Is it better to promote your Twitter account manually or with PPC?
Although there are benefits to any type of Twitter promotion, each type of promotion has its advantages.
Manual promotion has its advantages
(1) See who the players are in your industry
(2) See which articles & pics get retweeted more!
(3) Hand pick you want to follow!
Promoting your Twitter manually allows you to see who the players are in your industry. You get to see what they tweet about and how popular their tweets are relative to other tweets in their account and relative to others in the industry. You will quickly notice that certain topics generate more interest than others. It is complicated since some twitter accounts might have millions of followers and others have only hundreds, so judge them on the amount of interest they generate relative to their size.
The other advantage of manual Twitter growth is that you can pick and choose who you want to follow, and chances are, if they are relevant, many of them will follow you back. I like to choose followers who tweet:
(1) Interesting information relevant to my industry
(2) Who retweet others regularly
(3) Who interact with others
If you have lots of followers, but those followers are what I call, “dormant,” then those followers don’t do you any good. Google’s algorithm for promoting your site in search results gives rewards to those who get “incoming interactions” and retweets. Anyone can have a million robot followers, but can anyone get a dozen or more responses to most of their posts?
Don’t overlook PPC
If you get into pay-per-click promotion on Twitter, you might experience some fast growth, but here are some factors to think about.
Do you have a blog?
If you don’t have a blog, then you can’t promote your blog posts on PPC. Promoting a blog is a great way to get regular visitors to your site, and will earn you some huge optimization points on Google. If you don’t blog now, it’s time to start, and hopefully become an expert at the topic.
What is a follower worth to you?
You need to do a rough estimate as to what a single follower is worth to you. You need to see how having followers creates an increase in your client base somehow, or adds to your overall search engine traffic and ranking. Personally, I get very few new clients from Twitter, but it helps tremendously with Google which is why I invest thousands per month in my six Twitter accounts. For my main Twitter account which is a Notary Twitter, I estimate that a follower is worth about $4. So, when I use PPC, I pay significantly less than $4 for each new follower that I get.
The value of new followers can really vary
You never know if your new followers are going to stick around. Additionally, not all followers are worth the same amount. An active follower might be worth $1000 or more to you in the long run while dormant followers might be worth nothing to you.
Pay per follower or pay per interaction?
We use both programs on our Twitter promotions. I found that I get better mileage paying for each time someone clicks on my blog. It costs me only 55 cents, and for every several clicks, one of the people who clicks follows me on Twitter. I kill two birds with one stone! I get lots of blog traffic and lots of followers!
Promoting blogs on twitter
Keep in mind that merely tweeting your blog titles on twitter might not attract much traffic. I have a professional comedy writer work with me writing “Tweet titles” for popular blogs. We often will write over a dozen titles, test them all out, and see which ones are the most popular. You can get a much lower rate per click and many more clicks if you become an expert at how to write “Tweet titles.” I consider this the single most important skill that I have acquired in my two decades of doing business! Take it seriously, and become an expert!