One of the growing questions we’re getting with the growth of social media websites revolves around Twitter. How do coaches get an audience for their individual Twitter accounts?
We found some strategies recommended by the American Writers and Artists organization. They’re simple, effective and easy to do:
Tactic 1: Send welcome messages to all your new followers
This tactic uses a free tool called TweetLater to automatically send a direct message to everyone who follows you. Set up a TweetLater account, and under "Twitter Account Automation" you can write a message which will automatically be sent out when someone follows you (like an email autoresponder).
A couple of quick rules. First, it should look like an excited and informal personal message, not like an advertisement. Second, it should have a low-resistance call-to-action to go to your website and engage with you – this is how you get much of your traffic from Twitter. This is a fine line to walk, but it can be done.
You can model it after a message like this if you’d like: "Hey, thanks for the follow. Have you signed up to get our team’s monthly email updates yet? If not … Just do it!"
Tactic 2: Follow people talking about your topic
Here’s a quick way to get the attention of people who talk about the topics covered on your college sports website.
Search for keywords related to your website in Twitter users’ tweets. Either use Twitter’s web-based search or the free TweetDeck desktop software (an invaluable tool for regular Twitter users!) to stay on top of the current conversations.
And, as soon as someone uses your primary keywords in their tweet, you follow them. They get notified that you’ve begun following them, and they’ll often follow you back (triggering the welcome message from Tactic 1).
Tactic 3: Get in on conversations about your topic
For this tactic, you’ll want to use the search tools I told you about in Tactic 2 to find conversations people are having and questions they’re asking around your topic.
Then, just reply to them. Begin having a conversation. To send them an @ reply, put an @ sign on the beginning of their username. (Example: My username is dantudor, so if you want to send me an @ reply just type @dantudor at the beginning of your message.) Then type your message.
By having this conversation through @ replies, you’re creating a public record of your knowledge on the subject. And it won’t hurt to link to your website any time you have the answer to one of their questions already written (this creates a permanent link to your website as part of the conversation). And often the people you have a conversation with will follow you.
Tactic 4: Get noticed for talking about your topic
One way Twitter users have developed to indicate the main topic of their tweet are hash tags (#). If your keyword is "softball", and you put #softball in your tweet, this tells other users that this is the topic of your tweet.
Many people will search for hash tags instead of searching on just a keyword for people to talk to. By adding a hash tag to your keywords you’ll get maximum attention, followers, and ultimately website traffic around keywords describing the content of your money-making website.
Tactic 5: Automatically share your website updates on Twitter
This is a "set it and forget it" Twitter traffic tool.
If you use popular blogging software, it’s likely there’s a plug-in for it that automatically publishes your website updates on Twitter, with a link back to that page on your website. You can use TweetSuite with WordPress, and it works wonderfully.
Try one (or all) of these easy to use strategies if you want to become Twitter experts that get results when it comes to attracting recruits and building a following on one of the most popular social networking websites in the world.
