MBA2050 Q&A Wednesday: How long does it take to grow a following on Twitter?

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Foreign. Welcome to the $100 MBA show, the business podcast you can't afford to miss every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my co founder back in 2014 and and today's episode is Q and A Wednesday. On Q and A Wednesdays we answer a question from one of you, one of our listeners. If you got a question you want to ask just go ahead and email me over at Omar MBA Net. Today's question is from Bianca and Bianca asks, hey Omar, I am not new to business. I've run an online business for over 10 years but actually have not really been into social media. I use it for personal reasons, staying in touch with friends. But recently I've decided to take social a little seriously starting with Twitter. I want to use social media to be able to spread my message and grow my business. My question to you is how long does it take to grow a following on Twitter? I want to set up my expectations so I can commit to a certain amount of time. Would appreciate any advice. Thank you Bianca. Hey Bianca, thanks for asking that question and congrats on 10 years of business and she's A good example that, you know, even if you're not prolific on social, you can have a successful business online. But Bianca does want to go all in and improve her following or her presence on social, and she wants to start with Twitter. In today's lesson, I'm going to share a little bit about why you should want to grow a following or grow your presence on social media. How does that affect your business and your sales and your marketing and all that stuff and what to expect in terms of a timeline of growing a decent following, which can actually help you and your business moving forward. I'm going to share some things that might surprise you, that might get you to start thinking about social media a little bit differently. It might just also ease the pressure off your shoulders when it comes to thinking about growing your following. We're going to get to all the details in today's lesson. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

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It feels good to save big. It feels good to Geico. I said this many times on the podcast, but I'll say it again, business does not take place on social. Social media is a good place for you to build awareness, to build a community, to. To network, to build relationships that can bring attention to your business, to your website, to your offering. And that's where business is done. That's where you actually sell them on your products and services and turn them into a customer. Too many people want to skip that step. They want to just do everything on social, and that's not how it works. At least not a scalable business. This doesn't mean that social media is useless. It actually has some benefits, some great tools that you can leverage. But understand that social media is somebody else's platform. It's Mark Zuckerberg's platform, it's Elon Musk's platform for Twitter. So use social to your advantage, which means take the good and understand that your whole job is to build relationships, build a presence and move them over to your site so that you can build your email list, you can make profits, you can sell, you can turn those people into happy customers. Now, I gotta tell you that that whole transition from follower on Twitter to customer, it takes time. You know, that whole, I would say journey is not something that happens in seconds. Or minutes or days, it actually happens. Well, over time, people get to know you a little bit more and I'm sure you're familiar with it on the other side of the equation, meaning you, you might follow somebody on social, you might really enjoy their conversations, their tweets, the comments they make, the content they share. And then one day you discover what that person actually does, what their business is. So you check out their website, you learn a little bit more, you read some of their blog posts, maybe you sign up for their newsletter. And then one day when you need a product or service that they offer, they're top of mind, you go to people that you like, that you trust. And that's usually what happens. But it all kind of comes down to awareness, brand affinity, being liked and trusted. And you can build that like and trust on social media. And that's really its job. That's really what you're trying to do here, is build relationships, is to serve, is to give. And I personally think that social media is, it's at its best when there's conversation. If you just post day in and day out on your profile, it really doesn't move the needle. It really doesn't help you by just feeding people blog post after blog post or quip or gif or whatever you decide decide to do when you tweet out or when you post on social. Social media is powerful. When you are in the threads, answering questions, getting into conversations, that means following the right people and seeing the right things in your feed and really being a contributor to the community. This is where you become a tastemaker. This is when you become an authority. This is when you become a quote unquote expert and people want to get to know you. And what I'm talking about right now takes time. And the question that Bianca asks is, how long does it take to build a following? Well, as soon as you have one follower, you have a following, right? But I'm assuming she means a large following or a significant following that kind of moves the needle and helps in her business. Some people say this is around 3 to 5,000 followers on Twitter when it comes to Twitter, that things start moving and giving you like an ROI or traction, but there's no real number. It's all about the quality of the relationships. And I wanted to stop for a moment and say, don't worry so much about the numbers. Don't worry about how many followers, really worry about how many people you're able to help and contribute and really enjoy the process of being a contributor in the Platform itself, Twitter and getting into conversations and really helping people with your expertise or knowledge. You have a unique experience on whatever you do, share it with others in the context of what they need, with their questions, with their discussions, with their threads. And my advice is just focus on that. Because what will happen is when you do focus on that and not by your follow numbers, the followers will come. It's going to take some time, they'll trickle in. But, you know, you might get one follower a week and then one follower a day, and then you start getting 10 followers a day and you start snowballing. But having a strategy to say, hey, I just need to grow my following as much as possible, it just kind of doesn't work that way. It just works in terms of how much value can you contribute to the market, to the community that you're a part of on social media. So, for example, if your market is all about yoga for rock climbers, if you become a valuable community member on Twitter for those who love yoga and are rock climbers, you will organically grow your following. My advice is to really give it a fair go, meaning give it your best shot for at least one year. This means you are in Twitter every single day trying to help other people, getting into threads and this all is about kind of getting into the right conversations. I'm not a Twitter expert, actually. I'm actually still learning after being on Twitter for over 10 years. And I still have a lot to learn. In fact, I just took a Twitter course by Arvid Kahl. It's called Find you'd following on Twitter. And you can find it on Udemy or skillshare or Gumroad or even Podia or you can go to the site findyourfollowing.com I totally loved this course. It's fantastic, it's thorough, it's to the point and it's going to get you set up right in terms of how do I spend my time wisely when it comes to Twitter? How do I not spend hours every day, but at the same time be effective and grow my following? And some of the key principles I just shared are in this course is where I learned them along with the experience I've had in the last 10 years. The thing to remember when it comes to Twitter is it's about relationships, being intentional, about growing relationships. Because at the end you're trying to build trust with other people. And in order to build trust, you gotta have respectful, meaningful relationships with people. Can't be shallow and just kind of a bait and switch situation. Where it's just like, I want them just to check me out and check my links and go to my website. This is not a quick win. This is not a get 100,000 followers in one month type of system. This is just not how it works. And even if it did work that way, it wouldn't be sustainable because you didn't take the time to invest in those relationships. When it comes to Twitter specifically, I would say half of all of the effort and success that you're going to get is on the shoulders of the choices you make when it comes to who you follow. Because that's what you're gonna be exposed to. When you follow the right people, you get the right content, you get the right discussions, you get the right questions, you get the right opportunities to jump in and be helpful. And Twitter makes it kind of easy for you to follow the right people. Because if you follow somebody that you know you resonate with, you have the same values and you follow them, Twitter will automatically suggest a whole bunch of people that you should follow as well. And I found in my experience that their suggestions are spot on. So keep an eye on that and make sure you follow those as well so that you can be exposed to more conversations to be a part of.

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To wrap up today's Q and A, Wednesday's question from Bianca. Just like you spent 10 years to build your online business and be where you are today, it's going to take some time for you to grow your following on Twitter. But my advice to you is don't see this as a chore. See this as an opportunity. Because you're going to gain more than just your following. What you're going to gain is you're going to gain insights about your audience, about your marketplace, about what people need, what they don't need, their pain points, the things that annoy them, the things that they love. This is incredible. R and D, Having your ear to the ground and understanding your potential customers for free. Okay. And I think Twitter particularly is really good at this. I also think that Twitter is the best platform when it comes to building your network and relationships. Way better than LinkedIn in my opinion, Facebook or Instagram. It's actually built for discussions and the general vibe on Twitter is kind of like we're all equal and we're all learning from each other. Thanks so much for asking your question on today's Q and A Wednesday, Bianca, if you got a question you want to ask, just like Bianca did, go ahead and email me over at Omar MBA net. Thank you so much for listening to the $100 MBA Show. Hit subscribe so you don't miss an episode. Also by hitting subscribe, it's the best way to support the show and show your favorite podcast app that hey, this show's all right. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Yes, sometimes Twitter gets a bad rep for being a platform where people are angry and passionate and yelling and controversy. But I find that it's all about who you follow. When you make sure you follow the right people and when you start seeing type of activity that annoys you or is not positive or productive, just unfollow that person. And Twitter is really good at keeping your feed clean if you are actively following and unfollowing people. Algo is pretty smart and knows to show you the right stuff based on what you do engage with and what you do look at and what you don't. So curate your feed. Don't just leave it by chance. Okay? And you can get the most out of Twitter and enjoy your time there. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care. Gas, snacks, tolls this trip is draining my wallet.

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