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Social Media for Luddites

 BY

HILTON HAMANN

 

I got to wondering if, in order to use Twitter successfully as a marketing tool, you need to have thousands of followers. That is after all the conventional wisdom. But the more I thought about it, the more convinced I became, that marketing success on Twitter is not necessarily a prerequisite of having thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of followers.
Far more important, I believe, is having a core of quality followers who are dedicated to championing your cause and retweeting your tweets. It’s the old 80/20 rule (although I think, in this case, it’s more like the 97/3 rule) — 97% of your tweets being retweeted will be retweeted by 3% of your followers! It therefore stands to reason that, we should take extra interacting with and forming bonds with our “Twitter Champions.”
While it is nice have forty  or fifty thousand followers, many of those are little more than “names in a phonebook”. For example, I live in Johannesburg, so there is no chance I will buy dog from the pet shop in Washington DC that follows me. I follow him back because sometimes he has interesting information about petcare or pet nutrition but we are unlikely to champion each other’s businesses — and that’s okay.

However I have around 20 “Twitter Champions” who retweet my tweets on a regular basis, as do I, their’s. But can just 20 people make a significant impact to your online marketing efforts?
Absolutely! These are people who are all respected by their followers. One of my Champions has around 26 000 QUALITY followers, who follow him because they want to keep up with his words of wisdom and writings. When he retweets, many of his followers retweet that tweet to their own followers who retweet to their followers who retweet…well you get the picture. My 20 Champions collectively have about 70 000 followers so, when they champion my cause, the potential of it becoming viral is always there.
No doubt if you examine who retweets your tweets — use Twitter or third party apps

“@mention” button — you’ll see you have a small core of dedicated retweeters. These people are worth their weight in gold to you. They must be acknowledged and thanked for taking their time and making the effort to send your message out into the Twittersphere — every time they do it!

We all like recognition. If I do something for someone — that

I really don’t have to — I at least would like that person to have the good graces to acknowledge my act of kindness. I am sure you feel the same.
I spend around three hours per day sending personal messages to every person who has taken the trouble to retweet one of my tweets. I do it because it is the right thing to do but it has paid off far more than I could ever have dreamed.

If you found this article of value please be so kind as to share it on your social media platforms.

Posted by hive on Jun 23 2012. Filed under Editorial-Opinion-Musing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry