Skipping straight to activities, Twitter is a great platform for interacting with people. Since the follower behaviour is asymmetric you can hope to create a followership based on merit. A simple calculation of your follower ratio on twitter would be:
Twitter Follower Ratio = Number of Followers / Number of Following
Surely your true business activities will translate into twitter buzz depending on how much importance you give to Twitter in your day to day dealings. Are you printing your twitter handle on your business cards? Are you putting out QR codes pointing to your Twitter on your promotional material? Are you inviting your customers to reach you through twitter and promising them an immediate response?
Here are some of the answers to Twitter related questions asked by our clients:
Q1. What affects follower ratio on Twitter?
Answer: Interaction is the primary factor of follower behaviour on Twitter. We try to achieve more followers organically. It depends on activities like regular tweeting, kind of links that are tweeted, replies etc. Multiple factors contribute to your Twitter success.
- Your pre-existing brand value (eg. if you are a celebrity or a well known brand)
- Your current activities on other platforms (Blogging etc.)
- Level of activity on Twitter and your style (Trending discussions, paid twitter advertising etc)
- Your actual business activities
Q2. Having more followers than what we follow. Does it mean anything?
Answer: Having way more followers than what you follow certainly has its image value. Large number of followers compared to you following them back gives out an impression of authority. Most opinion leaders exhibit such follower patterns.
Apart from that advantage there is not much difference since whether you follow them back or not, it is important that your tweets reach out to a lot of people. Your reach will be defined by number of followers irrespective of people you follow. Yet it is good to achieve a high follower ratio on Twitter.
Q3. How much does it affect the image if the follower ratio is low?
Answer: There is no reason to worry because Twitter users are well used to the asymmetric follower patters. What people observe more is if your tweeting behaviour is regular, human and genuine. If the people you follow are real and even if that’s more than those who follow you, there is no harm to your image.
Q3. Are there ways to achieve followers rapidly?
Answer: In most cases you can build followers on twitter at a fairly high rate by simply interacting more. However to achieve this, many people on Twitter constantly follow and then rapidly un-follow large number of users. This is one of the most common Twitter-jacking methods and is discouraged by Twitter in its rules. Look into Twitter rules for Spam and Abuse.
Q4. Are there any automatic ways where we can we have much more people following us than we follow them back?
Answer: Yes automatic follow back apps or services that sell Twitter followers do something like swapping. It gives your account a lot of overnight followers. However they are mostly fake accounts. This technique might help in short term without contributing much to your brand engagement. Also it could result in suspension from Twitter. Thus we discourage this practice as a policy.
Q5. What are auto-responders and should they be used?
Answer: Auto responders are bots that help you create automatic reply messages for twitter DMs or Tweets. They are tricky because everybody can tell when a machine is responding. Plus if you get used to them you might miss out on real conversations. Twitter is a personal medium and there is barely any way that auto-responders can be used properly to keep it that way. We have not set-up any auto responders for our twitter account and we discourage their use.
Q6. What if a Twitter account gets suspended?
Answer: Apart from the critical loss of service time and a few followers in the process, you don’t need to worry about losing much. Twitter Suspensions are mostly temporary and you are allowed to appeal against it. Their system may take up to a week to respond to your un-suspend requests.
Q7. What tools will you be using for Twitter account management?
Answer: To begin with:
1. HootSuit: For Live Monitoring, Scheduling and reporting
2. Twitter for Blackberry, iPhone, Android: To tweet from your handset
3. People Browser: For Kred authentication
Q8. Is it worthwhile to tweet on Sunday?
About tweeting on Sunday we would say, it is much like running a newspaper ad on Sunday. More chances that people will read it, which means more chances of people making a purchase decision.
Any simple strategy to be followed …