Let’s say you’re a business owner with a cash flowing startup.

You’ve managed to acquire users and validate you initial product quickly and effectively.

Your business is profitable early and you’ve built a passionate user base for your product or software…but there’s a problem:

You’re running out of early adopters.

Pretty soon, you’re going to have to find new growth and sales channels to increase your reach, impact and sales, otherwise you’ll stagnate.

And as we all know, in business: stagnation = death.

How then do we avoid the fate of so many companies that start off so successfully but whimper and die only months (hopefully not years) later?

Social Media – The Most Powerful Sales Channel

Most small business owners think of social media as an unnecessary addition to their core business competencies:

• Who needs social media if you have a business that’s cash flowing?

This isn’t an unreasonable objections, but here’s the thing: it misses the point.

Business owners who ignore social media are in effect ignoring a very passionate, very powerful portion of their user base.

1. Passionate because customers who engage with companies on social media are people who really care about the brand (love it or hate it).
2. Powerful because these are the people who let their opinions be known. They are the influencers of society with their positive testimonials (or worse: scathing reviews).

Most importantly, by not engaging with your audience on social media, you’re ignoring a potentially large and lucrative sales channel.

The Ultimate Twitter Growth Machine

While there are numerous social media channels to engage with and grow your audience, Twitter is one of the most personal and, therefore, one of the most powerful.

Twitter, unlike Facebook, Google+ or LinkedIn, has a strong person-to-person component.

Yes, you’re limited to 140 characters, and yes, there is plenty of hashtagging, but in reality: no other social media platform allows your business to get up close and personal like Twitter.

This matters because the personal, human approach to business is still the fastest, most effective way to increase leads and sales.

In the following sections, I’m going to show you how to build a Twitter growth machine to leverage the direct engagement nature of Twitter to increase your reach, impact and sales.

Step 1: Automate Your List Growth

The first step is to start building your audience. In Twitter, these are called followers.

Here are some ways to increase your follower count manually:

1.  Follow other (targeted) people

In Twitter, people follow people who follow them (for the most part). So anytime you follow someone else, they’ll probably follow you. This is a very simple way to build your audience on Twitter.

2.  Create and share relevant content with users

As your audience starts to grow, it’s time to start sharing helpful, relevant content. You can do this with:

1. General posts to Twitter
2. Specifically targeted direct messages to individuals.

Each has their pros and cons, so I use a combination of both.

Generic posts to Twitter

The simplest way to use Twitter is to post 140 characters about whatever you want, to whoever is listening (your followers).

For your business, this could be sharing a new blog post, letting people know you’re looking for feedback on a new project, or sharing a discount on a new product (this is especially effective on Twitter – discounts increase click through rates dramatically).

There are a lot of ways to use this, but it helps to:

1. Add hashtags where appropriate
2. Tag people with large Twitter follower accounts where appropriate

This will allow your post to be viewed by people who care about it (hashtag) and by a wider audience (tagging people with a large Twitter audience).

Specifically Target Individuals

Here’s the beauty of Twitter: you can start up a conversation with individuals quite easily and there’s nothing unnatural about it (versus privately Facebook messaging people, which is a little more taboo for businesses).

Say you have a new product or service that helps veterans get a high-paying job in the civilian marketplace, and you’re about to roll the product out to a select group of early adopters. You could use Twitter’s filter algorithm to find all your followers with a #veteran in their name or who’ve used the hashtag in a post. Then you can reach out to them individually and share the product or service (or blog post, etc.) directly.

This takes extra time and attention, but direct engagement can multiply your sales if you do it right.

DO NOT SPAM!

Warning: you can do just about whatever you want with your Twitter feed, but here is what you must avoid at all costs:

1. Never, never, never spam.

If you have a new blog post, it doesn’t help to share it 10 times a day for 5 days to get the word out. This will result in unfollows faster than you could ever possibly make it up.

Automate Your Audience Building with TribeBoost

So if your eyes glazed over in the last sections because you’re too busy running a business to put in the hours a day on Twitter to make this work, don’t fret.

The whole point of The Twitter Growth Machine is to create an automated growth and sales engine – something that you DON’T have to actively manage.

Enter: TribeBoost

TribeBoost automates the audience-growing portion of The Twitter Growth Machine.

TribeBoost is great for a few reasons:

1.   It will increase your follower list with REAL followers.

There are a lot of ways to get fake followers on Twitter. Trust me when I say that this won’t help your business, no matter how cheap it is to get 100,000+ followers.

2.   It engages people in your target demographic

Like above, there’s not much reason to acquire a followers list that doesn’t care about what you’re creating. If you’re a solar panel installation company, it wouldn’t help you at all to be followed by Justin Beiber’s fan base.

The beauty of TribeBoost is that they will grow your follower list based on your feedback and the target audience you want to acquire.

3.   It’s actively managed by real people

TribeBoost is run behind the scenes by real people, meaning there’s no chance your account will get suspended. Plus, it’s just better to deal with people rather than machines, isn’t it?

Getting TribeBoost up and running is as simple as:

1. Sign up for your account
2. They’ll contact you for your Twitter information and the target demographic you want to target
3. Sit back and watch your follower list grow

Yes, it’s that easy.

Once TribeBoost has started building your follower list, it’s time to start the next phase of The Twitter Growth Machine: engagement and conversion.

Step 2: Automate Your Content Sharing

A list is useless if you don’t engage and build trust with the people who are on it. The simplest way to do this is through sharing content.

Problem is: sharing content consistently is time consuming.

Enter: Buffer

Buffer is an application that allows you to schedule Social Media activity on platforms like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Setting up a Buffer account only takes a few minutes, and once it’s up and running, you can start scheduling content to go out at specific times.

A couple tips on using Buffer the right way:

1. Share consistently

Consistently sharing content (in other words: sharing something every few hours a few times a day) increases engagement (shares, stars, retweets, etc.).

2. Share at the right times

Believe it or not, Tweets sent early afternoon do better than those send at 2AM in the morning. Buffer lets you pick the specific time you want your content to be sent out to your followers, which also increases engagement.

3. Don’t spam

Again, don’t spam. Ever. Buffer makes it really easy to reshare the same pieces of content over and over again. Don’t do this.

Outsource Direct Messaging to a Virtual Assistant

Direct messaging is something you can automate with a VA very easily.

This is simply a matter of building out an SOP (standard operating procedure) as you go, explicitly outlining the directions of who to contact, when, how, and with what content.

If you can outsource this piece of the Twitter Growth Machine, you’ll have a fully-automated, very powerful lead and sales generator.

Step 3: Turn Twitter Followers into Subscribers

Once you have your list growth, content sharing, and engagement automated, the next step is turning Twitter followers into revenue generating subscribers.

Enter: Link Plug

Link Plug is a very simple application that automates messages to your audience when they click through a link.

These messages can say whatever you want or offer special bonuses.

For example, say you have a powerful lead magnet for your business. You can create a message that lets Twitter followers know about it after they click through a link on Twitter:

For Example:

• “get my new book, 101 Ways to Invest In Real Estate, free by subscribing to my weekly newsletter.”
• “get 10% off all our products by subscribing to our newsletter.”
• “want more great content like this? Sign up for my newsletter + get a free bonus PSD template!”

This works because:

1. These audience members are already engaging with your content (clicking through the link), so this is a great time to offer additionally beneficial content
2. It doesn’t spam them; Link Plug makes sure the offer is presented in a non-offensive way that encourages subscription.

Why do I need to turn Twitter followers into email subscribers?

Simple: email subscribers = more revenue for your business than Twitter followers.

Online business 101: the larger your list, the greater your revenue.

Twitter is great for engaging with customers, but if they only stay on your Twitter platform they’re not as lucrative to your business.

Your goal must always be to grow your email list, and with Link Plug, this process becomes painless and easy.

Next Steps

So that’s The Ultimate Twitter Growth Machine. 3 simple steps:

1. Automate your list growth with TribeBoost
2. Automate your content sharing with Buffer
3. Turn Twitter followers into Subscribers with Link Plug

Once you’ve turned Twitter followers into subscribers, all you need to do is carry on with your conventional sales funnel (whether an email auto responder sequence, a content drip campaign or something else entirely…something we’ll cover in a future post).

This formula is so easy and cost effective, any business can put it to use right away and start seeing results.

The beauty of it all is this: this process can be put on auto pilot, allowing you to spend less time trying to turn social media into a profit center for your business and more time building products and services your customers love. It also frees up your time so you can use social media how it ought to be used: to really engage with your audience on a personal level (by automating this process, you can relax and engage with your customers whenever you want with no pressure to grow your list).

And that wraps up The Ultimate Twitter Growth Machine.

I hope you found this useful.

If you did, please share it with an entrepreneur or a business owner you know – I promise they’ll be happy you did.

Tom Morkes

Tom Morkes is the founder of Insurgent Publishing, the author of The Complete Guide to Pay What You Want Pricing, and a startup strategist and consultant.