The Recipe:

1 x strong communicator

1 x computer w/ Hootsuite, Tweetdeck or your favorite Twitter app

1 x set of clearly defined target markets

3 x hours per day

Yields: About 50% more twitter followers over 30 days

First, why Twitter?

One of the better descriptions of the business value of Twitter came from John Federico (@gadgetboy):

“Twitter is like the river by which everything flows, all other outlets and social platforms being estuaries, everything still makes it to Twitter where it becomes mainstream”.

Ok, so lets say Twitter is worth a business’s time, now what?

There are a million articles online that explain how “to do the twitter”, no lack of social media experts and Guru’s who promise to use Twitter to get you a bajillion hits for your .biz.  But, what if you are too cash strapped to hire a guru and your core team can’t be as consistent as a solid social media approach requires?  We ran into this at Bubbalon fairly early on.  Alex and I were both saavy, but our hectic days meant that our Twitter efforts were spotty at best and completely inconsistent.

The answer: Interns

A short amount of time, a craigslist post, 10 interviews and 20 phone calls later we hired Jessica (@jessrod354) based on her top notch communication skills, her experience operating her own blog and the social media work she did for her family’s wedding business.

Next step was to build the process she would follow:

1:  Proactively follow twitter users who are actively engaged in key vertical markets

2:  Engage said users.  No, really engage them, talk to them, help them, be human to them, not just treat them like “followers”

3:  Earn reciprocal follows by being REAL as described in step 2

4.  Unfollow users who are spammers, blatant self-promoters or who don’t engage in return*

Jessica chose a few markets she was interested in pursuing which we used to create keyword search streams in our corporate Hootsuite account**.  The markets she chose helped to give her a context for evaluating whether or not we should follow a user.   Next Jessica spent time watching the flow of twitter conversation looking for twitter users with a significant following, a close follower/following ratio and who were highly engaged with their twitter following.  Besides the main stream of people she followed, she watched the keyword search and trending topic streams.

She engaged in whatever real conversation inspired her, and contributed to these streams in the following ways:

• responding to questions or comments
• sharing links to Bubbalon objects that relate to conversations
• exporting her actual Bubbalon ratings to twitter
• being responsive to trending topics, creating corollary objects on Bubbalon and than sharing them to twitter

Her time was split between proactively following users, engaging her twitter community and contributing value to the twitter stream in the form of Bubbalon and non-Bubbalon content.

Traffic to Bubbalon coming from Twitter : July 13th – Aug 12th vs. Aug 13th – September 12th:

Overall

• the Bubbalon Twitter account doubled followers
• Bubbalon received 200% more traffic from Twitter

**To facilitate this process we used a powerful Twitter tool called: Hootsuite.  Hootsuite allows a company to organize Twitter accounts to be able to be used by multiple people, keeping everyone aware of who is doing what, and provides more powerful twitter functionality.  One of the best things about Hootsuite is that you can easily create keywords search “streams” that are very easy to monitor.  HootSuite – Social Media Dashboard for Teams using Twitter