This was another interesting Social Media Marketing World presentation on the use of bots and automation to grow and engage a Twitter following. Scott Page and Shelita Burke shared what they knew on the topic. Shelita presented a case study in which she helped a grow a Twitter following of 3k to 75k in three months. She has a Twitter following of 188k. I personally use some automation with my Twitter accounts, but I can see there may be more to do.
Conversation Economy
Scott Page began the presentation by discussing some the major changes in the social media landscape. Basically, more and more is being conducted in real time. We are now moving into a conversation economy. There is more interaction with private messaging services such as Facebook Messenger and Snapchat.
Businesses will need to learn how to connect with customers on applications like Facebook messenger. Mobile messengers allow for private conversations and there is no hard advertising, however, we will need to develop new metrics.
In this conversation economy, we will need to do more storydoing rather than storytelling. We will need to show rather than tell.
Building Your Tribe
Shelita Burke took over the conversation by describing how she developed her tribe. Shelita is a singer-songwriter as well as a data scientist. She is interested in why people click or follow. She uses this information to grow her tribe. As she explained in one case study, she built a following of 75K in three months using the insights she gained from the data. She uses bots and automation to build her tribe.
Bots
Burke uses artificial intelligence to onboard and retain followers. You can create Twitterbots for many purposes:
- Automate posts
- Automate tasks such as likes, retweets, follows/unfollows users, etc
- Track hashtags
- Chat with users (chatbots)
- Scrape user data
Here is a collection of useful tools Burke shared:
Automating Twitter
Burke recommended different ways to use automation and bots to supercharge your Twitter presence to grow a following. Here are some of those recommendations.
Retweet your own tweets – Burke recommends retweeting your previous tweets. She noted that tweets last for only about 8 minutes. You can do this multiple times.
Follow your target market customer – Tools like Crowdfire will help you automatically follow potential customers. If they do not follow you back after two days you can automatically stop following them.
Autodirect message – When you have a new follower, you can automatically send them a message with details on how to better engage with you. She recommends focusing on their needs or help someone else.
Use Twitter lists – Burke recommends putting people on Twitter lists. Give the lists elevated names such as Awesome people, Amazing people, etc.
Pin a Tweet to your profile – One of the things you can do is pin one of your Tweets to your profile. In this tweet, you can include a call to action, add a unique hashtag, and add instructions for followers to like and retweet the pinned tweet.
Tweet a video message – You can stand out by sending a video message to followers instead of just a text reply. Another great idea was to respond with a picture of a handwritten note saying thanks. This ties into what Joey Coleman shared.
Spread the love – You can use automation to generate likes and retweets for someone else. How can you make a difference for someone else’s Twitter account.
If you are interested in using automation and bots for your Twitter account, please contact me, I would love to help you out.
