HOW TO GET “IN FRONT” OF YOUR INDUSTRY IDOLS USING TWITTER
Karen Haller, Creative Director at Colour and Design Consultancy, also spoke at our recent Entrepreneur Country Workshop in partnership with Constant Contact. Here, she explains how she has optimised her time promoting her business across Twitter.
Marketing on Twitter is not just about sharing your latest offers, or building rapport with your followers, business prospects and clients. It’s also about creating relationships with people who can help you, and vice-versa.
I have successfully used Twitter (@KarenHaller) to build relationships with some well known and important people, which has led to me being listed as one of the Top 100 UK interior design Twitter influencers, being invited to speak at industry events and offered press passes to some great shows in my field.
This has not happened completely by chance, because Twitter gives you the opportunity to get in front of industry leaders and industry experts with the real potential to have conversations with them—and ultimately be seen as their peers.
So how do you get started?
First of all, find the leaders and prominent tweeters in your industry you want to connect with. Watch them for a while to learn what they tweet about and how they interact with their followers.
This will help you know whose eye you’d like to catch with your tweeting. Once you have decided who you want to get in front of, here are some tips to get you started:
1. Ensure your Twitter bio clearly states who you are and what you do. Most people use your bio to decide whether to follow you or not.
2. Follow them. You never know they may follow you back straight (especially if they like your bio). This also gives you the chance to keep a closer eye on what they’re up to.
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3. Enter any competitions they are running, respond if they ask their followers a question, RT (retweet) their articles and generally support what they are doing on Twitter.
4. Engage with them. Ask
a question or comment on something they are doing. This is more likely to open up a conversation instead of simply giving a general statement. However, be careful about this, don’t just jump in like a crazy stalker and start hassling them. Play it cool.
Taking these steps really does work, and a good example is when Tamsin Fox-Davies from Constant Contact wrote a blog post entitled “You Are Not Richard Branson.” She and some of her colleagues tweeted about the post over the course of several days. A member of the Virgin social media team picked up on the tweet and they in turn mentioned it in one of their own blogs and tweeted this and put it on Facebook.
Karen Haller
Then Richard Branson himself wrote a blog about it (he even made reference to a tweet I’d sent). This gave Tamsin the opportunity to engage in a conversation on Twitter with @RichardBranson via the @ConstantContact handle. Where else other than social media would you get access so quickly? This result was quite unexpected and extraordinary don’t you think?
A similar thing happened to me, and this is why I say that
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