How SEOmoz Increased Our Twitter Followers by 250% - Whiteboard Friday

Key Takeaways

hi seomoz fans i'm jen lopez i'm the community manager here at seomoz and today i'm going to be talking about how we increased our twitter followers by over 250 percent in the past year now i know the question is going to come up uh that we're not supposed to care about the actual numbers and um that it's that it's not about the numbers it's about the actual influencers and that sort of thing and that is true it's very true but you still in order to get more influencers and in order to get more people retweeting your stuff you need to get more followers um so we're looking at the percentage that we that we increased and not necessarily the exact numbers um so before i really get started i i should tell you that uh when i first started taking over the twitter account um my biggest goal was actually simply to beat rand and followers we started and the seomoz account had something like 4 000 followers and that was maybe a year and a half ago and today we have almost 28 000 and that was because i was bound to determined to beat rand who had a good fifteen thousand more followers than we did so let me tell you exactly how we did that so the first thing is we engaged i know you're going to say everybody says engage with your followers but what does that really mean right so at seomoz for us we use twitter not only as a marketing tactic but as a customer service tactic it's also a huge part of our community so twitter for us is a little bit of everything so if somebody um sends us a kudos like oh i just tested out the new web app seriously awesome thank you seomoz we respond back and say hi five or glad you love it or sometimes we retweet it whatever they get a response um that doesn't happen 100 of the time but it happens often so the next thing that we do is if somebody complains they get an error they're like your latest post was horrible whatever the case may be they also get a response sometimes the response is whoa sorry you got that error can you send us a screenshot or or make sure to have your third-party cookies on or whatever the case may be they get a response and oftentimes once they get a response their tone changes they change from being mad about something to all of a sudden being like hey it's cool you responded you got me i'm good um so we also started if you notice every one of our blog posts gets published on the on the block oftentimes it'll go up in the middle of the night in the u.s plus in the afternoon what we're doing is we're trying to make sure we have a huge following from from essentially all over the world and we want to make sure that you know it's not just the west coasters getting great content so we schedule it so that it goes out um so there are definitely ways to schedule your content and schedule tweets so that you don't look like a spammer because you're actually going in and when you're around you you reply to people you touch base with them so the biggest part of engaging is just making sure that you're talking to people whether it's they love you they hate you they have a question whatever it is talk to them they people really appreciate it and simply by doing that that alone um in the first year that that we started making these changes to the twitter account increased our following by about 100 what really kicked us into overcare is we made sharing a whole lot easier on the site i don't know if you remember but at least six months ago it was really difficult to share any content on our site if you wanted to share a post you had to scroll down way at the bottom there was a share this button i believe and then you click share this and you have like 500 options of what you're to do next and most users aren't going to do that they don't want to have to think i i go to a website and i want to share something i don't want to think about it i want to click a button that says tweet me and let it take me off to twitter so that's what we changed when we redesigned the site we made twitter and facebook very prominent on the site so not only actually has our twitter followers increased but our facebook fans have has about tripled also just by again making it easier for people to share your content again as i'm talking about this these are the tactics that we have taken to increase our followers it may not necessarily work you know with what you're doing you may not be in a business where you necessarily want to talk to people who are hating your product or whatever the case may be but this this has worked for us and it has increased our um our reach by by thousands and thousands if you look at um clout and you look at um where we were before and where we are now it's it's actually amazing the difference um i the next step in this is actually to do a post that shows you some really distinct numbers and that sort of thing that i can show you um the difference and what our reach is now as opposed to what it used to be so other than making it making sharing easier we've also added it to emails so you get an email from the customer service team and we say hey did you get an awesome experience with customer service tweet about it we send an email about the webinar coming up we're like don't forget to tell your friends about it whatever you do make it really easy to share i i've received emails from my dentist that says forward this to a friend or share this with your friend on twitter whatever you do think about all the all the ways that you market um or that you do customer service and figure out how you can add twitter into that so the last one is we involved everyone so even though we increased our um uh talking from the actual twitter account where where it's really roger so oftentimes you know roger he really loves to get on twitter and just chat it up with people so um sometimes he you know woots and wheeze and beeps a little bit but um it was really important actually to involve everyone so we we have asked everyone that if you see someone that has a question about a tool someone who um is asking about the best you know um guide to seo and and we have that content or if you just see anything out there where you know i can't be on there 100 i can't be online at all times even though if you know me well you probably know that i'm mostly online all the time um so we involved so rand if rand sees a question come through to seomaz he'll respond to it and he'll cc the seomoz account so we know that it's been covered same with joanna or or seomom they do the same thing we also have involved our associates like dr pete the entire distilled staff so the people that you see posting on the blog and that sort of thing i've also asked them if you you know you see questions whatever it is talk to people remind them hey there's this post over here or there's this app over here or don't forget you can send an email to help seomoz.org and they'll be able to give you more information or help you with your problem and then here we have mozzers just in general we have some of our great community members who have also helped us take it upon themselves to jump into conversations um involve people into the seomoz community through twitter so for us like i said before twitter is not just a marketing tactic to us it's involving people in the community it's telling them about community events whether it's a meetup whether it's a webinar coming up or we have discounts to a conference whatever the case may be we use twitter for everything talking to our community so these are the main three tactics that we've used over the past about year and a half um to increase our followers um the other thing that we're that we often look at is increasing our reach and taking a look at our influencers because we want to make sure that not only are we gaining followers but we're gaining followers who are the equivalent to the linkaratti right we want the social link karate we want these people who like to retweet who like to send your information out we want those people to be following us and to be engaged with us and we will often jump into a conversation and and be a part of it simply because we know that having that touch point with someone makes them feel um more a part of the community so you talk to someone i've done it in person too i talk to people in person and mention twitter and the next thing you know i see that they're following us so it's it's just really important to get out talk to your people and engage them so i would really love to hear what's working for you what do you do what is your tactic to gaining followers finding those influencers and and how do you use twitter um so i hope that you guys um will forgive me that that uh perhaps not as eloquent as rand but i really loved um doing the whiteboard friday today and aaron who's back there taking the video is laughing at me at the moment so i just like everyone to know that anyway thank you everyone i hope you have a great weekend and we'll see you next week for another whiteboard friday happy valentine's day right