The Drew Blog

7 Crazy Ways to Increase Your Followers on Twitter

03/10/11

In the more-the-merrier world of Twitter, follower count is an obsession for some brands, whether personal or corporate. Rightly or wrongly, increasing this count has become an industry in itself, with tools and gurus whistling new promises like the Pied Piper of olde. There’s even a ranking of the most followed CMO’s that has become a coveted bio item, bestowing instant credibility in the new social order.

A recent survey (see highlights on Slideshare) among Twitter users reinforces the urgency behind the growing obsession with follower counts. Conducted by Renegade with the Business Development Institute, the study identified a huge gap between the have’s and have not’s, finding that over 85% of Twitter users have fewer than 5,000 followers. While a whopping 75% expressed a desire to substantially increase their follower counts, less than half actually had a strategy in place to do just that.

Troubled by this situation especially in light of Charlie Sheen’s highly publicized Guinness Book of World Record setting achievement last week, it seems to me that we tweeters need to find new character in 140 characters and we need to have all those wonderful twits out there find us. So yes indeed, now is the perfect time for this cynics guide to increasing your follower count.

1. Be a celebrity
Honestly, there really is no easier way to increase your follower count than to be famous and already have lots of obsessive fans. Whether you’re Justin Beiber or Lady Gaga, Shaquille O’Neal or Ashton Kutcher, your minions will simply fall all over your every tweet. Say something nearly clever or almost worth reading and millions more will find you in a click of a mouse. Not famous, yet? Well, keep reading.

2. Be a notorious celebrity
When Charlie Sheen added 1.3 million followers in just over 24 hours this was big news, and he suddenly had another place to share his miraculously self-destructive behavior that he describes as “winning.” Lest you think he’s totally insane, with endorsement deals from Broguiere’s Dairy and Naked Juice hanging on his every tweet, Sheen indeed may end up having the last laugh on Twitter.

3. Buy your followers
If celebrity is out of the question, then maybe it is time to get out the cash and simply buy your friends. The remarkably reputable GetMorePopular.com guarantees they can get you or your brand more followers in no time. Want 10,000 more followers? This enterprising start-up will get them for you in 1-4 weeks for only $999.99. And for just another 25%, they’ll even find you followers you would consider in your target!

4. Bribe them with prizes
Joel Comm, in his best-selling book Twitter Power, recommends among many other techniques, offering prizes or free gifts to attract new followers. For example, one of his apostles, @fitbizwoman gave away a free ebook with 120 smoothie recipes to help increase her follower count from a few hundred to several thousand. While this may seem a bit crass, worry not, if the shoe fitbizwoman, wear it!

5. Follow to be followed
If bribing seems a bit too primitive, then perhaps an aggressive follower campaign is in order. Using power tools like TweetAdder and TweetBig, the idea is to identify likeminded tweeters who just might follow you back. Searching their tweets, profiles and follow to follower ratios, you can suddenly follow hundreds of potential followers in a matter of minutes. While testing TweetBig, without breaking a sweat, I myself added over 300 followers some of whom might actually care about what I have to say.

6. Unfollow the unfollowers
After you’ve aggressively followed hundreds if not thousands, you’ll then want to clean house, removing the ingrates who had the nerve not to reciprocate your follow. Again, by using tools like TweetAdder and TweetBig, unfollowing is as easy as following. In fact, Tweetbig even has something called a “time bomb” that will auto-unfollow in a specified number of days. Since 75% of the surveyed Twitter users in our study said the follow/follower ratio was important to monitor, the “time bomb” feature should be an explosive hit!

7. Follow your new followers
During my same test of Tweetbig, while adding 300 new followers, I also lost 70 old ones. Turns out, some of my old followers took it personally when I didn’t follow them back. This led me to a tool called UnfollowMe, which helps assess why your sheep might leave the flock and hopefully fix the problem. One thing is for certain, if you don’t want to take a follower for granted, follow them back post haste or risk their stealthy exit.

8. When all else fails, be interested and interesting!
Now comes the really hard part. Like chicks in the nest, your new followers will be hungry and must be fed. A steady diet of highly digestible content should do the trick, although it wouldn’t hurt if you actually cared about the conversation at hand. Try listening to relevant tweet streams and adding your POV with panache. Turns out, just as in real life, it is as important to be interested as it is to be interesting in Twitterland.

Final note:
Despite my cynicism, try not to underestimate the value of a strong following on Twitter. Reports Ted Rubin, Chief Social Marketing Officer at OpenSky, who has more than 43,000 followers, “Having thousands of followers has given me a broad audience of marketers, bloggers and social media enthusiasts.” Rubin adds, “Follower counts are important [for brands] because that is what gives them access to the social graph of others and that is the true power of Twitter, the ability to spread a message. “ (For a deeper discussion on this same topic, join me at BDI’s The Social Consumer – Case Studies and Roundtables.)

How OpenSky Could Revolutionize The Math of the Web

08/11/10

A fundamental truth of the Web is that it is easy to publish but hard to monetize. Literally millions of publishers post content on a daily basis yet few reap enough cash to justify the investment in time and energy. Even highly popular bloggers with hundreds of thousands of loyal readers struggle to make the math work. Small manufacturers that set up their own online stores have little hope of drawing large enough audiences to make ends meet. And consumers for the most part struggle to know what to buy and from whom – especially when it comes to specialty goods.

OpenSky Enter OpenSky, which bounded out of beta last week vowing to change all this. I was aware of OpenSky through evangelist Ted Rubin but didn’t really get the concept until I sat down with the principals and one of their early beta testers for a couple of hours at their opening soiree. I now get it. And while OpenSky benefits publishers, their readers, and small-scale manufacturers with a robust Web platform, I think the idea boils down to this: OpenSky is a scalable micro-commerce utility that enables publishers of all sizes to actually make money on the Web.

That said, the best way to understand OpenSky is to look at it from the perspective of each of the constituents; publishers, manufacturers, and consumers. In the process, you should come to understand why I think OpenSky is indeed a game changer, and will bring profits to publishers, markets to manufacturers and peace of mind to consumers faster than you can say, ka-ching.

Sharing, Not Schilling: The Bloggers Perspective

Marta Wohrle, a veteran of the publishing industry, started her blog, TruthInAging.com, in 2008. According the site, “Truth In Aging writes honest, thorough and, we hope, fun reviews of anti-aging cosmetic, makeup and hair products.” Reaching out to friends and family, Marta was able to build a nice following that doubled in 2010 thanks to a strong SEO program. But Marta still had a problem. She noted, “Even with Google AdSense delivering an average $7-8cpm and my Amazon affiliate program delivering 7% on referred sales, I wasn’t making enough to justify my time.”

With a sizable mailing list and over 45,000 visitors a month (according to Compete.com), Marta was an early beta tester of OpenSky, having already been searching for a way to increase her Web revenue. Noted Marta, “At first I was a little concerned that my readers might be offended if I started selling products I reviewed right from my site.” Creating a small group of “VIP customers” to test with, Marta found that only 2 out of 400 suggested she might be “going to far” while the others were overwhelmingly positive. Relieved, Marta pressed forward, excited at the prospects of gaining half the profit on each product sold, the other half going to OpenSky.

Marta explained that, “By selling the products I have been reviewing and recommending directly on my site, I make it easier for my readers to buy them and at least double my profit margin compared to Amazon in the process. My readers trust me and I don’t dare break that trust by recommending anything I don’t believe in,” she added, identifying one of the lynchpins of OpenSky’s value proposition. Successful publishers like Marta depend on building and maintaining trust with their readers–selling inferior products just to make a buck would jeopardize the whole enterprise.

Finding New Audiences: The Boutique Manufacturer

One of the products Marta recommends and sells on her blog is a $27 organic eye cream from a four-year-old husband/wife company called Nurture My Body. Traffic to NurtureMyBody.com according to Compete.com is well below 2,000 per month and more than twenty times less than Marta’s site. For Nurture My Body, any sales they get from Marta’s site is like manna from heaven. It cost them nothing to list their products on ShopOpenSky.com and Marta’s recommendation translates into high sales and low return rates.

Founder of OpenSky, John Caplan, explained that having a low return rate is another of the lynchpins to his company’s success. Noted Caplan, “During the beta, about 1% of products sold through OpenSky were returned which was phenomenal, especially when compared to 19% for Amazon and 40% for Zappos.” Caplan’s doesn’t necessarily expect their rates to stay that low with 6% returns built into the plan, but at that same time, he’s not surprised. Caplan observed, “Bloggers like Marta have built up extraordinary trust, so her recommendation simply carries the day.”

A Better Shopping Experience: The Consumer Wins Too

When one of Marta’s readers sees a product she wants, the buying process begins with a simple click on a link. This easy shopping experience is the third lynchpin for OpenSky according to co-founder Kevin Ambrosini, whose resume includes highly successful e-retailer, Gilt Groupe. Noted Ambrosini, “The shopping cart sits on the publisher’s site but we handle all the hard stuff like credit card verification and order processing.”

Well aware of the importance of a smooth buying experience, OpenSky also takes care of the customer service issues related to online ordering. Added Ambrosini, “If shipping takes too long or our 800# staff can’t resolve issues right away, the whole thing falls apart, so our goal is to provide the best customer service anywhere.”

One of the requirements for suppliers to put their goods on the OpenSky platform is that they can “drop ship” products anywhere in the U.S. Ultimately, OpenSky hopes to publish average shipping times so buyers know what to expect and sellers are incented to expedite their processes.

Win, Win, Win, or Too Good to Be True?

Entrepreneurs are inherently optimistic and the team at OpenSky is no different. Their energy and enthusiasm is infectious and clearly, I am now a believer. Time will tell if OpenSky indeed can change the math of Web publishing. One thing is for certain, unlike Facebook and Twitter, OpenSky knows from the start how its bread will be buttered, with publishers, manufacturers and consumers all winning. (This article first appeared on FastCompany.com)

How e.l.f. cosmetics achieved beautiful growth in an ugly economy.

04/14/10

When Ted Rubin grabbed the reins as CMO of e.l.f. cosmetics in 2008, he knew he was going to have to be inventive. “There’s not a lot of margin in a $1.00 cosmetic,” he noted in my interview with him last week. “I simply didn’t have a budget for paid media,” he added. Yet despite this limitation, in just under two years Ted was able to help the company significantly increase its sales in one of the worst recessions in history, providing a textbook case for any aspiring guerrilla marketer.

1. Listen Up

Anyone who’s ever met Ted knows he’s a great talker who prides himself in responding to any query from any person as fast as humanly possible. BUT what they might not know is that he’s also a great listener, and he made listening his first priority when he arrived at e.l.f. What he learned in his first 90 days provided the foundation for his subsequent success. Scouring the web, Ted found hundreds of fans across multiple channels, many of whom provided invaluable feedback — feedback that he continued to seek as ideas began to percolate.

2. Sniff Out an Insight

Up until recently, e.l.f. cosmetics were sold mainly online, direct to consumers at an unbelievably low price point. Therein lay the challenge. Even bargain hunters asked, “How could a one dollar cosmetic be any good?” Ted realized that this rampant skepticism could not be overcome by any company messaging, and in fact would require extensive word of mouth in which one consumer reassured another that e.l.f. is indeed a high quality product. Fortunately, during Ted’s listening period, he had found hundreds of delightfully chatty fans dispersed all over the web.

3. Hug Your Fans

Though e.l.f. had been early to the blogosphere, in late 2008 they had almost no presence on Facebook, Twitter or YouTube. So this is where Ted started, zealously responding to any mention of e.l.f. and engaging customers with instructional content that emphasized conversation over sales pitches. In the process, Ted discovered hundreds of consumer-generated videos that featured e.l.f. products and consolidated these on a branded YouTube channel and created a hub for them on the distinct AskELF.com url. During the course of 2009, e.l.f. became a social media powerhouse, accumulating in excess of 50,000 Facebook fans, over 50,000 Twitter followers (including Ted’s presence), and an astonishing 2.3 million+ views of user-generated videos!

4. Hold the Right Hands

Lots of brands pay lip service to the influential blogging/micro-blogging community by parsing out chunks of content they hope will be repurposed. Ted took a far more personal approach, “nurturing each relationship” to the point that many became his close friends. They also became a sounding board for ideas, one of which became the “Make Up at Home Parties,” a program that delighted the targeted bloggers so much that after 70 such parties, there is a waiting list of 250, and a galaxy of party-related content including text, pictures, Whrrls, and video that has been shared and shared again by thousands upon thousands of e.l.f. fans.

5. Tap into Metrics

As e.l.f.’s social media efforts were starting to take hold, Ted realized that “just building a large base of fans was insufficient.” He needed to understand who was really engaged and if/how this was affecting sales. Fortunately, the news was good. As the fan base grew, so too did traffic to their online commerce site from social media sites, 75% of whom ended up being new visitors. These new visitors demonstrated their commitment by buying product and signing up for the e.l.f. newsletter. In fact, the e.l.f. database nearly doubled to 2.3 million by the end of 2009, a metric that was music to the ears of the company’s owners AND prospective marketing partners.

6. Reach for Partners

One of the ways Ted was able to stretch every precious marketing penny was by partnering with a host of brands with shared interests. Conde Nast’s Allure Magazine provided content and gifts for the House Parties while the SheSpeaks.com network of product testers and bloggers helped find party hosts that would spread the word. ExploreModeling.com was the perfect partner for a marketing contest called the “New Face of e.l.f” which sought out 4 models of various ages. Viral by design, contestants garnered over 800,000 votes supported by 40,000 pictures that in turn gained 35,000 comments. With results like these, it is little wonder marketers like Virgin Mobile and Warner’s Bra along with J.C. Penney reached out to e.l.f. for more cross-promotions, most of which cost e.l.f. next to nothing.

7. Kiss and Tell

In the 4^th quarter of 2009, e.l.f. was suddenly in 1700+ Target stores with a 4 foot end-cap. For a primarily online brand this was a huge retail expansion. “Target was totally enamored with our social media presence,” noted Ted, who suddenly had a “currency” he could exchange not just with other marketers but also retailers eager to share e.l.f.’s social media cache. Marveling at how quickly the product sold once in Target, Ted noted, “A good part of what we built in social media enabled that to happen.” With over 400 blog posts about e.l.f. entering Target, 2000 retweets of the new retail presence and customers snapping photos of product flying off the shelf, Target was so thrilled with the results it helped e.l.f. secure a permanent in-line presence in a significantly larger percentage of stores in early 2010 than originally planned.

Final Note: Early in his career, Ted worked for “America’s Greatest Marketer” Seth Godin, who by then had already co-authored The Guerrilla Marketing Handbook. Clearly Ted learned at the feet of a master, one who instilled the guerrilla credo that inventiveness and elbow grease can make up for a small budget every time. Ted is taking that same spirit of inventiveness to OpenSky, introducing Relationship Commerce, and something he says “will change the face of e-tailing.” Ted is also a proud member of The CMO Club.