Giga Mundo – Marketing

Social networks are really important nowadays. Everyone is talking, sharing, interacting there. So you need be there too!

Easy in theory, but not so easy to do, because it requires real interaction with other people and writing messages able to grab attention. This guide shows my current Twitter Marketing Strategy.

ATTENTION: Twitter has changed its rules recently, so it’s a good idea bookmark this article and recheck it frequently in order to be up-to-dated always!

Twitter Marketing Guide

Day #1

First, go to Twitter and create one user account for each niche. If you have seven weight loss websites, you don’t need have seven user accounts, just one (UPDATE: but, it’s interesting to create secondary accounts for retweet content from main account, so you can increase its reach easily). If possible, your username should contain your brand, keyword or niche name (UPDATE: for secondary accounts, you can use keyword or niche names or person names – use person names for twitter accounts to retweet content from several niches).

For each user account, follow standard steps of Twitter (follow 5 people, after other 5 people, start tweeting, etc.) and, later, follow some people (I’ll explain how to choose people to follow later) until to follow 50 people. Now, you should send more two or three tweets (no links for now!).

Create and save a text file with relevant keywords for each main account. Let’s suppose that your niche is “dog training”, so you should have a list containing expressions like “dog behaved badly”, “dog needs training”, “how can i train dog” etc. You’ll use these keywords to search potential followers tweeting that.

Day #2 – #20

For each user account, follow more 50 – 60 people daily, later, publish one tweet via Twitter website and schedule two or three others via Twuffer website. No links yet. Don’t hurry.

Check if someone retweeted or mentioned you. If yes, you should write a tweet thanking and including @username retweeted/mentioned.

Do you remember that relevant keyword list? So, take that list and search tweets containing those expressions (without quotation marks) and reply something useful for that recent tweets. Reply 10 – 15 tweets daily, but don’t copy and paste same reply.

Day #21 – ?

Now, you are following 1000 people or more and many of them are following you. You should keep following potential followers, but max. follows per day will depend on your current follower amount. See:

Current followers	Max. follows per day	Max. follows per hour
0 – 500	50 – 60	50 – 60
501 – 750	70 – 90	70 – 90
751 – 1000	90 – 115	90 – 115
1001 – 1500	180 – 230	90 – 115
1501 – 2000	270 – 345	90 – 115
2001 – 3000	400 – 500	90 – 115
3001+	700 – 850	90 – 115

Realize that, in recent Twitter updates, aggressive following is being severely punished (locking your account and, sometimes, suspending temporarily or definitively), so you should respect max. follows per day and per hour!

That’s good, but new user accounts can’t follow more than 5000 people, so you should start to unfollow some people (I’ll explain how to choose people to unfollow later). How many unfollows? It depends on your follower amount and “activity amount” in your account, but we can guess 3x max. follows without following no one is a good number. In other words, one account with 600 followers can follow 80 OR unfollow 240 in a day, but not follow 80 AND unfollow 240!

Write some tweets using Twitter website, but now you can (and must) schedule many tweets in Twuffer. And yeah, your tweets can have links (direct links or shortened links, using Google URL Shortener). There are usernames putting links in each message, but I prefer to not take so much risk and include one link for every two or three messages (I’ll explain later how to get phrases to tweet with your links).

Slowly, your “follow limit” will increase, but what matters is how many people are following you back (and if they read and like your tweets!).

How to choose people to follow

In order to find good followers, you need know what you want:

• Just increase followers number: if your account is new, you should try to increase that number quickly and better way is following amazin potential “followbackers”. Followers from @bella__angel (english), @xM___G___W___Vx (english) and @CLUBEFOLLOWBACK (portuguese) are good for it. Another option is following recent followers from huge accounts, like: @JustinBieber (english) and @RedeGlobo (portuguese);
• Get possible targeted followers: in previous item, we got good numbers, but they can not be interested in our content. Now, you need targeted followers, probably followers of others users in your niche;
• Get more engagement and reach: if you want to increase your retweet or favorite amount per tweet, try to follow people retweeting or favoriting tweets from huge accounts or niche accounts. If you have good content, they will retweet too!

So, if you know some Twitter user in your niche with a big follower list (at least 150K), those last followers are online or are very active (and will be online soon) and many of them will follow you back. If you don’t know, so go to a big brand (like @CNN, if you are focusing on English niches) with millions of followers and follow its latest followers.

How to choose people to unfollow

If your account doesn’t have many followings yet (less than 5K), you can do it manually. In order to unfollow people you followed some time ago intead recent followings, go to “followings” tab and scroll down until show all followings. Now, unfollow last “no-followers” and going up that page.

But, it can be exhaustive, in my opinion. Fortunately, there are websites to help you:

• If you intend to unfollow up to 100 people daily, go to Just Unfollow (UPDATE: now called Crowdfire) and you can do it for free;
• If you intend to unfollow more than 100 people and have less than 10K followings and 10K followers, go to Friend Or Follow and… you can do it for free, too!

Crowdfire is easier and faster than Friend Or Follow, but if you reached that limit, it’s better to use a slower solution than paying USD 9.90 monthly, don’t you agree?

How to get phrases to tweet with your links

That’s easy: in your own posts and articles! If you have a blog (and you should have!), you have content. Copy and paste your content in a notepad (I prefer Notepad++), break your content into phrases and include your link in end of each phrase (in frequency you wish, that is, for every message, or other message, or three messages, etc.).

Remember each tweet can’t have more than 140 characters, so you can need truncate that phrase. Here is an example of one tweet truncated:

“Let’s suppose it’s a big phrase and I need truncate […] http://goo.gl/url-shortened”

Do it with other articles, if you want, and you’ll have a list with hundreds of tweets! Of course, some of those phrases can not be so good and you can discard them, but you’ll have many tweets, anyway.

Now, go to Twuffer and schedule those tweets. How many tweets per day? I’m not completely sure, but I guess if you tweet 15 or 20 tweets daily (in different times of the day) you can reach a good part of your followers and no one will complain about excessive tweeting / advertising.

Another way to get more tweets is gathering or buying inspirational quotes (in your niche or not). Some time ago I purchased a list with more than 40K quotes (inspirational, jokes etc.) and I’m still using it.

Automation and Tools

Even if you prefer to do manually, in some moment you’ll have 5, 10 or even 20 accounts and doing everything manually will be like a hell! In this situation, you can automate most of tasks. But, here, be careful to not abuse it, or your account will be locked/suspended/banned!

Currently, I use Follow Liker for Twitter to do it. Why? Because this tool is one-time payment, so I don’t need pay monthly subscription (one year ago, I used to pay for Crowdfire when I had only 5 main accounts). Other tools I use are Tweetily (free WP plugin to tweet old posts) and WP Tweet Machine (paid WP plugin to tweet and retweet several kinds of content).

But, even if automation can help you to do several things, you need guarantee your content has big quality and your account doesn’t look like a robot talking. So, write amazing tweets (100 – 150 per account), rewrite and spin it manually and use your favorite tool to publish them 20 – 25 times per day.

Results

As I said, progress in Twitter Marketing is slow and I have started it recently, so I have few results until now. One of my user accounts have more than 4K followers and it drove 181 visits in last 30 days. I’ll update this guide when I have at least 500 visits monthly from that Twitter account.

UPDATE: Actually now, 2 years and half later, my biggest account has almost 60K followers and, according to Twitter Analytics, links tweeted on it were clicked 1,000 times in last 30 days (that’s weird because, according to Google Analytics in my website, it got 1,500 visits from Twitter in last 30 days). My second biggest account has more than 39K followers and, according to Twitter Analytics, links tweeted on it were clicked 200 times (here, it matches with Google Analytics data).

Resources and Links

Friend Or Follow – http://friendorfollow.com

Follow Liker – http://followliker.com

Google URL Shortener – http://goo.gl

Crowfire – http://crowfireapp.com

Notepad++ – http://notepad-plus-plus.org

Twitter – http://twitter.com

Twuffer – http://twuffer.com

Tweetily – Tweetily plugin page

WP Tweet Machine – http://wptweetmachine.com

This guide will be updated periodically! Internet Marketing is very dynamic and, likely, some techniques can not work within 6 monthes or more. We’ll update this list periodically, so you should bookmark this page and visit it again later.