In the last article we looked at the foundations of your tweeting success, having a great profile and background image. If these are not right you will be leaving a lot of potential followers on the table.

Over the next two articles I will show you how to farm thousands of relevant followers and direct them to your book, but before we can do that we have to create even more inducement for people to follow you.

Tweets of Value

Stop and think for a moment, why do you follow anyone on Twitter, or if you don’t tweet yet, why would you follow anyone? You may pitch this in many different ways but what the answer boils down to is you are interested in what they have to say. So this makes getting followers easy, just have something to say that will interest them.

Now let’s add some more detail to this. Tweeters tend to send several tweets a day and tend to expect you to do the same. Many are tweeting between four and eight times a day. Certainly if you don’t tweet daily you will not look like you are taking Twitter seriously and you will find it harder to get followers. I am currently working on a minimum of three tweets a day with an average of five.

Normally when I suggest this to people the reaction I get is something along the lines of, “But it will take over my life. When will I get a chance to do any work…” and this sort of thing. I would agree and this is why automation is a key essential. I am working on three automated tweets per day plus most days one or two specials that I tweet in real time. Incidentally I have various reasons for looking at this three to five number that is only based on my personal preferences. I suggest you play and experiment to find the best number for you against the number of followers you get.

Again this is a strategic article not an operational one. There are lots of different pieces of software that you can use to automate your tweets, some are free, some are paid for. I am not going to discuss the ins and outs of the various pieces of software out there, just spend a little bit of time on Google and Twitter and you will find several and then make your choice. I am more interested in making sure you have a formula for creating tweets that are going to have people desperate to follow you.

Tweets that people want to read

The primary aim is to get people to your book, but if all of your tweets were a link to the book saying “Buy my book” you would very rapidly lose all your followers. Hence you need to create 140 character content that people want to read. There are many different types of tweets that are valuable but below I am going to go through my favourite categories of tweets, why they work and how you can use them.

Tips – If you look at my profile you will find Persuasion tips, if you look at Joe’s profile you will find Marketing Provocations. Take you specialist area and create tips, thoughts, ideas as tweets. Give the whole thing a name and number them.

Why name and number? If someone finds number 18 and likes it they will hunt out your profile to find the other 17 and follow you to make sure they don’t miss number 19.

Links – Find articles, blogs and websites of interest around your specialist area, add a provocative, interesting or just outrageous (depending on your target market) headline then tweet the link. If you are sending people links to great articles, websites and blogs they will want to stay in contact with you.

I am really talking about links to people other than yourself here, but if you have a blog with specific interesting articles it would be okay to link to a few of those as well. People on the internet like list based, how to, and funny / provocative articles. So if you can find some of these for your specialist area you have hit gold.

Quotes – People on Twitter really like quotes and this is good because quotes are easy to find on the internet and you should be able to find some for your specialist area.

Being Human – Remember Twitter is a social media platform and therefore showing your humanity is vital to the success of your Twitter Marketing Strategy.

But this is not giving you free reign to send out tweets about what you are having for tea or picking the kids up from school. What I am talking about here is displaying some of your passion, your identity and your vulnerability.

Let me explain by way of example. Let’s take a couple of the blandest tweets I can think of and see if we can change them to reflect the author of a persuasion skills book. Here are two bland tweets:

• I am having sausages for tea tonight
• Just off to pick my little Jonny up from school

Here is how I might change them to reflect more of me:

• I wonder if I can persuade myself to have a healthy tea for a change. Sausages are healthy aren’t they?
• Picking up Johnny from school, wonder if I can talk him into walking the ten miles home?

Okay, they still aren’t great tweets (particularly when I don’t like sausages and don’t have any children) but I hope I am making the point. These humanity tweets need to display more than just what you are doing and if you can link them to your specialist area then even better.

Real Time Tweets

I made a huge amount of product sales twice through using humanity tweets. Each time I sent out a series of tweets over a period of three or four days. They were  real time field reports on a persuasion skills product I was testing.

I tweeted warts and all about my successes, failures and learning points. All of this I eventually pointed at my blog which expanded the themes and linked to the products. I can’t be specific about the exact increases in sales Twitter is a little difficult to track in this way. But in both cases I certainly sold far more than I expected and would have sold with my blog alone.

Coming Soon

Now you have four different types of tweets, you have a rough and ready idea of the number of times a day you need to tweet and are probably considering some sort of automation for this. In the next article we will look at putting all this together as a coherent strategy and then we will go farming for those followers that are likely to buy your books and products.