12 tips: Increasing your social media influence (Part 3)

In Part 2 of this series, we looked at the importance of being a good conversationalist. Being a good conversationalist also means being a good listener. That sort of bring this back to Tip 1: finding out which your followers want.This is an always easy, and becomes increasingly difficult the larger your following gets. What appeals to or interests certain members of your community will not necessarily appeal to or interest others. You have to be aware that there is a “range” of interests. That isn’t to say that you need to go out, do a lot of research, and get so far out of your area of expertise that you cease to offer value to anyone in your community.

SM Influence Tip 4: Broaden your range of interests. At the same time, broaden your range of offerings to the people in your community.

This brings this back again to being a good listener. Have some faith that the people who are following you now, the people that are your community, have come to you and have come to your community for a reason. Your job is to find that reason and fulfill that need. (See Tip 1).

Do you remember me telling you in Part 2 that my Twitter following was plateauing? Inadvertently I had ignored Tip 1. My Tweeps were getting bored! I wasn’t fulfilling their needs. Once I tuned in to the conversation that was going on in my community, I was once again able to contribute, add value and engage my followers. Once I done that new followers continued to come.

Tip 5 is going to be controversial. Basically, what I’m going to tell you is that you don’t have to do it all yourself. Twitter is been around long enough now that there are some excellent tools to assist you in managing your Twitter activity. There are several services that help you manage your followers and the people that you follow. There are services that help you manage the content that you offer in your tweets. And there are services and software available that will virtually automate nearly all of your Twitter activity.

Let me emphasize that there is a wide range of twitter tools and that you can use all, some or none of these tools. Once I got to the point where I was trying to manage 7000 or 8000 followers, I decided (personally) that I needed some help. I had already experimented with some of the tools that help you manage your following/followers. However with the number of followers I had, I found it was just a little too much to manage. So I looked first at a web-based solution called SocialOomph, which helps you not only manage your followers, it also gives you tools for researching and distributing interesting content to your followers. The SocialOomph tools are easy-to-use and highly configurable. As with many web-based services, SocialOomph offers a free service, which may be enough for most hobbyists, as well as an enhanced for-fee service, which would suit folks that might be using Twitter as part of their business.

I still use some of SocialOomph‘s tools from time to time. After trying their free service, him as well as experimenting with some other Twitter management packages, I elected to go with an excellent software package called TweetAdder. Unlike SocialOomph, TweetAdder installs on your computer. Like SocialOomph, TweetAdder offers a wide range of tools to help you manage your followers, select and distribute content as well as provide statistical support for managing from one to several Twitter accounts.

I highly recommend that you look at a product like TweetAdder or SocialOomph, if you get the to the point in your Twitter career, where you’re spending so much time just “managing” that you don’t have time to pay attention to the really important stuff: listening, conversing, and interacting with your community.

SM Influence Tip 5: You don’t have to do it all yourself. Consider some of the Twitter tools that are available to help you manage your followers, the people you’re following in the content that your offering.