A few weeks ago, Justin Bieber visited with Matt Lauer on The Today Show. New to Twitter, Matt asked his pal to help him build his following. With a single tweet from Justin, he picked up about 34,000 followers in just nine minutes and 100,000 in 5 hours!
Wouldn’t that be great to build such an instantaneous following?
But that raises a question–is Matt’s following filled with “Bieber fever” crazed teenaged girls, who really don’t care what Mr. Lauer has to say or does list size matter?
According to social media expert, Jeff Bullas, when it comes to Twitter, “size matters.” “A large Twitter following provides scale and leverage to market your business, blog or website.” The bigger your following, the more credible you look.
In my opinion, I think this is true to a certain extent, depending on your agenda and your industry. For staffing firms, Twitter should be handled with a steady plan and commitment to build your following. So while you won’t get a hundred thousand new fans in one day, you’ll build a credible following over time–filled with people who want to hear what you have to say and who want to read your content.
The good news is that you don’t need a tweet from Justin Bieber to build your Twitter following. Here are a few tips to help you build your list (without a celebrity endorsement):
- Reciprocate. Chances are, if you follow someone, there is a social obligation for them to follow you back.
- Re-tweet Industry influencers’ tweets that pertain to your business. Chances are that they’ll notice and do the same for you.
- Give your tweets a home. Your website, blog or other social media sites are a good place to have them land.
- Be relevant. Keep your tweets targeted to your following to keep people engaged. For example, as a staffing firm you can send out snippets from your blog that deal with workforce issues, employment law and other content that helps people run their business. You can also have a candidate focused account where you tweet hot jobs, job fairs, workshops and other career related advice.
- Build upon relationships. Check out who is following people you like and follow them.
- Vary your content. Pictures and multimedia can be more engaging than text only tweets.
- Use hashtags (#) and @ handles to draw in people and businesses.
With over 140 million active users as of 2012 and 340 million tweets daily, Twitter should be a part of your overall social media strategy.
If you need help developing your Twitter influence or any other aspect of social media marketing for your staffing company, we’re here to help!
Give our social media team a call today!
888.696.2900
