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Okay. Today we’re talking Twitter and specifically how does Twitter benefit business. Now, I’ll be upfront. I am NOT the guy to come to to learn about Twitter but Michelle is. Not the guy but the gal, the person, the expert. So stick around. Alright. So, let’s lay the foundation here. You’ve got some credibility with Twitter. How many how many Twitter followers do you have? -We have 307,000 followers on our startup princess channel. -And you’ve actually got a few… A few different Twitter, it that right? That’s your big one. So, over 300,000. -I mean, it’s not like I’m celebrity status. But for a small business, it’s pretty great. -I don’t know how many I… Might be like 50. 10? -Great. -10 people are hearing from you. -They’re not actually. Because I don’t… I don’t tweet. So, I’m excited to do this video really just to kind of… Because it’s something that I still don’t understand. We mean, we’ve chatted about it before. But I want to get into I say the phrase nitty-gritty. I said it, a few times today. Because I don’t enjoy Twitter. And I don’t know why. Because I know you love Twitter. Talk to me about first of all why you love Twitter? -Okay, before I do, I need to say like this is like social media anonymous. Like I hate Twitter. It’s okay. Like I don’t believe that every, every business has to be on every social media platform. I do believe that it’s okay for you to pick your favorites and to play powerfully there and I would much rather business owners choose one or two places and go deep than be in 8 different outlets and not do any of them any justice. So, it is okay for it not to be your primary medium? That said any chance I get I’m happy to tell people why I love Twitter. And first and foremost is that Twitter is the best right now. And this could change in time. But still, over the last decade is the best for links. So, where Facebook and Instagram and some of the others are really not link friendly and they don’t want you to post links and they will lower that in the algorithm, doesn’t affect in Twitter at the same amount. Which means that Twitter, my second point on why I love this is bringing me the most traffic to my websites.
So, continually Twitter is my number 1 on all of my sites for traffic back to my web locations. -You’ll check that through your analytic. -I track them through my Google Analytics so I can see where things are coming from. And so I’m sharing content, I’m sharing past blog posts, I’m sharing new blog posts, I’m sharing videos, I’m sharing podcasts and I’m still getting the most traction from Twitter than I am through any other social platform. -That’s real important to hear. That something that I haven’t ever heard before. What really motivates me to use YouTube and why I gotten such great results on LinkedIn is because I I know the result, I know how to get it. -Sure. -And so to be able to have a tangible result like that thinking there’s a lot of things that I’m doing but I can look at my analytics and I’m getting most of my traffic to my website through Twitter, it’s actually a big deal. -Yeah. And I can work my strategy around it. And in some cases I’m using it like a crutch and I’m careful with that. Because I also tell my clients when they’re deciding on their social media outlets that your most important responsibility is your own home court advantage. And in the business world that’s your website, it’s your retail location it’s your platform. At any given time, Twitter to change and at any given time, iTunes can drop your podcast. It happened to somebody I listened to last week. At any time, Facebook can shut down your website. And also happens on YouTube too or they can say nope you can’t put anything out anymore. It’s rare but it can happen. And so your most important marketing responsibility is your own home court advantage where there’s no distractions, there’s not lots of other things going on. Yet, at the same time, I can use Twitter to facilitate that right now. So I can get people back to my website and away from social media distractions by utilizing Twitter. And so it’s funny because I forget too. Sometimes I’ll get into the habit and I’ll get excited about playing and Instagram stories for a while and be like, “Oh my gosh, I haven’t tweeted and I need to go back and tweet with my audience and engage with them.” But because of that traffic, that is one of my biggest hot buns. -Alright. So one thing that i know that a strength that I see on Twitter that I would like to use, I just haven’t been able to convince myself to do it. Okay, the strength that I see is it’s a great way to like join in a conversation. -Absolutely. -I feel like, okay, if I’m if I’m going to use Twitter properly and start you know, jumping into conversations so that I can network with some great people, I see it as is it’s going to take more time and more effort. Where I’m trying to reduce my time and become you know, I’m always trying to become more and more efficient. And I know how to hire somebody else. But I have a hard time like… Feeling like I can hire somebody to… Because it’s you can have pretty one-on-one conversations, real conversations with people on Twitter. Almost like you would in a text message. So, how can I do that without it taking up my time? -Okay, so a couple of things that you mentioned in there that I think are really key. One of the other reasons why I love Twitter is because the conversations are already happening. You can just dive in. And Twitter is still hashtag friendly. Facebook tried to get into the hashtag game. They came in late, it didn’t really work and now if you put hashtags in and often lowers and they algorithm. Because they don’t want you to hijack a hashtag. Twitter doesn’t care about that. And if you want to hijack Megan Markel for example, you can’t. Now, I don’t recommend businesses do that unless they have a legit reason to hash tag into trending conversations. But it’s easy to tap in. So I might only have 307,000 followers but if I do hashtag marketing or hashtag small business or hashtag work at home moms or whatever it is, I can tap into another conversation that’s way more than even my following. And I can also create conversations that way too. One of the ways that we built our audience and it still works today. Not exactly the same way but it still works in principle form is by creating conversations people care about. So, you can either tap into the conversations that are already happening or you can create conversations that people will get interested too so that they can come be part of it. And we built our following through what we call Twitter chats. And so each week on Wednesdays at noon, we would do hashtag startup chat. And so we would have a different subject every single week. When we could be about marketing, next week it would be about press and we would invite other people to participate with us. But then we had this big open conversation. And as long as people use the hashtag, we could follow along. And people would ask us questions. We’d put questions out to a panel of people. But then we gave everyone the microphone. We gave all these business owners that we were friends with an opportunity to have that conversation with us. And so they were sharing their tips, their advice. And they were tapping into a bigger conversation. They might only have a hundred followers but they were tapping into a bigger conversation they couldn’t have either. And so we were curating and collaborating on conversations through hashtags that helped build our following but also helped tell really good stories. And I love and I can’t say this enough. I think that it’s marketers, it’s really hard to condense our messages. We want to share everything about what we do. But Twitter forces you to be concise. It’s an awesome tool to share small tips, tricks, bits of information and forces you to hone your message without going completely overboard. And as a result, it’s easy for other people to digest because it’s so concise. -Alright.
So, I love answering questions. -Sure. -I love teaching and training. And so I find on Twitter, I felt like, “Okay, I’m just going to tweet, Isn’t the weather amazing today?” Like I can’t wrap my head around something that’s so short like that. So, I can’t wrap my head around somebody else that started a conversation with the elastic question. And I’ll go in and I’ll answer it or whatnot. Is there a good way to share content or do I need to use other platforms for the sharing of the content? -Okay. So and you also asked this before too and then I went down like hijacking conversations. But the real question is how do you decide what to say? So, are you on Twitter and how do you do it without it taking over your life? The reality is that you can post a hundred times a day. And if your audience doesn’t care then they’re happy that you’re doing it. Which is different than any other platform. So you can share a lot more. I don’t share a hundred times a day because I can’t think of a hundred things to say in a day. But I do get specific. One of the videos that we talked about before was creating your core message. And deciding what your core messages is a business. And I use that as a foundation for my Twitter messages. And then I will pick a theme for every month. So for one month I talked about leadership and another month I talked about success principles and then another month I’m going to talk about marketing. And maybe even another month, I’ll talk about a marketing content. And then what I’ll do is I will curate write and create graphics around a specific theme and I will schedule those in advance. There’s a lot of different schedulers out there. I use HootSuite. But there’s a few others that work. And so I will schedule the conversation that I want to have. But it doesn’t just work to schedule and forget it. And so, what I do is I go in for 15 minutes a day and I interact. So, in the morning, I’ll spend 5 minutes. In midday, I’ll spend 5 minutes. And the evening, I’ll spend 5 minutes. If I’m having a good time, I might stay longer. But I’ll go in and interact with people and I’ll retweet other people’s things. And I’ll respond to people who gave me comments and questions. And I’ll see who asked me questions that I can respond to. And so, there’s still an organic element but there’s a very strategic element to helping move along our messaging and our topics of expertise by doing that in advance so that the organic stuff is easier to take care of and that the frequency is there. And I’ll pick which podcast I want to promote, which things I want to get done. But generally speaking, I’ll schedule out a month in advance. And then it just takes me in there engaging with the audience. Because I don’t want you to schedule engagement. That should be organic. You can schedule content but not engagement. -Okay. So one thing that I’m trying to wrap my head around. Let’s say I were to dive in and do Twitter and do it the right way. I don’t like memes or quotes that are… Like I’m just, “Here’s a cool book. Great, I can send out a quote.” You know, every hour, every day. It’s like I want to… If I’m going to make a quote or make a meme or you know, something caption on a photo, it’s like I want it to be a quote that really is coming from me or that’s part of my brand and whatnot. Seems like, “Yeah, that would be effective. Man, that’s a whole lot of work.” So, I’m just… Just asking like what do you literally do? Do you… Do you really write out a whole bunch of… How much… How much time and effort do you really do? How much of it is really you, your content, your message. How much of it is stuff that you just you find that… What’s realistic here? -So, I tell people… And this we could talk about for this for like 8 hours. But… -How long is this video? -Yeah. Not very long. But the quick answer is, I tell people two, two, fifteen, fifteen. And what I mean by that is two hours a year, two hours a month, fifteen minutes a week and fifteen minutes a day. And so, it takes me about 2 hours a month to create all the content I want. And I’m sharing tips, I’m sharing advice, I’m sharing information that’s coming from me and my brand. I do have quotes because we found that people love quotes and they’re the most shareable. And I also think it’s good to have other people confirm what you’ve been saying.
And so, it’s good to find other resources of .what people are saying out in the world You can also curate good content of what people are looking at. But in 2 hours a month, I can really do my whole months worth of posts. -I know that you’re not finished with what you’re saying. But that right there obviously already gives me a big help. Because I love… I love doing things in batches. So I filmed here more episodes in a day for YouTube. -Mm-hmm. -I don’t know why I haven’t wrapped my head around doing that for Twitter. But if… If I were to… One, I have to know the type of content that is going to work. -Sure. -But if I can… if I can spend 2 hours. You know or whatever block of time. And get it done for the entire month, that’s really from me that it’s not just coming from a quote book like that. All these helicopters flying by. -They care about this message too. -Or they they’re trying to distract us. They don’t want people to use Twitter. -Those are the Facebook helicopters. -So anyway, um maybe we were just making up. Maybe there weren’t really even helicopters. Anyway, any final tips you want to share on Twitter for business? -No. I think that to your point is right. Batching it is going to bring you the best success. And also helps you look at it as a whole. Instead of waking up in the morning and saying, “What am I going to post today.” And it’s a random thought. You’re actually sitting down from a business standpoint and saying, “What do I need people to know about my business this month and how can I provide value?” And part of that is not just about pulling quotes. I tell people that they need to provide tips and advice, they need to provide questions to get people to interact and engage, they need to sell, they need to get people to sign up for their email list. So grow your use Twitter to grow your email list. And the last one is sale selling. But selling is only 10% about what you do. And so everything else are things that you’ve created. But also the final tip I will say on this because I know we could talk for a long time. Don’t be afraid to use old things. So I have a list has old blog posts, old videos, old podcasts. And if they’re still relevant, obviously, if they’re not time sensitive, I will still share those. And so it’s not about creating brand new things every time, it’s about sprinkling in some of the past things that you’ve done. Because those are just as relevant and valuable today as they were 2 or 3 years ago. Assuming they haven’t changed. -Yeah. If I think of a really good tweet that I sent out right now. And 5 people see it, I could probably send that tweet again. And not have any problems. -Mm-hmm. -I’d have one more quick question. -I like it. Does Twitter have a scheduler or do you need to use something like HootSuite? -So, currently, Twitter doesn’t have their own scheduler. They have third-party. Facebook has their own scheduler and you should always use the Facebook scheduler. But for Twitter third parties, there’s like buffer which is also can be a good one. I’m used to HootSuite and HootSuite seems to play well in the sandbox. But right now that’s the way. -Cool. There is Twitter and why we should be using it. -Excited. -Thanks Michelle. Be sure to subscribe. Got lots of amazing videos here. Of course because I made them. -Right. -We’ll see you tomorrow.