My Twitter Experiment: Twitter Dummy

So I recently purchased John Paul Aguiar’s e-book Twitter Dummy and I’m just breaking into it. It’s not terribly long (37 pp) but of course with multiple projects going on, my time is rationed so I’m going through it a little at a time.

I wonder if Twitter Dummy can really help someone like me break out of Twitter purgatory…? (P.S. if you’ve purchased Twitter Dummy, please join this conversation; I’d love your input!) I know that the bulk of my issue is in figuring out what to tweet about, but that will come in the same timeliness that this blog develops. They are both relatively new (the blog and my Twitter activity) so I am hoping to grow them together.

Note: Prior to this I had purchased Hollis Thomases’ Twitter Marketing: An Hour a Day, and while it is extremely thorough and exhaustive, it’s a little too much for me. So far, Twitter Dummy just gets right to the point.

Here are the challenges I have found with conventional (if you can call it that) Twitter marketing ideas:

• I believe that Twitter can be an excellent way to expand my marketing reach, but I have difficulty seeing how that can be accomplished without coming off as contrived.
• I still do not understand how regular ppl (as in, not Conan O’Brien, who has 495K followers and only 7 tweets at the time of this writing) get 3,000 followers in 3 months. That seems really high. And how ppl have 40, 50 and 60K followers is astounding to me! (It seems that the follower number is a magnet, and the higher the number gets, the stronger the magnet becomes, and more and more ppl will follow that person, even if they have no real care for anything that person has to say).
• I don’t really want to Tweet 10 times a day. Or, really, I do, but I don’t want to tweet 10 times a day unless it can come across and natural and unaffected.
• I see Twitter as a means of social connection, not a ticker or leaderboard.
• I am hesitant to automate anything. So far, I like wefollow and I have hooked Twitter up to my ping.fm account, but I have a hard time embracing auto-DM or pre-scheduling tweets.
• I wish I could use Twitter the same way I use Facebook to update my status to my Facebook friends. But that includes mindless chatter, my obsession with Derek Jeter, and my shameless addiction to reality TV. None of those things would be acceptable to my Twitter following! So I have to use it in a different way. Thing is: I find myself with Tweet-block… what in the world do I say? It gives me heartburn!

What I’m Looking for In Twitter Dummy

While I realize that 37 pp isn’t going to give me everything I need to become a Twitter superstar, I am hoping to achieve some of what the book talks about:

• Significant increase in reach. I define reach as both followers and “friends” (ppl I follow).
• More successful usage of hashtags, which will hopefully increase my following.
• Learn how to automate some things gracefully, including following my followers (the book explains this – I skipped ahead ).
• Learn how to use HootSuite effectively so I can better manage tweeting, retweeting and answering my DMs.

There are many other things the book talks about, but for me, mastering the above would be a huge step.

Any real experiment needs some sort of timeline, so I’m giving this a 3 month timeline. I think I will set a low goal of 1,000 followers in three months using Twitter Dummy (and of course, following @johnaguiar and observing what he does – he has 43K followers, by the way).

Crossing my fingers!

Cheers,

Tia

Follow me on Twitter : @bizchickblogs

Tagged as: John Paul Aguiar, Twitter challenges, Twitter Dummy, Twitter experiment, Twitter marketing