Assignment 4, Bootcamp #6 - Twitter Marketing, Part 1

[iCraft Admin]

Hi Hofkissed,

The power of Twitter is in numbers. You can scale your account relatively fast if you keep following members that twit about things relevant to your niche. If you have less than 1000 followers on Twitter, you are almost invisible there and can't get enough traffic to secure sales. So the more people follow you, the better. It will also get easier for you to get followers, once you hit a 1000 mark. People like following popular accounts.

How many times per day should you should twit?
There are many different opinions and studies out there - when to twit and how much. You can Google this topic and share with the group what you found useful.

I'd say it's a trail and error situation. Try certain number of twits per day and see if the number of your followers grows or drops off. If they are consistently dropping off then slow down a bit. I think if you twit or re-twit interesting things (sale items & new products fall into this category too) than people will be happy to see your posts. Keep in mind, nobody sits on Twitter all day, so if you twited 20 - 30 times a day, some people will notice only 1 or 2 twits. For that reason you can repeat some twits to make sure more people saw your important messages.

When Guy Kawasaki was talking about his use of Twitter, he said that he tweeted every story he wrote 4 times. The exact same tweet. His rationale was that his audience was tuning into Twitter at several different times during the day and he found that 4 was the optimal number to convert enough of the people reading his posts into traffic back to his website.

So start experimenting with the number of twits you post every day and let us know what you are noticing.

[Hofkissed]

Thanks for the info!

I started replacementing and following more people yesterday. I looked for both things that were interesting to me, and people who not only had a decent following, but people that also followed a lot of other people. I thought that if they had 1,000's of followers, but only followed 100 people, they were less likely to follow me. Not that I expect everyone I follow to follow back, but that was just my thinking.

I started tweeting other things as well - other people's pictures on Instagram, interesting things happening while I'm away for a weekend getaway, etc. I was thinking I was doing something right because one of my tweets was favourited by someone who wasn't following me and I gained two new followers too... people who I was not following.

I also retweeted a couple of interesting tweets yesterday and in one of the articles, it said that you should put "RT" in front of what you were retweeting so that everyone could see it... not just people who followed both you and the person you were retweeting. I didn't have an option though to do that. Maybe I misunderstood.

Anyway, I'm still not too familiar with Twitter and have lots to learn. Sometimes I just don't get it, but I'm going to try.

[Lannie]

I've retweeted from fellow bootcampers and from related sites that I found interesting. Also have followed interesting sites.

Still trying to figure out the best way to use hashtags. I replacemented on the more likely hashtags, like Admin mentioned. There seem to be thousands of occurrences of each. How useful would this be for an individual seller? How useful would it be to make one up - why would people find and use a new tag that might be so specific?

Clearly I'm not quite getting it yet. Will continue to read up, and retry. 

[NoriandChasesCorner]

I have also encountered the same things. I think I get something figured out and then I can't do it again. I've also have retweeted but haven't been given an option to add anything. I'm still working with it.

[iCraft Admin]

Hi NoriandChasesCorner,

If you want to add anything to a tweet, you can copy it, then post it with your note and RT @AuthorName in front of it. E.g. if you like our message "Great finds for Mother's Day", you'd post something like this "RT @iCraft Great finds for Mother's Day - Lovely handmade gifts".

If you don't want to add anything to a message, you simply click on the "Retweet" link below that message.

[iCraft Admin]

Hi Lannie,

You'd use new made-up hashtags only if you tweet as a group, so everyone could easily filter new tweets and follow a specific conversation that only members would know about.

If you want your tweets to be found, you'd use established hashtags and even use a few of them in the same tweet, like "Great #Valentine day #handmade #sale for all #Jewelry lovers + URL".

[Lannie]

Thanks Admin! I appreciate the clarification of the uses of hashtags and the example. This actually makes sense to me!    I'll carry on and practice using hashtags to be found.