Baby Boomers Building Businesses
I can’t believe how many days it’s been since I’ve had a chance to come and write something. … but it’s been a good busy-ness.
Twitter is a daily event in my life and although I haven’t achieved 5000 or even 2000 connections on one account, I followed the advise of several Twitter gurus and I opened a couple of accounts. I currently have 3 active accounts and I’m sort of targeting each account just a bit differently. I have another account idea that I’ll probably implement next week.
So here are some stats, just so you can see that what I’m doing is really working.
ID EricaFath has 1008 followers – I had this account for years, but never really knew what to do with it and when I started promoting it last week it has 208 followers.
ID StartingAfter50 has 1429 followes – this is the account I opened January 6 to use for my individual 30 Day Challenge that I started January 9.
ID PricelessAlways has 438 followes – this is the account I opened January 21 and am using in the group 30 Day Challenge that started last Friday.
So as of this morning, I have 2875 followers and I added 267 of them in the last two and a half weeks.
I have learned the the busiest and best marketing days on Twitter are Wednesday and Thursdays and from my short time on Twitter I have noticed that more people follow me on those days that over the weekends, so it’s probably true. The Twitter boards are also busier those days.
According to HubSpot’s report, the best days to tweet are Thursday and Friday, but personally, I have found Wednesday to be very busy on Twitter. In fact, last night it was so busy I kept getting the message that the board was overloaded and to come back later.
Another thing that research show it that the best times to tweet are 3 -5 pm and 9 – 11pm EST. This is a great little tip because when scheduling my tweets, I can choose any minute of the 24 hour day, so why not choose the best times.
So knowing what I now know, the strategy I am using is four simple steps to building my Twitter lists … and I do these on each of my accounts.
I tweet several times a day … sometimes I do it live and reply to people’s tweets or retweet something. In fact, in our group challenge, that’s what we are focusing on – promoting each other using the hashtag (#) or retweet using the @ symbol to promote everyone’s business. We were taught to use Hootesuite or TweetDeck to create a list of our group to make it easier to follow each others tweets. Our commitment was to retweet other people’s tweets - 8 to 10 retweets per day – at least 5 days a week for 30 days. This is in addition to our own tweets as we have to be tweeting so others can retweet us.
This is the first week and I haven’t had any trouble keeping up. It’s been kind of fun and I can see how doing this creates interaction between people. In fact, I’m liking it so much that I’m using the same technique and connecting with people who aren’t in the challenge and making new friends. I guess that’s the social part of social media.
I spend time on the weekends finding people I want to follow. I still prefer to do this the manual way using Twellow to find people who are interested in the things I’m interested in. This is also a handy tool to use as that means I can target different interest groups on my different Twitter accounts and then match some of my tweets to focus on that interest.
I have my Social Oomph account set up on all my accounts to automatically follow anyone who follows me AND to automatically send a welcome message to anyone who follows me. In my message I invite them to join me on Facebook … (I’ll talk about my Facebook strategies in another post).
I give people I follow at least 5 days to follow me back. So on Saturdays, I “purge” my list of any unfollowers. I use Twitter Karma to do that for me. It’s a really quick easy to use program and it unfollows in a hurry. By doing this, I give people time on those busier days to find and follow me and yet I can do my manual finding people to follow on my slower day. Honestly, I love Sunday night TV so I’m multi tasking and keeping up with Brothers and Sisters and those Desperate Housewives while I’m making new friends on Twitter. OK … true confessions is over. LOL
Well, that’s where I’m at with Twitter, but there has been so much more I’ve been doing… Facebook, GiveAways, articles, and just learning how to create traffic. But that’s a story for another day.
Oh, and I should mention that this week I’ve spend quit a bit of time training my newest team member on how to use an awesome autoresponder to build their list. She’s a networker and really impressed with this system so I think I have my first sale. Yes, life is definitely exciting … and a bit busy. But I love it! And I think I’ll just keep working my business plan.
