Hacking Twitter Interactions

Social Media is a growing segment today.  Today I had the chance to chat with Branden Hampton about how he became one of the top dawgs on Twitter.

Branden is recognized as one of the top tweeters in the World by Forbes Magazine.  Branden gained his engagement when Twitter first started by engaging people with @notebook.  This over the next year became one of the Worlds most engaged Twitter handles and shot Branden to the top of the most influential man on Twitter.  He now controls 30+ million followers with 10’s of 1000’s of interactions every hour.

So how does he do it?  When I asked Branden he said:

1) Content 
I’m a content whore and this is why I’m successful  It’s a numbers game, the more you tweet, the more times people see your name/page, the more retweets you’ll get, thus resulting in exposure to new people and thus more followers. In the end, the more followers you have, the more money you make… then rinse repeat this vicious circle. Just make sure you find a happy medium (1 per hour is awesome, 1 per 15 minutes is not)
If you post 1 tweet and it goes to your 100,000 followers and you have a 3% retweet rate, which means 300 RT, the average twitter user has a few hundred followers, so this means those 300 RT result in 90,000 extra people seeing your tweet, which is your extended reach. If you have 100k reach, plus 90k extended reach for everything you post, you can have 1,900,000 impressions by posting 10 tweets a day. Some of these may be repeat exposure, but maybe they like when you said one thing and then not the other, so you’ll gain a follow on the one they liked.
Quality is very important, but quantity is a must. So you just have to have a great balance; lots of content, but lots of good content.
2) Scheduling
The most important things to remember are that  #1 you’re human and you can’t post 10-15 pieces of content, on schedule, all day every day so you need a computer to automate this. #2 we want to work as little as possible, so automation is even more important to accomplish this. You’ll need 2 either way, the best 2 by far are SocialOomph and BufferApp — again one will be used for ads and the other for content, which goes to which will be based on if you have a few days worth of content ready or a few months.
3) Growth
There’s a few different ways to grow and here they are in a nutshell:

• Organic – most important and gains the most followers; you tweet, people retweet to their followers, new people see your account and follow. nothing beats steady organic growth, this is accomplished by the content section above — lots of tweets, lots of good tweets, steady tweets ~hourly or so and every day. prime hours usually like 7am PST to like 9pm PST, that means you need 15-16 content pieces. There’s no peak time, there’s users from all time zones all around the world, so as long as it’s not 3am, then 2pm is the same as 7pm for the most part.

• Promotion/Shoutouts – you promote someone, they promote you. Basically the best way I’ve found to do this is 3 consecutive RT of 3 really good tweets from the past 48-72 hours. This will have people notice you on that person’s timeline and if they like what they see, they’ve discovered something new and cool so they’ll follow you.

• Trending Topics – this is my least favorite because it involves being on Twitter and active, but I dont mind doing them once and a while. If the trending topic is #DontYouHateWhen and you have a love page then you tweet something like “#DontYouHateWhen you text your crush and they don’t text you back?!” its really a simple concept. If you have less than 100k followers and you do trending topics, you’re 100% spinning your wheels, you have to have enough followers for your tweet to get a few hundred retweets and gain some traction to get on the “top tweet leader board”.

4) Engagement

• The more people you can humanly respond to the better.

• You don’t have to respond to people who say “haha” or “lol” or “thanks” — but if they have a questions about your company, brand, product, page, etc you should respond when possible.