Coaches: How to Get People to Follow You on Twitter and Keep Them Following

Coaches are well, you know, all a twitter about Twitter these days.

Definitely it’s been the hottest social media site since 2008. Why? Because it’s quick and easy to participate in this massive online cocktail party, especially if you like accessing social media via you smart phone. Twitter works with SMS (text) in a way that email and Facebook just don’t. It’s a very, very cool way to connect with your peeps, er Tweeps!

Sorry, Twitter engenders lots of word play!

And it’s public, so the conversations have Rapid Ripple Effects that can boost your popularity and your coaching business.

How? Well for example, here’s the experience I had the first time I posted a sign-up link to a free coaching teleclass. I literally returned to my Outlook email right after posting and already several people had signed up. I thought, ‚Äö√Ñ√∫How’d they even have time to do that so fast??‚Äö√Ñ√π

Want to join in the mix? The name of the game with Twitter is to follow others and have them follow you. And it works a lot like it would at a party, but occasionally coaches have a hard time seeing that, so here are a few tips IMHO.

I. How to Get My Follow

1. Be a friend of a friend of mine

2. Be somebody famous who I’m interested in

3. Say something interesting about something I’m curious about

4. Be an interesting blogger who I want more connection with

5. Be a company with a great approach to marketing (I enjoy seeing how you do it)

6. Be a coach (I follow lots of coaches)

Getting a lot of follows is great, but it takes much more to keep those follows and if there are winners and losers with Twitter, then the winners are those who not only attract follows, but keep them.

There are a lot of Twitterers that I scan everyday, only a few that I really pay attention to and fewer still that I follow on my iPhone with “device updates”. Those are the ones that make it onto the coveted SMS platform that makes Twitter so valuable.

II. How to Keep My Follow

1. Post daily, but not constantly

2. Have something to say (”Woo Hoo” doesn’t count)

3. Share a great resource (Use tinyurl.com or a similar service to shorten the URL)

4. Retweet (RT) great stuff that somebody you follow has posted. They will love you for it and may RT your tweets in return. That way, their followers will find out about you.

5. Quote something interesting from the day’s news (Or just share a great quote)

6. Be funny

7. Don’t fill my homepage with “Thanks for the follow” messages to other people

8. Avoid long text conversations on Twitter (The rest of us aren’t really that interested)

9. Help me solve a problem

10. Direct me to a great site

Well that’s 10. Probably there are many more. You’ll discover them once you get going on Twitter, yourself. The easiest way to start is to have someone on Twitter invite you to follow them, so here’s my invitation:

Go to http://twitter.com/MasteryCoach and click on “Follow”. Fill out your profile and follow some of my friends. Pretty soon, folks will follow you, too and you’ll be part of the party.

III. How to send “Device Updates” to my iPhone

1. Become my Best Friend Tweep (BFT)

There you have it!

(Copyright, Julia Stewart, 2008/2009 – All rights reserved.)