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We continue the conversation of utilizing social media strategically with the network of Twitter. This web app developed from a simple SMS conversational tool to a complex networking tool that has a professional appeal among ministry and tech officials alike. The potential of information and connecting to like-minded individuals is seemingly endless and coupled with a pervasive hashtag integration, you really need to have some kind of presence on this social media.
Twitter is a unique creature within the social media umbrella because it has come across as a great marketing tool. The easy on #FollowFriday of sharing great resources that you endorse as well as searching the latest tweets via search lists make this a wonderful tool for your hobby, business, and ministry. At the same time, the frequency of messages you can send out is extremely high compared to Facebook or Google+. Buffer App conducted a study on the number of tweets that is idea for improving blog traffic. It found that one tweet an hour is the most ideal, whereas Facebook would show that more than one status update a day is too much.
Looking For Real Followers
While it may look impressive that you have 1.7 million followers on Twitter, the reality is that probably only a small portion of them are active followers that truly read your message, a larger portion semi-follow you, and the rest are either bots or simply follow you because you follow them. With this in mind, we are not looking to increase the number of followers we have, but gaining real followers.
Find Friends
With that in mind, one of the best targets of people to have as followers are those that are active users, have similar interests, and they themselves only follow a couple of hundred people. This increases the likelihood that they will not only read your material, but may act upon it. Of course, people with a low number of following and high number of followers are great, but again the number of true people reading their material will probably be much lower. We want to build relationships with people, not become another statistic in a mess of people on someone’s account.
Our Twitter Strategy
Here are some of my Twitter strategy goals I’ve set for seventy8Productions that we have this year.
- Gain 300 followers a month with a target audience of active users who have similar interests and do not follow too many other people.
- Sponsor six Tweet chats through various partnering ministries, like YouthMin.org.
- Market blog articles and other aspects of 78P no more than six times a day and no more than 2 times per article.
- Keep my Twitter list under 75 people.
- Make at leats 50% of tweets some sort of free resource or conversation starter.
What does/will your Twitter strategy look like?
kolby milton says
you don’t want to follow too many people? There are a lot of youth pastors out there that need to be followed to entered into a conversation. You goal of 300 per month is crazy and awesome! love it.
Anonymous says
No, I do want anyone to follow, but those that have less than 300 people are more likely to read my texts than those with thousands. So, if you are simply wanting traffic to your site, these people are great to connect with!
kolby milton says
Good point. I really want both things. Traffic to my site, and people engaging with it.
Anonymous says
🙂 Agreed!
Rachel Blom says
There’s an interesting contradiction in what you write. How will you keep your (hopefully) many new followers interested and engaged in a conversation (after all: Twitter is a social medium, thus a dialogue) if only 75 of them make it to the list of people you ‘really follow’? It’s an honest question…It’s one of the reasons why I’m not ‘actively’ recruiting new followers, because I’d rather have fewer followers that I can really connect with than thousands that don’t mean anything…
Anonymous says
The list of people is a list of tweets I monitor very closely and read every single tweet. But as for the rest, I have the full list of people that I monitor to, just am unable to read every single thing. So when someone retweets a message of mine, I begin the dialogue with them, add them to that list of people to monitor what they have to say and begin building great relationships. At the same time, my full list of people does get weeded out occasionally and I have to remove people because of spam, inappropriate stuff, or simply bots that need to be blocked.