Jeff Bullas, a top influencer, saw 5-30 new Twitter followers a day once he added a simple tactic to his marketing strategy: retweeting. It sounds overly simple, but retweeting key posts from industry leaders will grow your Twitter following.
New followers are just one benefit of retweeting. Here’s five great reasons to implement retweeting into your Twitter strategy:
- Give your profile new exposure. Retweets can see greater impression rates than an original post, which translates into more opportunities for users to see (and follow) your profile. Plus, influencers often repay the favor by retweeting your comment, giving you a thank-you and a mention, adding you to a list, or following you back. These all help encourage their followers to become your followers.
- Showcase your expertise. The ability to identify industry leaders reflects an understanding of the industry. Retweeting their content shows a dedication to excellence through continually learning from their insight. Adding commentary to their content displays your insight. All great benefits from a simple retweet and comment.
- Provide variety. Variety is the spice of life, right? Retweets help break up a thread of promotional posts, offering a variety in both the content and the look of posts.
- No one else is. Okay, that’s an exaggeration. But few users are. A case study by Microsoft found that around 3% of tweets are retweets. When you’re retweeting influencer posts and your competitors aren’t, you’re now providing something uniquely valuable. Users follow those who provide value, making you an enticing option to follow over other accounts.
- Save time. You know it’s important that every tweet isn’t promotional. But it takes time to search the internet for content and then write a post from scratch. With retweeting, reading a post and writing commentary only takes a few minutes. You can then divert the time to other follower growing activities.
How to Implement a Retweet Strategy
- Identify key influencers in your industry. To gain the benefits of retweeting, you need to re-tweet the right people and the right content. One easy way to find influencers is with Guy Kawasaki’s tool, Alltop http://alltop.com/ Enter the topic of your industry (for example, social media) and up pops a list of top blogs. Check out a few blogs to find individuals most applicable to your target audience.
- Add influencers to a Twitter list. You can choose to make a public list (such as Top 15 Small Business Experts) or a private list. If you want to retweet a large number of influencers, consider making a private list for every day of the week. Assign a few influencers to each day to ensure variety of retweet sources.
- Tweak your strategy as necessary. When you review your Twitter analytics data on a weekly/monthly basis, see how the retweets fare. If any influencers engaged back, be sure to keep retweeting them often. If retweets for a given influencer saw little impact, remove them from the list.
Retweeting is a simple way to grow your Twitter presence. If you want to take advantage of the benefits of Twitter, but lack the time, check out our social media services package.