By KP Kelly, ARCH Digital Media’s Organic Twitter Growth Specialist
“Twitter is vital for your brand!”
You’ve heard that many times. Social media marketers like me preach the importance of Twitter for growing your brand. But what does that mean? What does that look like? What can Twitter really do for your brand?
Here is an example and a real case study of a Twitter account that I took from 0 to over 100,000 followers in less than one year.
@MacJoFit
Search for @MacJoFit on Twitter. It is one of the fastest growing health and fitness brands on Twitter with over 130,000 followers. It is the go-to source for health and fitness news, guidance and motivation for many people. The brand drives over 50% of its revenue directly from Twitter. MacJoFit has national endorsements and promotional relationships with large national and international companies.
This month, the Owner of MacJoFit, Makenna Jo, is being featured as one of the 21 best fitness trainers in the world at world health summit. Impressive, isn’t it?
One year ago, it was just a pie in the sky dream for Makenna, a single mom working three part-time jobs just to put food on the table.
Makenna had a dream. She wanted to be a personal trainer. She wanted a career that allowed her to spend more time with her son, and provide a comfortable living. She also wanted to grow a fitness brand that could help people all over the world to live a healthier life. Makenna turned to me to help turn this dream into a reality. And I was all in to help her achieve her dream and grow a brand from scratch for her.
But how? I turned to Twitter.
I’ve grown many brands on Twitter, from start-ups to fortune 500 companies. I had previously taken a mobile marketing company and a financial firm from 0 to 100k followers in 1-2 years. I knew what it would take to grow MacJoFit, and here is how I did it.
The plan
You need a plan on how to attack Twitter. Logging on once or twice a day and tweeting random content and following a few people here and there does not do it. Relying on the quality of your 1-2 posts per day to grow your following won’t cut it. You need a plan. Here was mine.
Target an Audience:
We had 3 different audiences to target.
- Women aged 30-55 within 50 miles of Cleveland, OH
- People aged 30-55 nationwide who were interested in health, fitness or weight loss
- Companies whose target audience was one of the two above mentioned audiences
If the content of a tweet did not target one of those three audiences, we did not tweet it. Our goal was to add at least 500 followers of each of those three targeted audiences.
- Outcome 1: We grew each of the 3 targeted areas by over 1,500 new followers per month.
- Outcome 2: Facebook acquired an average of 25 new fans per day directly from Twitter.
Provide content the target audience is interested in:
MacJofit offers in-home personal training for women and online meal and fitness plans for both men and women everywhere. It is not often that someone takes to Twitter to search for where to order a meal plan or to find personal trainers in their area. We could not tweet about just that and expect to grow an audience.
Instead, we focused on the things those audiences are interested in. We tweeted:
- 5 tweets per day about the local community or trending topics
- 10 tweets per day with links to health and fitness tips
- 3-5 motivational quotes
- 5 retweets or replies of health and fitness related tweets or of our targeted followers
- 5 sales tweets
MacJoFit sells personal training and online meal and training plans. We never hid the fact that we were asking our followers to buy.
- Outcome 1: In month one, with 30+ tweets per day, Twitter brought in $500 in sales. In month two, it brought in $1,100. This month, October 2014, it has brought in over $500 each week. (Directly from Twitter).
- Outcome 2: MacJoFit is recognized as a go-to source for health and fitness because of the content @MacJoFit posts on Twitter. Makenna is asked daily to be on radio and television shows to speak as an expert on health and fitness.
- @MacJoFit timeline: Notice every tweet has at least 1 Retweet. @MacJoFit averages over 100 retweets per day.
Be Consistent and Passionate:
This was the most important part of the plan. We knew our targeted audience. I know all the secrets of how to target those followers and get them to follow (I can’t share all my secrets with you). We knew what type of content we needed to tweet.
The key to it all was being consistent.
This is where many brands fail. You have to tweet at least 20 times per day, interact with your followers each day, continue to add fresh content, and you can’t take a day off. I never missed a day with MacJoFit.
Final Outcome:
One year ago, MacJoFit was just a dream. Over 100k+ twitter followers later, MacJoFit is Makenna’s full-time job, a company growing in revenue by over 20% each month, and a national brand.
Makenna has been able to help people all around the world to live healthier lives, and, mostly important to her, she is making a comfortable living and has more time to spend with her son. Twitter helped make Makenna’s dreams come true.
What can Twitter do for you and your business? Have a plan: Target an audience, provide valuable content for that audience, be consistent with 20+ tweets per day, and you can experience the same success as MacJoFit.
For more tips on how to grow your brand on Twitter, follow KP on Twitter.