Well I’ve jumped on the twitter bandwaggon and have started Twittering on at http://twitter.com/AmityWeb. I actually think I am quite late. I’ve found many successful Twitterers (?) that have been doing it for a couple of years now and have built up quite a reputation and following. I wish I started a couple of years ago. But now I am here I am trying to embrace the Twitter community with open arms and just hope I can provide some useful information (you will be pleased to know I don’t have a cat so you wont be getting updates on that!).
This blog post is just to raise some questions at this time and hopefully to obtain some feedback from you readers, so please feel free to add comments.
What I Want to Achieve
I am not the sort of person to tell the world (non) intersting updates on my personal life. I don’t want to follow others telling me what they are doing now, and I practice what I preach, so am not going to use it to inform my followers “I had a nice cup of tea”. I follow people to learn. I want regular, fresh and up to date information and news about my work and my interests (one and the same). I therefore want followers who are interested in the same thing. The objective is to all learn from each other, helping us and our businesses move forward.
Like every other business owner, I also want my business to make more sales. I can see the potential in Twitter for this. Combined with my blog I hope to increase my followers, impart useful information to them via the tweets or blog and ultimately hope to become more prominent and known in my industry in this area which hopefully will lead to more sales. I think Twitter can be a useful means to do that, so I am now in a steep learning curve with so many things to learn.
So Many Things to Learn
How do I increase my followers?
This is the crucial question… I have read many websites and most say the same thing. I will be trying some of them out (I don’t want to do all of them) and think this will be a slow process. The key will be to build up relevant followers. Maybe this can be done via building up loads of non-relevant followers so get to people through their network, or maybe not. At the moment I think 90% of my followers are spammers and “marketeers”.
What Should I Tweet About to Maintain Interest?
I think the tweets need to be a mixture of business and personal. Business related to provide useful information on blogs, twitter, joomla, zencart, cakephp, wordpress, seo etc. and impart knowledge that others are interested in, but also to put a human face to the posts by also mixing them up with some personal tweets. I would like to get to know the people I follow and who follow me.
When is the Best Time to Tweet To Maximise Read and Click Through Rates?
I’ve also been tempted to tweet late at night but then wondered if any relevant people would see them. The people I am interested in reading my tweets mostly would read them during working hours. So certainly during working hours is the best time for me, but then at what times?
The Ultimate Question for Business – How Do I Make Money from Twitter?
Finally, like anyone, I would like to make money from it. I can only see two methods at the moment and that is 1) try to become known and respected enough so people would want to use my business services or 2) drive people to sites with adwords etc. I don’t think the latter will drive enough traffic to make money and its not what I want, so building up my own profile to increase my business clients is probably my main goal.
So some intersting questions I hope to find out and answer over the coming months!