5 Steps to Becoming Highly Infectious on Twitter

You’re tweeting mad if you’ve missed the short term and long term benefits that a social media platform like twitter can create for your business and personal brands.

Some may even call you a tweethead. Those people aren’t very nice but here’s what is nice and that is generating new clients with minimal consistent output.

If you’re tired of utilising haphazard techniques to marketing virally through this monstrous medium no fear help is at hand. Here are my 5 steps to becoming highly infectious on twitter and how to benefit from wofm (word of mouth marketing).

1. Select your poison

Your poison is the message you decide to deliver, it is your; angle on a particular topic, your personality, your comedic relief, your professionalism, your enthusiasm and the quality of your content.

What do you want to be known for? Be very clear. Think of yourself as a celebrity or a musician that becomes known for a specific type of genre. Why would people want to follow you? Is it because you have something interesting to say? Or is it because of your sharp wit that’s teamed up with educational information that your consumers can proactively utilise?

Share content with your follower’s that is practical in nature and engages their emotions. Never underestimate the power of chemistry to spark wofm. People will talk about you if you; pleasantly surprise them, make them angry or get them to feel excited or even sad. Move them emotionally and they’ll move your message virally.

2. Choose your apps

Out of the 1000’s of apps you can team your twitter account up with I keep coming back to a couple of key ones. They are Tweetdeck and Social Oomph. Tweetdeck allows me to track what is being re-tweeted and who is spreading my message across the web whereas Social Oomph allows me to schedule my tweets in advance and manage my output to a few short hours per month with maximum results.

Choose your apps carefully. It will be greatly dictated by your working style and your main objectives.

3. Get Re-Tweeted

Dan Zarrella, social media and viral marketing scientist studied ‘what’s in a Retweet.’ Out of 84,000 re-tweets here’s what he discovered;

* The term ‘RT’ was utilsed in 86.79% of the retweets and the term ‘ReTweet’ was only utilised 13.21% of the time.

* The word ‘please’ occurred in over 5% of the retweets and;

* 69.05% of the retweets contained links to an external site whereas 30.95% of them contained no link at all.

As you can see from the data, it is not only important to say ‘please rt’ but to also add relevant links where possible. Write articles and post them up on your websites blog and then proceed to promote the blog article via twitter posts. Shorten your url’s so you can fit your article headline in the post. Tweetdeck has an application for this.

4. Consistency – Are you a Cher, Madonna, Tina Turner or a Richard Branson type or do you give up like Sarah Palin?

How consistent are you? Like any marketing campaign you must be consistent in your message to gain traction and engagement. If you plan to use twitter as a tool then it needs to be used consistently to gain visibility. Have you ever read Madonna’s bio? That woman doesn’t give up and neither should you.

If you aren’t getting results wear a cone bra! Or, alternatively you could take a different approach and test your twitter campaigning. Testing and measuring is important. You can’t fix what you don’t know is going wrong. Something Sarah Palin should probably learn.

“Oh, no you didn’t!” Oh, yes I did!

5. Don’t be a Wallflower

Take a lesson in public relations from Lady Gaga. She works the media like no one else and like Gaga you need to learn how to work your twitter followers. Adding a dose of controversy to your twitter posts result in an immediate reaction, sometimes positive and sometimes negative.

The trick with controversy is to put it into context. If you do plan to comment on something highly sensitive do your research and be prepared to back it up with statistical evidence or an inarguable debate. Nothing gets people speaking more than a topic close to their heart and there is nothing more mentally stimulating than a healthy debate.

Post a controversial article around your profession on your website, promote it via twitter and get individuals to have the debate on your platform. Who knows, they may just agree with your point of view and defend you against other critics. Now there’s a diehard fan worth taking to the bank.