Before this summer, I found myself sitting in the exact same situation as you, asking the exact same questions you have. How can I gain more twitter followers? How can twitter generate sales for a small business and finally how can twitter increase web performance for a Cheshire based small business?
After attending a social media workshop provided by Connecting Cheshire Superfast Business. I decided that I would try and implement my findings with a side project that I currently have which is Knutsford Menus. Looking to increase the social profile, as well as increasing the web performance to generate more visitors, this Knutsford based small business had just shy of 70 followers.
Using the techniques I learned from the workshop, I will provide you with some helpful social media hints, tricks and tips which will not only allow you to gain organic twitter followers, but will also help optimizes web performance and increase visitors over time.
4 easy ways to grow your small business twitter following
- Follow your required audience
- Repeat your message
- Develop a niche topic
- Reach out and ask your followers
Follow your required audience
First things first, you have to set out your goals, so who would you ideally like to have following your business and the updates that you want to share? Below is just a small selection of accounts that you could research.
- Industry Leaders relevant to your field
- Who industry leaders are listening too
- Competitors
- Local businesses and local users
- People you know
If you are new to twitter please make sure that you don’t register and follow hundreds of accounts because chances are, they won’t follow you back and assume that you are one of the 20 million fake twitter accounts. A good general rule of thumb is to try and follow 20% more accounts than currently follow you. Hopefully over time, by implanting these tips not only will your followers increase but so will your website performance.
Repeat your message
In all honesty, there is nothing worse than a twitter user who constantly retweets their message. You would think that it this would annoy your followers or increase the risk of losing a few but chances are, your followers will not be reading every tweet you send!
According to twitter guru Jeff Bullas the number of average twitter followers is 208 per account. Depending on peak time of every twitter user, chances are the novice twitter user will have missed your tweet. So by rephrasing and retweeting your best content, chances are that some followers that missed the original tweet will read and interact with your latest post.
Develop a niche topic
If you tweet just about anything and everything, chances are you won’t gain much interaction or followers. However, if you have a lot of knowledge about something, find and share what you know with your target audience. In this case I wanted to share restaurant updates with the local people of Knutsford.
By posting and sharing news on new restaurants, menu updates, offers and new features added to the website, I developed a niche market where the local people of Knutsford would benefit by reading what I tweeted. If you are struggling to find what to tweet about, go to websites and message boards related to your topic and answer questions that you may find on your travels.
Reach out and ask your followers
Once you have written your niche content that’s worth sharing, don’t be afraid to start the ball rolling and ask other followers to share your content for you. By emailing or by sending a direct message, connect with industry leaders or followers that are relevant to your field and ask them to share it. Don’t be afraid to revisit websites and message boards and promote your content there either!
According to The Next Web by adding the word ‘retweet’ in your message, followers are up to 12 more times likely to want to help share and retweet your content for you. This strategy has proven to be useful for even major corporations such as the ‘American Red Cross’.
Conclusion
As you can see, by implementing these helpful tips Knutsford Menus has now over 380 followers which have seen an increase in almost 300 in such a short period of time. Just this week alone, I have managed to gain 9 more followers with over 200 impressions.The web performance of this small business based in Cheshire now also oversees over 1000 hits to the website every month.
If you have found our blog on how to organically grow your small business account, perhaps you might also find some of our other web performance blogs useful such as how to construct the perfect content for your website or 5 SEO tricks you should look to avoid. If you are a small Cheshire based business looking to maximise your web performance, why not contact James Cox on 01565 653616 or pop in for a coffee?