My Guest today is Dan Rice, the founder and creator at I Am Dan Rice (Digital Marketing). Dan is a creative marketer who has discovered how much he really enjoys coming up with content ideas. If you’re someone who is intimidated by the process of coming up with great ideas, simply don’t have the time or just want to focus on other areas of your business Dan is here to help.
Robin Waite · #51 - Your First 1000 Followers on Twitter - Dan Rice
Are you wanting to use Twitter more for your business? Fancy getting an insight into creative ideation and building authentic relationships in your business? This blog post forms part of a podcast conversation with Dan Rice, a creative ideation and Twitter expert.
There are two kinds of creativity.
The artistic side can cover creating visuals, editing videos, and things like that.
Creative ideation is another form of creativity, which is most relevant to business owners. It is the concept that you come up with things, approaches to problems, solutions to problems, and structures and strategies. Instead of following the status quo, you take a different approach to something, put that approach into a test or structure, and execute it to see what works and what doesn’t. From there, you can come up with new ideas off the back of that process to trial, focus on, or recognise when something didn’t work out. It is okay if something does not work out. Sometimes that happens and it is part of creative ideation.
You often hear marketing experts telling you to post X times a day and engage Y% everyday, but is that the right course of action?
Simply being yourself and being personable will take you far. However, we look for shortcuts to make this happen and processes to follow, which is where the post X times per day tips come from.
There is a validity to them. Your performance on Twitter is better when you post a certain amount per day and engage on a daily basis.
But if all you do is set up automations and link your website RSS feed to Twitter, that won’t be bringing traffic to your website or doing your brand any good. When you engage with people though and provide value, then they are more likely to see your posts and you are more likely to see traction from it.
From a positive perspective, automating is something you might put in place to set up passive leads in order to focus your attention on your business and what you are good at, because marketing is not everyone’s strength.
The negative side could be considered as laziness. You have to be willing to put the work in. Twitter is not something you can just automate the entire time.
Naturally not every business will benefit from Twitter, but for small and entrepreneurial companies, Twitter is a great place, but you have to be willing to put in the time and get the right structures in place.
Nowadays, we are faced with an abundance of social media platforms to grow our businesses. So how do you go about finding the right platforms for you?
There are similarities with the creative ideation process. There is testing and validating involved. Think about how you can build a funnel and test it, and do that for two or three platforms. With funnels, you want to grab attention, develop it, and then try and convert it. Once you’ve got your funnel set up for two or three platforms, track them and see how they go. See what clicks you get and how many people become clients or prospective clients that you can develop over time. It is about looking at the amount of organic traffic you are getting, rather than chasing the latest platform every time.
By spreading yourself too thinly across multiple channels, you will spend more effort achieving less. To really start testing structures and finding the right platform for you, Dan recommends creating a checklist of 10 activities focused on building your audience, developing your audience, and converting your audience. Produce content which delivers on those three areas and execute it for however long works for you, and then trial for the other platforms.
For Twitter specifically, there is lots you can do on the checklist. Direct messaging is considered a valuable activity, like on other platforms. Likewise, it is ok to schedule tweets, but make sureyou are doing some live tweets and responding to other people. Responding to other people and sharing your thoughts also reduces the amount of new ideas you have to come up with. Consuming content is part of creating ideas. Creating lists and following other people’s lists are also ways to open up new audiences and inspiration. Dan recommends not retweeting too much, because you effectively may as well not be tweeting at all. Too much retweeting and automating posts can also result in a ‘shadowban’, which is where the algorithm works out who is trying to cheat the system and therefore restricts who can see your content. This is why it is so important to engage properly.
Has this information opened your eyes to Twitter and the world of creative ideation? If so, head over and give the podcast a listen for even more content.
Dans services – a Digital Marketer Specialising in Creative Ideation
>> If you’ve got any Twitter-related questions: www.iamdanrice.co.uk/ccm/
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Website - www.iamdanrice.co.uk
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