Social Media Celebrities: Becoming Someone on Twitter

So, how do these individuals and businesses achieve this status? Consider the following ways to become “someone” on Twitter.

Engage, engage, engage: You hear it all the time, and it’s true. Engaging your peers is the best way to get attention on social media, including Twitter. If you want to have Twitter followers, you must engage the people you want to have follow you. It’s tempting to unfollow them if they fail to reciprocate, but that isn’t necessary. Just move on and engage someone else. Eventually, the reciprocation will come – and those are the followers who will help you get to the top of the Twitterverse.

How do you engage on Twitter? You reply, you retweet and favorite other people’s tweets. You can also engage others with a little crafty tweeting of your own. Participate in Tweetchats, even if they aren’t chats that are relevant to your industry (Tweetchats are threads of Twitter updates that form a conversation, bound together by a common hashtag). Anytime you update your social media profile, make it funny, make it smart, make it…well, read on.

Make it personal: Buying followers, auto-responding and pre-scheduling tweets a month in advance are all really good ways to disengage people. You may as well say, “Unfollow me, please” when you do these things on social media. Make sure your follow requests, tweets and direct messages come from you and only you, and at a relevant time. Think about it: Scheduling tweets too far in advance means that those tweets may no longer be relevant when they go out. The “news” you are broadcasting may have already changed, and nobody likes old news. Make sure your Twitter activity is personal, relevant and consistent.

Choose wisely: You need to choose your network wisely on Twitter. Don’t randomly choose people to follow; this almost never works. Instead, identify profiles of those individuals and businesses with whom you have something in common. When a “regular” person follows you, follow them back; they are probably a potential customer (if they aren’t your customer already). Be careful about following your competitors; this works in some industries better than others.

You can also become a social media “somebody” by using supplementary Twitter tools. There is endless technology designed to help Twitter become more usable. TweetDeck, Twitpic, Twitlonger, Bitly, Hootsuite, Bottlenose, InboxQ, Twylah…yes, that many tools and a lot more. You don’t need to choose them all, but you do need to choose them wisely. They can (and probably will) help you gain Twitter status, if you stick with those tools enhance your Twitter experience.

Becoming a celebrity on social media is no longer “kids’ stuff” or a superficial pastime. Fortune 500 companies take Twitter seriously, so small businesses should as well. Social media superstardom is a worthwhile goal for today’s savvy marketers, so keep on trying to reach it.