The Region Wildlife and Topical Photography

Last week I started a social media spring cleaning project, if you are reading this week then I am going to assume that WE started spring cleaning and switch voice a bit. If you followed along on your own twitter account, then you currently have a private list containing people whom you follow but do not follow you. Furthermore, these are people that you have decided you want to continue following. I deliberately left you without two pieces of information though. First, if you are a photographer (this is a photography blog), why does this matter to you? Second, is there a plan of action to reducing the number of people that are not following us back? The answer to the first question is “a lot”. The answer to the second question is “yes”. OK, I will attempt to provide meatier answers than that.

As a photographer, the more you can get your’ work viewed, searched for, commented on and shared (where appropriate) the further your’ market reach. To get more of the people that you follow to follow you allows you to easily and freely alert a large audience to new works that you have made available. This can easily be the first step on your’ sales funnel and doesn’t cost a thing (unless you count the opportunity cost of your’ time, which should be offset by the market gains). So, there you have the why from a photographers standpoint. Now for how…

When you go to your’ twitter page and click on your’ “followednotfollowing” list, you are looking at a subset of your’ tweetstream. This subset can be intimidating, because you think “None of these people are following me.” Right, so we are going to fix that. The people who are not following you have likely not been interacted enough with by you. They need to SEE your’ tweets at least a few times before you have ANY familiarity to them and since they are not following you, they can only see your’ @them tweets. We could go the easy route and send “@them plz follow” but any follows you get out of that are the equivalent of a mercy date. Strategy…

Pick a few people and read their tweetstream, read it live, read it historically. What interests do you have in common? When you have some familiarity start occasionally retweeting mutually interesting tweets (add a comment). Between 3 and 9 of these over a couple weeks will gain you familiarity (and possibly an easy follow). Once you feel you have established a level of “twitter familiarity” try a couple @replies if that does not get you followed, you might want to move on to some others in your list. I am not advocating giving up, this person may be very selective, you have run a good campaign and it didn’t “convert”. Move on with your’ next target audience and return to this one at a later date. You may find as you go about this, that some of these people are in clusters. When you get followed by a couple people in those clusters and then “hopefully” retweeted, that may be the impetus that gets you acceptance into another group and its’ associated followers.

I hope that this has given you a new perspective to think about managing your twitter following, or reinforced that you should think about it. The first part of marketing is to develop a target audience, once you have done that you can hopefully bring them to your site with an open mind. Another thing to keep in mind if you try these tips, don’t focus on your non-followers at the expense of your followers. Keep up your’ normal twitter routine, augment it (not replace) with these tips. Happy tweeting and enjoy the natural spring light!

Tags: marketing, photography, social media, twitter

This entry was posted on Monday, March 22nd, 2010 at 8:05 pm and is filed under SEO and Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.