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I have two Twitter accounts, both of which targets two very different audiences and I noticed a very big distinct difference in the two accounts. One Twitter account is very engaging with lots of opportunities and the conversation is very alive.  The other Twitter account has very little and no lively conversations going on and there is very little content I find interesting or which to engage in.  If there are  interesting and active conversations  it is from random UK or USA connections.

So why is it that one account so active and there other inactive?

Here are some of the reasons why the one account has little or no engaging conversations:

• Honestly, I did not spend much time nurturing the one account as much as I should have, this has changed now and I’m paying a lot more attention to this account.
• The audience I’m following is still very engaged in yesterday’s type of marketing where people self promote all the time, rather than building relationships.  Generally I would not follow people who only promote their own content or just have automated but you are a target audience and this is my reason for following you.
• No one is making the effort to start a conversation.
• Not many if any, spend time to retweet other people’s content.
• The people I have followed are not following others back and if they are its an auto follow.

So all I see is people posting their self promotion in the Twittersphere leading on a road to nowhere. How is this working for you?  Are you generating new leads and building a network?

Here are the reasons why the other account is so engaging and alive:

• I spend a lot of my time on this account building relationships.
• The audience is very active in posting useful and interesting content and not self promoting all the time.
• The audience actively finds conversations to engage in and spends time chatting to one another.
• Followers actively retweet other people’s content they think will be useful to their followers.
• They promote others and often recommend or introducd people to each other.
• Very few Twitterers in this account like to auto follow.  They prefer to find followers themselves.
• Twitterers in this account have a reason for using Twitter and are focussed and clear about their target audience.

Here are a few tips to try and swing your Twitter experience to being useful:

Firstly, you need to make sure your profile is completed. Add what you specialise in your 160 characters, also be sure to add keyword terms, so when people search for people they want to follow you will be included in those keyword search terms.  It is also important to upload a decent photo of yourself so people can connect with you the person.

How to find more followers and get the conversation started.

Start following specific people. This would be your target audience which includes your possible customers, your existing customers, people who share common interests, your competitors and people in your country or where you live.

Unless it is helping you to generate new business and build your network, stop the auto follow.  You can have 1,000’s of followers but if it is not helping you to build referral business or new customers then what is the point?

Sign up to Twellow, then select the country and industry or specific people you’d like to follow and start following, visit their profiles, follow and let them know you followed them, if they respond, yay, if not, then that’s just rude, which I’ve experienced and then at some point if they don’t answer me back after a few tries, I unfollow.

Visit various profiles of the people you are  following so that you can connect with the people they are following, this helps you to find interesting people to engage with.

A powerful way to find new followers is by retweeting other people’s content, share, share, share.  I spend time almost every day just retweeting content.  I look for interesting content and then I retweet it.  People really appreciate you retweeting their content and 99%  of the time people will  respond to either thank you or start up a conversation with you, again if they don’t, that is just rude.

The other way to find more followers is to scroll through various conversations and see what others are posting and find conversations to participate in.  I’ve had some really great conversations start up just doing this and added new connections.  These become valuable connections rather than just some automated system finding you useless followers who are not connecting, not engaging or not even in your target audience.  You can do this on any Twitter platform such as, Tweetdeck, Seesmic.

The next thing you want to do is post valuable content, things your audience will find useful.  Post questions, find things to talk about, for example:  I had @avbosman say to me that he is new to social media and so what I’m saying at times makes no sense to him because he does not know the lingo.  “Thanks Anton”, that put me in my place and made me realise I need to go back to basics where I can help people who feel the same way.  It inspired me to start posting explanations of social media terms, which has generated a few RT’s and also started new conversations and I have some new followers which I am now following back.

Think about your target audience and find things they will be interested in.  If you are in the hotel industry, you may want to start posting tips about running a successful hotel, post industry related events and workshops or maybe keep up to date with latest news updates and feed those to Twitter.

Introduce and connect others, this is another way to get conversations started or helping each other by connecting people who could be of benefit to one another.

Finally, Twitter is a relationship tool, NOT a place for you to only promote what you do.  Twitter is a place where you can build your network, help others and connect.  Social Media in essence is a networking tool.

What are your thoughts, do you have anything to add in how you increase your followers?

by Romany Thresher
If you’d like to discuss ways in which to increase your followers or help with content you can connect with me @directassist or @romanythresher or you can skype me on directassist.

I’ve had a few requests asking me how to set up an email signature. Sorry for taking so long to get round to it.

The question you may be asking but why an email signature?

It is an easy way for people to make contact with you. One of the frustrations is when people send you an email and there is no way of finding out more about the person who sent you an email. The reality is people are lazy and if you don’t make it easy for people to find and connect with you, they will just move on. Don’t give people an excuse not to connect with you. Also have you considered the person receiving your mail may not know you have a blog, or a Twitter or a Fan page.

Here goes. I’m basing this on the fact that you use an email client which allows you to use html coding. I’m going to use Outlook 2007 for this example.

To begin, you will need the following:

• An html editor such as Dreamweaver or Kompozer which is free
• The images you want to use in your signature
• FTP server access with your FTP login details

In Outlook open up a new message and navigate to signatures, click on signatures.

• Click on option new
• Give a name to your signature file
• Design your signature, at this stage, just add the basic details, such as name, surname, and contact info.
• Then select options for new message and replies
• OK/Save

Now you want to go to your FTP server and upload your images to the images folder in your domain name so the url will look something like: www.mydomain.com/images/nameofimage.jpg remember the file extension, could be .png, .jpg

Once you’ve added all your images you are ready to open up your html editor

Copy and paste this code into the html section of your html editor

<a href=”http://yoursite.com” target=”_blank”><img src=”http://www.yoursite.com/images/imagetitle.jpg” alt=”website” border=”0″></a>

You may want to alter the size of the image but try and get a good size image to upload, e.g. 48px by 48px is a good size.

For each image you want to insert, you need to use the above URL next to the previous one. Add in the destination URL and the destination URL for the image. Once you are done, save this file.

Now it is time to find the signature file you created in Outlook.

For XP, Windows 2003 and 2007 copy the following: %userprofile%\Application Data\Microsoft\Signatures

Click on start and run – paste the line you copied and hit enter

Now you should see 3 files and htm, txt and rtf files. Open up the htm file (also stand for html) in your chosen email editor, copy the html code you created earlier and paste it beneath your contact details and hit save.

Restart your Outlook

PS. Save the html file you created for your signature, you can use this same code in online forums and communities which allow html coding.

Let me know how you get on.