Internet Marketing Coaching

While Twitter is a relativity new application online, the discussion about “Follow You, Follow Me” has been raging since it’s inception. Now if you are wondering what Twitter is you will want to read this weeks newsletter about twitter here.

In the last few months I have been using 2 different strategies with my clients to test which Follow strategy works best for twitter. Today I want to share with you my results from testing and measuring under multiple accounts and in multiple industries.

Twitter 1 – With this account we have been using the Follow You, Follow Me strategy where we target other Twitter users, add them to people we will follow and hope they follow us back. In doing this test we decided that it was best to target people to follow that were relevant to the industry we were tweeting about. So we went and found around 1800 people in the industry and followed them. Remarkably in the small time that we did this (over the period of about 3 weeks) we were able to grow about 1200 followers. So the stats were:

1800 Following

1200 Followers

While this turned out to be a great Twitter list growth strategy the real question is, did these followers convert into traffic, conversion or money for us?

Traffic – We used an internal piece of link tracking software to monitor the traffic that was being driven from our Twitter account to blog posts we were reading and websites we were visiting.  Despite having 1200 followers the links that we were tracking were lucky to get 10 visitors. It didn’t matter what time of day we put the link in, it didn’t matter what words we used before the link we were lucky to get 10 visitors.

Conversion – Again we used an internal piece of conversion tracking software to monitor conversion from our twitter account.  We tried email newsletter offers, free gifts, free reports, products, everything we tried resulted in a conversion rate of 0%. Despite having 1200 followers on twitter, not one of them wanted to take up our offers.

Money – Well we don’t even need to go here, we had little traffic and no conversion so it would be very obvious that we would therefore make no money from this test.

Twitter 2 – With this account we have been using keyword trending research on twitter to place those keywords in our tweets to attract followers. This has been a slow process, in the same time as Twitter 1 we have been able to grow to 202 followers. We are not following back the followers who choose to follow us, but we have followed a few key industry people to add credibility.

Here are our stats:

78 Following

202 Followers

While this turned out to not be a massively quick list building process, the real question is, did these followers convert into traffic, conversion or money for us?

Traffic – We used an internal piece of link tracking software to monitor the traffic that was being driven from our Twitter account to blog posts, websites and images. We found that on average we could expect about 40 visitors from each tweet. In some cases though, we were able to get around 100 visitors.

Conversion – We used an internal piece of conversion tracking software to monitor conversion from our Twitter account.  With just a few tweets we were able to convert 9% of the followers into an email marketing campaign.  Also with just a few tweets we were able to convert around 13% of followers into a product pre-launch campaign.

Money – To this point out of the people to convert into our marketing sequences we have been able to make $54.  Now this may not seem like a lot as of yet, but as we have people still going through marketing cycles we are relatively happy.

Conclusion: While Twitter 2 has taken longer to build a list, it is already proving that it is more targeted and that the people who follow us are more interested in what we have to say. With Twitter 1 it is quite obvious that our tweeting just becomes caught up in all the other twitter noise those people have.

If you are wanting to build a following of loyal customers (or potential) customer via Twitter, I suggest you use the slower but proven strategy of list growth like we did in Twitter 2.