How To Use Twitter to Grow Your Email Opt-In List for FREE!by Perry Belcher & Ryan Deiss
INTRODUCTION
The Goal: Move your fans off of Twitter and onto your email opt-in list as quickly as possible, since most people that join Twitter are only around for 30-60 days.
STEP 1: Build your follower list in Twitter
STEP 2: Tweet pre-tested content
STEP 1: GETTING FOLLOWERS
The "big secret" to building a list of followers is to FOLLOW FIRST.
Follow people who are interested in your topic.
- Follow recent followers of competitors and colleagues
- Follow at the right times to increase your chance for follow back.
- Weekends (esp. Sunday nights)
- Weekdays (1pm - 3pm EST) & (6pm - 10pm EST)
- Mornings suck
DEMO: FINDING PEOPLE WORTH FOLLOWING
Good to follow people that don't follow a lot of people (but still are active), because when you send a message, it will sit in their timeline longer.
About 30% of people you randomly follow will follow you back - about 60% will if you leave them an @reply.
Find a local list of followers in search.twitter.com (search "live in Austin")
Check out twitter.com/WholeFoods
Follow people that followed other people most recently... don't drill down too far... big brands/competitors add followers quickly, so just keep checking back.
If you're just starting a new profile, follow 50 people per day (delete after 3-4 days if they haven't followed you back). Once you have 500 followers, add 10% of your list per day. (ex. Once you have 1,000 followers, start following 100 per day)
Best days to tweet (from sysomos.com/insidetwitter/)
- Tuesdays and Wednesdays are the best (16% of Twitter users are active on average)... you wanna tweet when other people are actively using Twitter
- Sundays are the worst days to tweet (not good for getting a message spread), but the best time to follow... people go in and manage their account on Sunday ("housekeeping"), more than they talk.
- IMPORTANT: You never know when your people will be online, so your best bet is to tweet 7 days a week.
Best times to tweet (from sysomos.com/insidetwitter/)
- Afternoons (11am - 3pm EST)
- Evenings (9pm - 11pm EST)
- Mornings aren't great, but if you can you should still have a morning tweet "block"
Tweeting in "blocks"
- One tweet has virtually no impact (gets lost in the timeline)
- Tweet in blocks of 5 - 10 tweets at a time
- Tweet your entire block in a 5 - 7 minute period (i.e. one tweet every 30 - 60 seconds)
- Your last tweet should be the disguised content tweet
- Three blocks per day (morning, afternoon, and evening)
Sources of pre-tested content
- Google Alerts (enter keywords related to your market)
- AllTop.com
- StuffToTweet.com
DEMO: DONE-FOR-YOU TWEET CONTENT
Google Alerts
- Not "pre-tested" content... but still good, and usually only big stories
- Typically use "Comprehensive" setting
- "Once a day" setting
- You can plug in multiple search terms, but place a comma between each one
AllTop.com
- Ranks all the best blogs in the world by subject, and then it lists each of the blogs articles based on their popularity
- More specific content
Digg.com
- Pull data (i.e. popular stories) from a year back
- Super recent stories
- Content that gets the most reaction from people
- More general content -- although current, and hip
STEP 3: BLENDING IN DISGUISED CONTENT
(Moving people from Twitter to your opt-in list)
METHOD 1: Tweet to content on your blog (which should have an opt-in offer) - Most passive
- Make a post on your blog that sends them to the story on the original site
- Could make a short video sharing your thoughts on the content you're linking to
- Ex. drivingtraffic.com > "Should I unfriend my Facebook friends like Ed Dale?"
- Use Camptasia or JingProject (free version of Camptasia)
- Lowest opt-in rate
METHOD 2: Tweet to webinar/teleseminar registrations - Passive but most effective
- People are OK with this... they get excited about it
- You can be very current with it
- Doesn't come across as an "opt-in" page even though it is
METHOD 3: Tweet to squeeze pages – Aggressive
CONTENT/PROMO RATIO
Your ratio of content to disguised content should never exceed 5:1 (i.e. 1-2 promotions per tweet block... 3-6 per day)
You can retweet the same disguised content every few days (or even multiple times/day)
You can continue to tweet to the same 4 blogs posts, etc.
EXAMPLES: DISGUISED CONTENT IN ACTION
Example Tweet: ryandeiss 2 social media "cheat sheets" (PDFs) --> http://budurl.com/3dn2
- Let them know the format -- People understand that in order to get "PDFs", "MP3s", "VIDEOs",
etc., they'll probably have to register
Sidenote: Standard-looking webinar pages convert better than custom signup pages
- GoToWebinar.com
- You can export your list out of GoToWebinar... so it's like a "disguised" squeeze page
- Note: AWeber will does NOT allow importing... so you couldn't take this list and import the addresses into AWeber. Most other web mail services do though (e.g. iContact, ConstantContact, etc.)
OUTSOURCE AND AUTOMATE
Hire an assistant to follow and tweet for you
- Give them SocialMediaMoneySystem.com
Use TweetLater.com to automate your tweeting (esp. your disguised content)
- Ryan does not recommend auto-following... doesn't get you the right kind of audience, and it can get you banned
Refer to video for Craigslist post used to hire a Social Media Assistant
DEMO: USING TWEETLATER
Perry and Ryan do not recommend using auto-reply... they're obnoxious and don't get a great result. Especially don't send people to a squeeze page.
You can use the "Disguised/Promo Content" section for a month or more without changing anything
Glad to see that our research could be used to help in this plan.
ReplyDeleteCheers,
Sheldon, community manager for Sysomos
Sheldon - Looking to forward more reviews on social media tools
ReplyDelete