Nuvota

It has been about three weeks since I started testing whether Twitter is powerful enough to build a business around it. In this post I would like to give you quick progress report:

1. Setup (Jan 11^th – Jan 15^th):

• Bought an avatar on istockphoto.com.
• Hired TwitArt to develop a customized Twitter background for me.
• Downloaded TweetAdder.

2. Content (Jan 18^th – now):

• Started sending 6 unique tweets in the morning at 1 hour intervals, repeating the same 6 tweets in the afternoon/evening (Mo-Fri). The tweets are comical, don’t include links and are statements (versus questions).
• Using Hootsuite to schedule these tweets every morning.

3. Tactics (Jan 25^th – now):

• Started asking one question every day in order to engage people
• Began re-tweeting (forwarding) messages from my followers (people that receive my tweets) once or twice a day.
• Began replying to tweets, directly commenting on the content, once per day.

So what are my results so far?

As of this morning, I am following 375 people, 165 people are following me and I was listed 4 times (Lists allow Twitter users to organize the people they follow into groups).

So far I only have one person re-tweeting something I posted – which is pretty low considering the fact that I am posting something entertaining/funny. Maybe I am not as funny as I think! In addition, no one has yet replied to my questions.

As it relates to the messages that I re-tweeted, no one thanked me for it. This is a common Twitter etiquette. If someone re-tweets a message you post, typically people thank you publicly using the @ sign (e.g. @nuvota Thanks for the re-tweet!). I am not sure yet what to make of this. This custom might just not be as predominant with my target market.

And lastly, I had one person giving me a #Follow shout out (Hash tags are a way for people to give tweets a common topic). The “Follow” indicates that the person using it is telling his/her followers to follow specific twitter users (e.g. #Follow @nuvota @rainmaker @jenniferlopez).

All in all, you can see that even though I already have built up quite a following in a short period of time, I haven’t yet developed an engaged community. By consistently applying different tactics over the three months of the test, I am hoping to develop the trust and engagement necessary for my “sales” related tweets.

Let me know if you have any comments/ questions so far. Stay tuned for more!