It was tough being different.
I was not doing things as they expected.
Breaking the rules.
They really didn’t like it.
Their comments and insults were daunting and confronting.
How dare you do that that.
You are doing it wrong.
You are a robot.
But I pressed on.
Standing out and breaking conventions takes courage.
Conviction.
Why did I ignore the crowd?
Because it worked.
And no animals or babies were being hurt in the process.
Just people’s ideas of how you should tweet were being challenged.
Made up Twitter rules.
That was 10 years ago when social media started to take the world by storm.
But breaking the norms of people’s expectations can make you stand out.
The ignoring of people throwing stones from the side lines has worked. And I now have over 560,000 Twitter followers. But that is only part of the story.
The power of simple tweeting is not to be underestimated.
It gets you global attention.
It build trusts and credibility.
And it also can build your email list and make sales.
My Twitter numbers
Recently I gave access to the team at Agorapulse to my Twitter analytics to research the data on my Twitter account.
This is what they found.
That means I also get 197,000 clicks and over 108 million impressions every year.
That is a ton of traffic to my website and it is free.
Read the Agorapulse “Jeff Bullas Case Study: Tweeting Evergreen Content on a Massive Scale” to find out more about what they found and how to do it!
So what were these “so called rules” that I was breaking?
No automation rule
Ten years ago the social media convention was that your did every thing manually. Social media was this brand new global playpen and we were able to have worldwide conversations.
It was fun and intoxicating.
The Wild West.
The convention and rules of behaviour back then was that you didn’t use tools to tweet but you did it personally.
But there was a problem.
It didn’t’t scale and I didn’t want to spend my entire day tweeting.
I had work to do.
Initially I used very rudimentary tools that got me into trouble with Twitter.
So I ended up in Twitter’s naughty corner up and got suspended for a few hours on a Friday that I remember well.
Lesson learned.
Today there are sophisticated social media marketing automation tools to tweet, run campaigns and promotions. And they are designed and optimised to work within the rules of tweeting as Twitter has written in the policy and user agreement.
How I automate Twitter
Today I use the Agorapulse Social Media Management platform that saves me a ton of time. And as we know, time is money.
The process includes these key steps.
Step 1: Create the appropriate queuing categories
I happen to tweet 3 key types of content:
- Blog posts
- Free Ebook promotion for email list building
- Sponsored / partners content
Step 2: Create the time slots to be spread through the day
Once you’ve created the categories that match your type of content, you need to create the time slots to distribute your content.
Step 3: Add content in your content queues!
There are three ways to add content to your content queue in Agorapulse.
- The first way is to post each piece of content one by one. You can do this by clicking on the publish button inside Agorapulse.
- The second way to do add content is to use Agorapulse’s Chrome extension.
- The third way is to use the Bulk CSV Upload feature.
For a more detailed step by step instructions on how I use Agorupuls, check out this in depth “how to”.
Frequency rule
Many social media experts will tell you to tweet just a few times a day.
I tweet at least every 15 minutes. That is 100+ times a day.
When I started doing this the social media purists accused me of spamming.
But Twitter is not an inbox.
It is a stream of consciousness and content.
And I ignored them despite their bleating.
So some data realities.
The data shows that most people who are Twitter users only spend 20 minutes a day on Twitter. So 15 minutes means that you will have a tweet in their stream at least once.
Research by Simply Measured revealed in 2014 that tweeting every 15 minutes instead of 30 minutes increased traffic by 31% and engagement by 89%.
So tweet you heart out!
Multiple tweet rule
Common Twitter convention also said in the past you should only tweet the same content once.
But I tweet the same content sometimes 6-7 times every month.
And I have been doing that for years.
The secret behind that tactic that is to create evergreen content.
Here is an example of evergreen content that we have been tweeting for years.
Evergreen content are posts and articles that continue to remain relevant beyond the latest news cycle. They have content endurance.
But you also need to have a bank of content that you can tweet about. That is why creating consistent content for your blog and website is vital.
And one other tip.
Find the content that people love and keep putting it in front of them.
Wrapping it up
The reality is that rules and convention sometimes need to be bent and even broken.
Are you blazing your own path or are you just following the crowd?
So test and optimize.
Sometimes the results will surprise you.
Over to you.