Ten Painless Tactics To Earn Attention On Twitter

Hey, everyone, welcome to Whiteboard Friday. No, I am not Rand. My name is Dan Shure, and I’m an SEOmoz associate. I’m here in the MozPlex for the MozCon Conference. I’m very excited. I just flew in a little bit earlier today, and I’m going to do the Whiteboard Friday this week.

Today, we’re going to talk about the Top Ten Twitter Tactics times three. So I’ve got three lists here of ten tactics for each category that we’re going to go through. Those categories first are attention, that is getting attention onto your profile or who you are, just getting noticed by people that don’t follow you. The second is audience, so that is getting people to follow you and then maintaining that audience, and the third is action. So that is getting people to take actions from your tweets, from the people that are following you.

So let’s get right into the first one. For attention, the first thing I would say is you want to set up a profile that looks professional, that has personality, and that stands out in a way that you will get noticed. That might be a nice looking photo. That might be a clear user name, not something with a lot of underscores or weird digits in it or things that aren’t spaces. You want to have it be something that people will instantly recognize as your name.

Second, you want a contrast what’s happening out in Twitter a little bit and kind of stand out. So I’ll give you a few examples. One might be, suppose . . . so I’m a tad nervous. I’m not going to stop though. We’re doing this in one take. So, to contrast and stand out a little bit. If a lot of people around you are tweeting things that are really long, like using the full 140 characters, if you do a lot of short tweets, you’re going to stand out more because you’re going to look different than everyone else.

Also, if you do what I like to call – what I’ve been trying to do – double tweeting, and that is I will tweet once, that’s kind of the prep tweet to get people’s attention, and then a second tweet to actually do the action, to get people to do the action. Or actually, that second tweet will have the content that I want people to really notice.

Third, indirect mention. So what I mean by this is suppose you’re trying to get an influencer to pay attention to you, but you want to use, maybe, a little bit more of a soft sell sort of tactic. What you can do is if you find an article or something of theirs that you really like, you can tweet that but just mention them in it in a way where you’re not trying to get a response or being really hard sell about it. It’s just a little bit of a soft sell, and I think influencers especially really appreciate that, especially if you talk about their post in your tweet in an original way and grab their attention.

Number four, ask for help. A lot of people say you should help others to get attention, but you can get a lot of attention just by asking for help. Then when you ask people for help, ask people to retweet you. “Hey, I need to find a programmer for this project” or “Hey, does anybody know the answer to blah, blah, blah” and you ask for a retweet. And then people start retweeting that. You can get some attention that way. And the other thing this does is this shows people that you’re willing to learn, that you’re out there to get help from other people and try to get better at whatever it is that you’re doing.

Number five, helping others. So Will Reynolds has talked a lot in the past about using “if this, then that.” It’s IFTTT.com to set up alerts for certain people or certain keywords. When those tweets happen, you’ll get a text message or an email or some type of alert, however, you want it to be set up, and you’ll get that and so you can react to that right away. Suppose there’s an influencer, for example, that maybe needs help with their computer and you can help with computers. Maybe you’re trying to get the attention of somebody that’s a food blogger, and they don’t know anything about computers. They tweet something, “Hey, I need help with my computer”, and then you get a text message from IFTTT, and you can respond to that right away and help that person out.

Number six, listen. Go away from Twitter and do something and then come back and deliver. So here’s an example. A few months ago Rand tweeted something, actually about IFTTT. He said, “Hey, somebody in inbound marketing should write about IFTTT. It could be this great new inbound marketing thing.” Most people might reply to that, “Oh, yeah, hey, Rand, I’ll write about that” or like, “Hey, Rand, do you think this would be a good idea if I do blah, blah, blah?” But what I’m saying here is to listen. He’s already said he’s looking for that content. It might be interesting. I went and wrote that post without asking permission. I just went and did it. Then the next day, 24 hours later, I came back, I tweeted it, and I said,
“Hey, here’s something Rand suggested” and he retweeted it, and that post has done very well. So that’s suggestion six.

Seven, consistency. This is kind of like traditional branding in a way where you’re trying to get your logo to be recognized by people instantly, like the Starbucks logo or like the Nike logo. You want people to see it and know exactly what it is. This is very much that same mindset. So what I mean by consistency is if you’re trying to get an influencer to notice you, you don’t want to try to go for that quick sell or that quick reaction or try to jump . . . it’s like approaching a girl right away, like too quickly. You want to, over time, maybe respond to questions or maybe ask them a question or mention them. If they see you doing things on a consistent basis and putting out content that’s good on a consistent basis, then they’re going to notice you. That’s going to be a much stronger type of relationship and type of attention that you will have earned by that consistent action.

Number eight, so this is great actually. I don’t know how many of you have participated in SEO Chat or I think there’s a PPC Chat, but this is a great way to get attention outside of your existing audience in Twitter. I think SEO Chat is on Thursday nights. They might have changed it, but it was Thursday nights, and PPC Chat, I think, is Tuesdays. You can go into any of these and just say, “Hey, what’s up? I’m checking it out.” Get some people to notice you that are part of that community. The great thing about that is you’re walking into a built-in community, something on Twitter that’s already happening. You’re getting tons of people to notice you right away with that hashtag.

Number nine, a little similar. So we’re at MozCon now. I think anybody would be really smart to use the MozCon hashtag while they’re here in a way where they can get attention. So I’ll give you another example. Last summer I was at the Affiliate Summit, because I won a free ticket, and as an SEO at an Affiliate Summit, there were a lot of affiliate marketers there but not many SEOs. So I used the hashtag for the event and tweeted, “Hey, anybody would like help with SEO, come find me.” That was a perfect way to get people’s attention because you’re in a conference full of affiliates, and you’re one of the only SEOs. So you can use hashtags like that very strategically at events, live events.

Finally, number ten, retweets from followers that influencers will see. Let me explain that a little more carefully. So I’ll give another example. A year ago when I was first starting out in the public world of SEO, there were a few influencers that I wanted to make sure saw me, like Rand, Will Reynolds, and Tom Critchlow, and people like that. I knew that if a few of the people that were already following me retweeted my content, if let’s say Tom Critchlow was following John Doherty, if John retweeted something of mine, Tom would see it. And the more that happened, the more I would be in front of influencers and not just my immediate audience, and that was done intentionally.