The more and more people I speak to who are doing twitter the more interesting I find it. What most are doing is creating profiles that talk about their speciality. Nothing wrong there I hear you say, that’s what I’m doing. The reason they are doing this is to raise their profile as a trusted source of information on their chosen subject. Yes this raises your profile and yes of course this is what you know most about. However the big issue in my opinion with this process is the people who follow you.
Typically as I work in marketing I get followed by…yes you’ve guessed it marketing people. A woman I know who is a colour specialist gets followed by architects, interior designers and other people interested in colour. A SEO female business owner gets followed by SEO people. Now the issue for me here is simple. NONE of these people will bring them work. All they and I are doing is giving our competition valuable information and help. Now this is again useful IF you are looking at selling seminars, webinars, moving yourself into a place where you are invited as a speaker or selling your knowledge in one form or another. However if you aren’t (and let’s face it there are a lot of people doing this already) there is simply no benefit of having 100’s if not 1000’s of followers simply picking your brain.
So how can you change the dynamic whereby you are being followed by people who are in the position to employ you and your company? Well quite simple really. Define your target market, think what they would like to read about and create a twitter account that gives them what they want and includes your skill set as part of the package. This way I will be attracting people who are after this information and not people who wish to simply understand what I do better. This can go down as far as defining a sector. I.e. IF I wanted to get into county councils then I would create a twitter/blog/social media process that helps the people within the council find me and follow me. This would allow me to feed into them various pieces of information that was critical to their job and at the same time show them that a. I understand their issues and b. I know what I am talking about when it comes to my speciality.
For me I want entrepreneurial business owners who know the value of marketing but for sure want to read about more than just marketing. Therefore finance, growing and exiting your business, technology etc are all parts of what I should be supplying to my target market. If I can write a blog for MD’s, CEO’s and they start following me then I might have a chance of winning business and not just getting followers. This for me is a far better use of my time as I may be able to get Sales from my followers, not just followers.
I hope this helps and is the missing piece to your social media strategy.
Happy hunting.
