Evan Carmichael shares how he built a Twitter following toward 100,000. Thank early supporters, define your target market, post consistent value without promotion, test posting times with CrowdBooster, promote your handle everywhere, and engage directly with replies to build loyalty.
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Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. Welcome to another edition of Ask Evan. In today's episode, I'm going to answer a question from one of my forum readers, Yinka, who's asking about Twitter. So he wrote in saying, "None of us have asked you how you've gotten all the Twitter followers that you have. How did you do it? Can you teach us or show us how you did it?" So thanks for the question, Inka. I'm a big fan of using Twitter. I, at the start, didn't really understand Twitter. I thought, you know, people are posting about their cats and what they ate for lunch, and why would I want to be a part of this? And then I just did a quick search for my name and found that people were talking about me, and I wasn't part of the conversation. So I started off just watching, and anytime somebody mentioned me or my website, I just gave them, you know, thank you, just trying to empower my champions and get them to want to, you know, write more content and share more about my website. So that was kind of phase 1, and I encourage entrepreneurs just to start that as phase 1. Monitor your name, monitor your company name, and just recognize when people promote you or talk about you. Luckily for me, everything was good. I didn't get any negative complaints, but all the positive ones I tried to recognize and just make them feel like they were important and to thank them. They were fans, and so you want to empower those guys to go out and talk more about your business. So that's how I got started. To have the success and have a lot more people following you and have some traction, what I found is a couple of keys that hopefully you can use to implement into your business. The first is really define your market. So know who you're trying to attract on Twitter, and it may not be having a million followers. That may not be your goal. I mean, we're closing in on 100,000 right now for my account, and I know my audience is entrepreneurs. And so that's a big audience. I can attract a lot of people. That's what I'm really passionate about. I love helping entrepreneurs. I love answering questions. I love sharing new information that I find. That's helping me, that hopefully can help you guys as well. For your audience, it may not be a large audience, and that's okay, but you want to have a specific audience in mind when you're creating content for your, your tweets. So that's first. The second thing is create awesome content. So it's not just promotional stuff. If you follow my Twitter stream, you're not just seeing me saying, hey, you know, half-off sale, or come buy my book, or whatever. It's talking more about value-add information for entrepreneurs. So I'm sharing quotes that I find inspirational, I'm sharing articles that I found helpful and useful, I'm sharing stuff from my own website, and you know, it's all value-add stuff. So it's not sales pitches, that people are going to tune that out. And I think if somebody's just blasting you with sales information, you're probably going to tune it out too. But if somebody's adding value to your life on a regular, consistent basis, then you're going to want to, you know, consume that more and more. And the more people, you know, like seeing your information, the more they're going to want to be curious about your website, curious about your products and services, want to sign up for your newsletter. All the fun stuff that comes along with it. So, you know, you can have a few promotions in there, but keep most of it being all value-added stuff, again targeted towards your audience. The next thing you can do is optimize your tweets. So what I found is, you know, you can send the same tweet out at different times during the day and have a much greater response at one time versus the other. So I use some tools to help me find what time of day do most of my people read my tweets. And from there, I'm able to optimize the schedules that I go out. So I use this tool called CrowdBooster, which is free, which will analyze your Twitter records and it'll show you what times of day to send your tweets out and give you recommendations. And then I use a tool called Buffer app, which is also free, which then allows you to schedule your tweets out at certain times. So I get a lot of mine in the morning, so I'll send them out at 7, 8, 9 AM. and then a couple in the afternoon as well. And that's what I found to be the best times for me. For you, it may be completely different, so it just depends on your audience. And I use those tools to help me get my message out so that I'm hitting people at ideal times. So definitely a great way to go about it because you're spending that time creating your tweets anyway, you might as well try to hit the maximum number of people who are following you. And then the last part is you gotta promote it. So, you know, for my Twitter account, a lot of people will find me from searches, but most of the people will find me from the promotions that I do. So it's on my website, it's in my email, it's in my newsletter. So all of your communications, you wanna have your Twitter address on there to encourage people to want to sign up and follow you. It's on my business card. I don't have a phone number on my business card, but I have my Twitter account on my business card. So all of the marketing communications that I do includes my Twitter account, and the more work you do to, you know, market and promote your business, the more you're gonna see it come out in Twitter followers and people following you online as well. So all the offline stuff you're doing too should include your Twitter to get people to follow you online. So that's what I've done, and it's helped, and it's, it's grown every month, and it's exciting, and I love, you know, being engaged with people. I try to answer all the tweets that come back to me, so it's another one that you can take back with you. People feel they can have a personal connection with you, they're more likely to want to follow you and stay engaged. So when people ask me questions, I might do a YouTube video like this, or I might tweet them back with a reply, and recognize the people who are supporting you, and they'll keep supporting you and tell their friends about it. So it's definitely a process, but it's helped and it's been a lot of fun. So hopefully that helps you guys. If you like the video, please give it a thumbs up. Makes me want to do more of these videos for you. And if you have a question about Twitter, or if you want to share what you're doing on Twitter that's been really effective, I'd love to hear what you have to say if you want to leave a comment underneath this video, and we'll see you on the next episode.
