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.
Research can produce results.
Over the past few months I have downloaded volumes of free reports and some $7 things about Twitter and Facebook.
I have spent the morning systematically going through them to see if I could find some advice on how to unfollow Twitterers that I’m following. I need to get my ratios in line so I can follow more people and build my list.
Some of the stuff is very outdated, even though I look at when I downloaded it – on Dec 30 or Jan 5. In so many of them, the links take you to sites that are no longer on line. Wasted marketing space in my opinion.
Lesson to be learned here -
When I have my own products, ebooks, and reports available, make sure to keep a list of what’s where and see if it needs updating! Keep my links current so it’s productive marketing for me.
So after days of research I think I may have found a solution.
Someone suggested Twellow to me – and I must say I love it. You can find it at twellow.com . This allows you to search for people that have similar interests as you and then you can see their profile and follow them.
Some of the other programs that I looked at that add followers to your account do such a random add that I realized that’s not what I wanted. My goal is to build a twitter list of people I can connect with and that will post or tweet things that I am interested it. So it’s a bit about quality, not quantity. Personally, I’m not into football or car racing or fix up old / new cars, so when I go to twitter, that’s not what I really want to see. Twellow allows me to choose who I follow so that makes it worth my time to spend time each day connecting with new people.
I also have my Social Oomph set up. I really like this program as well. You can find it at socialoomph.com . It will allow you to schedule tweets up to a day in advance and you can have more than one profile added to your account. I’ve have also used this to set up my account to sent a welcome message to everyone who follows me.
In fact, it will allow you to have rotating messages if you choose to. My message basically say thanks and then invites them to come follow me on Facebook by going to bit.ly/JoinMyFacebook By the way, if you haven’t connected with me on Facebook yet, just click on that and say hello! Maybe mention my blog, Starting After 50, if you want to tell me how you found me.
I guess I should also mention bit.ly. This is a great tool to shorten those long website addresses … 140 characters on Twitter doesn’t give you much room so go to bit.ly and shorten those links. A really handy tool!
The best part about these Twitter helpers … they were all free! Fits my budget just fine!
I’m not making much progress on solving my Twitter problem. I have no idea how in this 30 day challenge I’m suppose to get 5000 followers if I can get past the 2000 limit Twitter puts on my account.
I understand the ratio business which is basically the ratio of Twitter followers to those you are following, or the other way around. Actually I think when they give a ratio it’s actually how many are you following as compared to how many are following you at the same time. I haven’t figured out what the ultimate ratio is as there seems to be some conflict on that issue. But I have concluded that a ratio of 2.17:1 is not good.
I did download and try one program that Angela suggested called Adder. She didn’t give me a complete name so I Googled it and found a program called TweetAdder. I installed that and linked it to my Twitter account. It wasn’t too hard to figure out the settings I wanted the program to use, which were to only unfollow those that have not followed me in 5 days.
Since it’s almost been that long since I was able to follow anyone, I just let the program do it’s thing with anyone on the list. And it seemed to be working. I kept checking my Twitter and the numbers were going down. I started at 2001 that I was following and a couple of hours later I was at 1751. That was great. It took a while because I set the software to unfollow someone every 30 seconds; I think the default was at 9 seconds or something like that, but I changed in in my trying to figure it out.
So this TweetAdder software seems to work. At least it did yesterday.
I went to use it again today to get my ratio down even more … and it told me the limit of the demo was 250 unfollows – which I used yesterday.
Now I need to pay. In Canadian dollars it will be close to $100 as I have two Twitter accounts and plan to open a third which will be attached to my new website.
And I can’t pay. My credit card it maxed (come on, it is a few weeks after Christmas). Well, that’s not the main reason. It’s because I haven’t gotten out of the house due to snow storms, blizzards and bad roads and sidewalks. I haven’t made it to the bank since before Christmas nor to the mail since just after. And I need to get to the bank so I can pay my credit card. Once I do that, I’ll be able to get this software… but until them, I’ll keep researching. Maybe I’ll find a cheaper program – Free would be best.
So while I’m doing that, I’m going to reactivate a Twitter account I opened years ago and bring it back from the dead and get some mew followers on that list.
I am thrilled to announce that my main website is ready and open to the public. I finally was able to work out some of the snags in making the them function properly.
I am also very proud of the content on this site. It’s taken me almost two weeks to research and write the various articles. I believe this is a great basis to start with and I have a list of potential topic to write about in the future.
So go check it out … My new brand and theme for my List Building Business is located at:
Be sure to leave your comments below.
I love hearing from you.
I’m still facing a brick wall with Twitter!
I’m up to 886 followers as of this morning, which is great. 886 in a week and if I could do that for 4 weeks I’d have over 3500 follows in 28 days. Not making the mark of 5000 for the challenge, but still a good following.
What I like the best is that most of those followers are people like myself. People in the working from home, home business category. How did that happen? It’s because I was very choosy in who I chose to follow, people I wanted to connect with, people I thought would encourage and motivate me and then I would be able to bless and motivate them. That’s the win win scenario.
But how can I increase my list. I checked with Angela, the one who started the challenge. She told me I needed to get some software that would automatically have me unfollow those that aren’t following me. Apparently Twitter only allows you a certain ratio of following to followers after the 2000 mark.
I’m obviously not in that correct ratio. So yesterday I did the Google thing. Found what I thought I needed. Set up an account. Set the options on my account to delete everyone who after 4 days has not followed me. And I waited to watch the magic happen.
And I waited. Nothing happened. I double checked the settings. DId a little more research and gleaned that maybe the system works by putting requests into a cue … so I decided to give it some time.
It’s now been over 36 hours since I set it up. This software system has not deleted on person I am following. I’m concluding this one is not working. So I’m going to try a different one today. I’ll uninstall what I did Sunday night and try a new one. I figure I’d better uninstall so there is no chance of conflict.
That’s the Twitter update for today. I want to investigate what Twitter lists are all about. Think I’ll research that a bit today. I also am going to start setting up my Facebook fan page for my list building coaching. Since the site is 98% finished, hopefully 100% by tonight, I can now set up Facebook to link to it.
Then I can start promoting.
Oh, did I tell you that I really like Social Oomph? I’m using it to prepare and store my status updates for Twitter. It can handle more than one account and I’ll eventually link it to my Facebook pages too. I’m using the free version for now and it’s working well.
Do you have any questions you want to ask me about my journey? or make any comments? Feel free to use the comment box below.
The snow storm continues … and I didn’t leave the house and try to venture out to church. It snowed all day yesterday and was still snowing when I went to bed, so at about midnight I had made the decision to stay home on Sunday.
It’s going to be a reading day. I love those because I love reading.
But before I get my nose into the book, I thought I’d quickly do my Twitter “thing”. I’ve been so good all week. Every day I’ve finished my actions for the challenge and since I was home all day today, I wanted to do it today as well.
I’m barely started and then I get notices from Twitter.
It seems I can’t follow anymore Twitter followers as I have reached my limit of 2000. What’s that about? I’ve seen lots of people have accounts that have 30 thousand, 60 thousand people they follow or follow them. What’s with this limit of 2000?
This challenge was set up to get 5000 followers in 30 days. It’s day 7 for me and I can’t get past 2000!!! How am I suppose to reach 5000?
I don’t understand. I am very confused.
This is the link the message took me too:
Twitter Puts on Limits
What have I done for Twitter to stop me?
This was when it happened. Notice, I’m at 2001 following:
Stats of Twitter Challenge Day 7
The point where Twitter stops me. Now what?
