Experience has taught me that sharing my goals for others to see is a great way to spur accountability and motivation (while keeping my social networks free of dust). For example, last month I ran 26.2 miles without stopping and Facebooked what every mile of it felt like. It was a pretty good plan until my phone died, but at least I was able to cross the finish line alone and miserable.
So here’s my share for this month:
My latest client has set a goal to hit 11,000 Twitter followers by Dec 31 (roughly 2,500 off from where we are now). The current strategy has been to host a series of contest giveaways to encourage Twitter engagement. For example, “What fall food are you #ThankfulThursday for? Tweet for your chance to win!” You get the idea. They also host user events across the country and post pictures and hashtags like a #kidoncrack. It’s obviously been working, seeing as they have over 8,000 organic followers. So they’re going to stick with it, and brought me on for a few hours a week to try a different approach.
Side note: I’m not-so-secretly calling this project “My Twitter Marathon,” because I’d rather run a mile for every minute I spend trying to figure out #what-the-hell-did-that-tweet-even-mean?
Onward: So last week I followed the crap out of people using our target hashtags. The results were mediocre. We jumped by a hundred or so followers. Given that I need to gain at least 50 followers a day until Dec 31, that ain’t quite cuttin’ it. The good old days when you could work down a list and hit follow, follow, follow are unfortunately either over and/or just not working in this niche. So this week I’ve decided a different approach. I’m going to retweet the crap out of influencers using our target hashtags and see what cooks. If that fails I might just buy the darn followers [insert *gasp* here].
All joking aside, I can tell you what the partner of a budding digital marketing firm should say, and that’s “If you share valuable, high quality re-tweetable influencer content and thank the author with a @, the people will follow.” Duh… So that’s what I’ll do.
To my friends who actually like Twitter, do you have any other ideas for me? Either way I’ll keep you posted how it goes.
Over and out.
