HOW TO LIVE IN THE AVIARY AND AVOID THE BIRDSHIT

You have to fly with Twitter to make a lot of this work.

I will keep with the bird themes until I run out, which might be now.

I spent part of my afternoon rummaging around on various friends’ blog sites and surprisingly I found many had no links to their Twitter page. You have to group all of these things together.

And then I went on some Twitter pages and was surprised to see very few followers on many, sporadic Tweets and sometimes the dreaded egg, and these are interesting people.

There are a few basic rules and ways to work the Twittershpere.

First off, fill in your Twitter page so it looks interesting and reflects you or whatever it is you are selling or pushing or promoting online.

I don’t care if you design handbags, make wine or are a plastic surgeon it has to yell what you do. The worst thing to do is keep that egg up. Nobody wants to follow an egg, eggs are great in the nest, in an omelet, but get it off your Twitter page. If you want to fly under the radar, put a photo up of something that isn’t your face. But lose the egg.

I will not follow anyone with an egg. I just removed ten eggs off my feed.  I figure if they can’t get it together to do something more original than what Twitter sticks up there, I cant be bothered following them.

No one is born with a Twitter following, outside of one of the future Kardashian kids: So clearly people build up to the thousands by doing some work. And yes it’s work, much more in the beginning than after it gets rolling.

The first thing you do is start to follow people who do what you do.

The whole paradigm of life online is so different from that in life on the street.

Say you had a hardware store and Hal across the street had one too, now you would not put a sign in your window advising people to try Hal’s, or a sign saying Hal’s Hardware Rocks.  

We have always lived with the idea that competition meant if someone did what we did then he or she could/would get business away from us. The notion of built in generosity towards our competitors is not part of our nature, especially in these economic times.

When I spoke at Jell Pulver’s 140 Conference last summer: a great treat. I said “Be generous online, it’s so big there is room for us all.”

So if you start with that as a template, go follow all the people, well not all but a lot, who do what you do. If you are an author, you follow other authors, you follow book bloggers, bookstores, publishers, if you write in a specific genre you go deep into Twitter and find the people who do what you do, then you see who follows them, that is your fan base and you follow them. And you see who the people you admire follow and you follow those people and then you see who those people follow and you follow them and you keep going until you are following up to five hundred people who are in “your world.”

And then you start retweeting what they have to say. And you go into settings on your Twitter and you click to automatically follow anyone who follows you. And then when you get the notice they are following you, you thank them and take to retweeting some of the things they say. You also need to reference them in your Tweets. Start doing #FF FridayFollows, this is people suggesting people they like to follow. This stuff goes a long way.  The people you are being generous with will in turn often times start following you. Go on people’s Twitter feeds and look for #FF and you will see what I mean.

It all feeds into itself. Example I once tweeted about Lucy and SillyBandz a kid craze from a few years back. I think I even uploaded a photo. Within two hours the head of Silly Bandz was following me, his competitors were following me. Now if I were in the toy business this is exactly what I would have wanted. Not being in the toy business I let them go after a time. But I kept following them for a good year and I retweeted them.

If you are in the fashion business then you follow designers, fashion bloggers, online magazines, people who are doing exactly what you do and you friend them and promote them and do all the things you might not do if you were say only  brick and morter store.

We all live with this notion that if you get the job then I don’t. This isn’t about that. It’s about connecting to like-minded people who do what you do and all forming kind of a daisy chain that allows people to grow their brand.

I can’t even believe I just wrote that, but I have grown to believe in it as I have watched it work.

Two examples…

I have a friend, someone I adore, who started a new business. I spent a hunk of time this summer telling them what to do to make it move, much of it what I’m writing about today, I just went to their Twitter feed, not a peep since August. And you know what they have not grown one bit. You have to put in the time. You have to do the work. It’s not magic it only looks that way to the untrained eye.

Then there is a story of how to help others, not exactly through Twitter but it proves my point of generosity .  The author of Come To The Edge Christina Haag, contacted me this summer as we had mutual friends and someone told her I knew how to promote online. Now her book is bigger than mine, has always out sold mine and probably always will. I happen to love her book BTW.   But I gave her some tips and turned her onto some press people who had helped me. And in the process we became friends.  Someone then said to me, why would you help her, she does what you do? You’re just hurting yourself.

I said you know my helping her with social media is not going to take sales away from me, either people will buy my book or they won’t, they are two different things.  And even if they were similar we could have piggy backed each other. And you know Christina has told people who interview her or places she where she reads all about me and I have now booked gigs made possible because of her. And on top of it I have made a good friend.

Be generous. Pay if forward it will only come back to help you. But not insincerely, it has to come from the right place. Don’t retweet something you hate just to blow smoke up someone’s ass, it doesn’t; work that way.

Do it from your heart. Do it from your passion and do it everyday with enthusiasm I promise you you will see results.

9 October 2011 · Comments