This post grew out of a comment I was moved to make when reading Michele’s @NewBizBlogger post Are You Creating An Inner Circle?.
Michele offers online business tips of interest to anyone who reads this blog.
We all need to be creating “inner circles” or Tribes or collaborations. No matter what you call them they are essential to our success.
In his excellent Tech blog for early adopters, LouisGray (Twitter) did a 2010 Year in Review post that says, “The word of 2008 was “launched”. The word of 2009 was “Twitter”. The word of 2010 was probably “Android”.”
My word for 2011 is COLLABORATING
Collaborating is going to be THE most important factor in our success going forward. Only those businesses and bloggers who continually collaborate with others in their niche will have enough traffic and visibility to be successful. We must all focus on reaching out and following up regardless of how busy we are.
Here are my tips I shared with Michele’s readers that we can all use to grow our influence:
Tips for finding others to support you faster on Twitter:
1) Follow all the people who interest you named in the posts I linked in the FollowFriday Lists Link Roundup post.
2) I have a list of the people on those lists who have ~10,000+ followers or more. I can email it to anyone who wants it.
3) Always follow and interact with the people in your niche who retweet others as they are more likely to retweet you too!
4) Pay attention to #followfriday and similar recommendations from influencers. We usually recommend those who share generously and/or have excellent content. They are the people you want to know.
5) Instead of focusing on those who are famous and have tons of followers but follow few, focus on influencers who are supportive of each other and of new bloggers, quality content and good causes.
I believe there will be a great divide between those who are sincerely generous like @Ileane @Kikolani @DragonBlogger @NewBizBlogger @DonnaFontenot @SeoSmarty @SearchGuru @Creative_Ace @sweetsfoods and those who aren’t.
If you were to put influencers in a Twitterlist you would quickly see who they collectively follow – then follow those people.
Identifying is only the first step – the second is to interact with those people. Not all will respond and some you may not hit it off with but real relationships will grow between those who “get it”.
It is MUCH faster to connect with those who show by their actions that they are collaborators than it is to try to turn others into influencers! Would you like to be an influencer but aren’t sure how? Read Kikolani’s 8 Best Practices for Collaborative Blog Groups.
Related articles
- Twitter: Increase Your Influence with Twitter Lists (growmap.com)
- So Who Is On This Weeks Twitter FollowFriday Then? (blazingminds.co.uk)
- My 3 Words for 2011 (chrisbrogan.com)
- The Blog in 2011: More Pictures, More Words (mediaite.com)
- How To Achieve Your Social Media Resolutions In 2011 (socialtimes.com)
