difficulty finding targeted followers please read on.
This post is about how I went from 12 to over 2000 targeted followers (personal trainers, fitness professionals and a few randoms) in about 8 weeks (without trying too hard) and how you can do it too.
In the scheme of things, I was quite slow to get on board the twitter bandwagon; I just didn't understand it and none of my real life friends were tweeting, so I paid it no mind. However, since I registered my account @mybizisfitness and put in a little bit of work, I've met a tonne of great people and had one success after another.
If you're new to twitter, I'll be honest; it's kind of weird at first...In the beginning I had no followers and here I was telling no one about my awesome day. For some reason, people began to follow me and keeping with good twitter etiquette, I would follow them back.
After about a month I had a whopping 12 completely random strangers following me. I still didn't get it and wondered why I was wasting my time.
It was time to do some research. I needed to find out why people were using this thing and how I could use it to promote my business is fitness.
I read the twitter rules and began to follow some successful people to see what they would tweet about. I discovered that the most successful tweeters would promote their businesses in between talking about their day, sharing useful links and other bits and pieces of information. They also had a LOT more than 12 followers.
After some research, I discovered that twitter allows you to follow up to 500 people a day. Twitter etiquette tells us that if someone follows you, you follow them back. So that was my strategy; find as many people in my niche as possible and hope that they follow me back.
I began searching the twitter database using a variety of keywords like personal training, fitness business etc. and found it quite inadequate for the numbers that I was after.
If you're like me, when you have a goal you have to achieve it in the most efficient and painless way possible and this definitely wasn't it.
This is when I discovered 2 great tools which made my job very easy: Twellow.com and Twitter Karma.
Twellow.com is the Twitter Yellow Pages. Simply log in with your twitter handle and you're able to search the database and narrow your field by location and keywords. Using my trusty keywords like 'fitness australia' my search returned hundreds of targeted profiles. You could try narrowing your search to location or specific industries depending on the type of followers you want to attract, then it's just a matter of clicking the blue follow button.
As mentioned before; Twitter only allows you to follow a maximum of 500 people per day and there are also limits on your follower/following ratios, so what I found worked was to follow the maximum amount of people I could and then give them a few days to reciprocate.
The problem with Twellow is that it's not completely up to date as some accounts are inactive and some people just don't like to return the love. For these kinds of accounts, I would like to introduce you to Twitter Karma.
Twitter Karma is a great tool for culling out nonreciprocating or inactive twitter accounts as it gives you a clear list of who you are following and who is following you.
Again, simply log in using your Twitter account. Twitter Karma recommends that you use any browser other than Internet Explorer for best results. Your entire list of people you're following and your followers will now be displayed and you can easily 'unfollow' anyone that isn't following you. There use to be a 'bulk unfollow' button but it's been removed, however it's still the most efficient way to clean out your following list to make room to find more followers.
If all you want is followers, you could go nuts using these two tools alone and fill your account with thousands of over a few weeks. You're better to try and have a majority of followers that you can offer value to if building your business is your priority.
I'd also like to mention that while this system worked for me, Twitter may at any time change it's rules on what it deems 'untwitter like conduct' and punish accounts that it believe could be spamming. So please note that if you choose to use the two services mentioned you do so at your own risk.
Ben
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Thank God you wrote this post. I am a Twitter spastic (can I write that?)and I was about to hand in my Twitter ball and bat.
ReplyDeleteNow by following your tips over the past four days I have got over targeted 100 followers (and that Twitter Karma thing allows me to get rid off all the dead wood).
Cheers Ben
Hey Rick.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the comment mate!
Congrats on the extra 100 followers, has it converted to traffic?
Just looking at this post, I wrote it in late August when I had just gotten over 2000 followers and my twitter account is now sitting on almost 2700 followers just by using this simple system once or twice a week.
Ben