Social Machinery

With more than 20 Million users and 8 Million Tweets per day, trying to be someone in the vast landscape of Twitter-land is not easy. Most of the users will try to create a loyal audience but after a while leave their accounts, frustrated by the results.

So, how you can build a loyal base of followers who would like to spend their time reading your tweets?

Let me share 6 Tips for becoming more relevant and build your personal brand reputation

1. Understand Twitter user behavior

Like when you start any business or project you start understanding who is your audience? How they behave? What they expect from you?

This is the only way for creating a compelling Twitter “strategy”.

Twitter is a very exotic social networking animal; Let me share with you some stats from this year :

• 85% of all Twitter users post less than one update per day
• 21% of users have never posted a Tweet
• 5% of Twitter users account for 81% of all activity.
• Until people have 150 followers, they follow about the same number of people. After that, this starts to break down.
• Twitter users with a higher number of followers tend to tweet more often
• 92% of Twitter users follow less than 100 people, while 97% of Twitter users follow less than 400 people.

Some takeaways about these stats are that Twitter activity is mainly driven by a tiny little group of people, the rest of the people are just listening the conversation.

Another important fact is that there are a lot of inactive users, who will add little value to your followers list as they rarely post or they are totally inactive. Finally, is interesting to see that there is some sort of milestone after 150 followers. Once you break that level, the adoption rate of new followers seems to increase at a higher rate.  

2. Follow all your followers
I always compared Twitter to a party and like any party if someone is talking to you, besides greeting him you also need to listen and interact. Courtesy is a critical aspect of Twitter and your followers will highly appreciate it. If you want to have a more direct contact and create rapport with your audience use direct messages. Engage in discussions with people, comments on their tweets. I believe there is nothing different about the way we make friends in the real world than on Twitter.  

You will see some “Twitter snobs”, who don’t interact with anyone and don’t follow people. I believe that this type of indifference will only create an arrogant perception of you.

3. Share relevant information – Content is King
Try to find your niche in Twitter. Is fine to share personal Tweets about trivial things of everyday life, but if you want to build a loyal audience try to create a personal Twitter brand.

If you are expert in technology or maybe know a lot about wines you could try to focus part of your Tweets in this area. You should follow a simple rule of thumb; 30% of your tweets should be engage in current discussions (RT, DM,etc), 40%  related to your area of competence and 30% on general interest/personal matters.

One of the things that is highly appreciated on Twitter, is when you share links about interesting and informative aspects of life or your topic of interest. There are several tools that can help you to find great information that you can share with the world. Also, try to share a fresh point of view about news Don’t become a robot by just retweeting and posting every single link you find related to your topic of interest.

In summary, position your personal brand in certain area of interest and work hard on sharing great information and your personal point of views.

4. Answer all your @replies
Twitter is about connecting people, so unless you start engaging with them, you will never be able to obtain Twitter’s main benefits; establish a dialogue!

There is a lot of people who never replies and this is lack of digital etiquette, if you try to discuss with most of the top Twitter celebrities like @problogger, @Guykawasaki, @chrisbrogan, in most of the cases you will receive a reply back.  What they clearly understand is the fact that social media is a two ways street and you need to establish dialogue for creating a loyal audience. Try to do this and you will see the difference.

5. Tweet regularly

As I mentioned before, most of the Twitter users don’t tweet very often. Erratic Twittering is one of the main reasons for losing audience attention spam. This is an old marketing principle; if you want to position your brand you need to be there always, if not your users will forget your name and start looking for other alternatives. Try to make some time every day for sharing something with your community. Is not about quantity, but keeping quality in mind and having regular habits for engaging with your followers.

6. Share your own content

Twitter is a excellent site for sharing your thoughts with the World and creating buzz about ideas or concepts.  Maybe you already have a blog or you work as a designer, technology expert or an artist. Well, Twitter is the right place for showing and getting genuine feedback about your work.  Is difficult to build a strong reputation and appreciation only by sharing others people work. So, use this site as an entrance door for letting people know what you are able to do.  In Twitter the most important thing to become relevant is to be relevant. I believe that everyone has something unique, maybe some expertise or a disruptive perspective. Well, Twitter is the place to share it.

So in summary, being relevant is about sharing, engaging and connecting. Is also about finding that unique thing you have inside you and sharing it with the world.