Driving List Growth with Twitter Is NOT Rocket Science

But, it does take some planning, consistent work, and some creativity. With the tremendous growth of Twitter usage over the last year, it’s hard to ignore the 18 million people currently on Twitter. Here’s a quick overview for how Twitter can drive your email list growth and ultimately your sales. Fasten your seatbelt – this is really cool (and fun) stuff!

1. Create an account. Create a Twitter account at http://twitter.com.
2. Develop a mini-editorial plan. Yes, even these little 140-character Tweets can benefit from a little planning. Know what your goals are right up front. Are you trying to build a list? Are you trying to build support for a cause? Whatever it is, your mini-editorial plan can benefit from what your “target followers” will want to read and benefit from. Create a list of general topics and types of content you might want to tweet. How much news would you want to tweet? How frequently might you want to throw in some sort of promotion? Be sure to think about the tolerance of your target market for what they’re willing to read before they may stop following you.
3. Do a little research. Don’t forget to do a little research before you start tweeting. What keywords should you incorporate? What topics are really hot? Check out TwitScoop for trends on any topic. See an example below for “iPhone.”

   

4. Start tweeting. Jump in the cold pool and start tweeting. The more you tweet, the more people will find you and start following you.
5. Follow others. Yes, it’s important for you to follow others because that’s one of the ways they find you. Identify the primary bloggers/Twitter users in your market and start following them. Some just might start following you, too.
6. Retweet other tweets. If you find a great tweet, re-tweet it. If someone retweets your tweets, thank them.
7. Mild promotion could get you somewhere – whether blatant promotions or mild promotions will be best depends upon your market. Once you have a strong following and people are appreciating your content (yes, content is still king and what drives all of this – that’s the publisher coming out in me!), start making some offers. Or, make some offers early on to get people to follow you.
8. Move them down the sales funnel with email. So, here’s where email comes in. As you get more followers, incentivize them to join your email list too. Those will be your best prospects, right? They now know you and trust you enough to sign up for more. Now is the time to use email to begin moving them down the sales funnel, but that’s a topic I’ve covered before.

So, basically, it works like the below diagram:

Want to learn more? Check out this interesting article on how Twitter drives traffic.

If you need some advice or even some additional resources in any aspect of your interactive campaigns, be sure to give FulcrumTech a call at 215-489-9336 or contact us online. We love this stuff! And, don’t forget to follow us on Twitter.