Before you hire a Twitter expert to provide Twitter training or management services for your business, you will want to undertake a Twitter expert search to satisfy yourself that you are choosing to work with someone who genuinely understands how to use Twitter themselves.
When a business owner is not familiar with Twitter, the choice of ‘experts’ is daunting and it is difficult to decipher those who will provide true expertise and value for money. Here are some tips to help you determine .
Don’t be fooled by high numbers:
You’ll often see profiles that use automation tools to inflate the numbers they follow and who follow them. These tools work by allowing the user to follow several hundred people very quickly, wait a few days to see who follows them back then unfollow those who haven’t and follow several hundred more.
Using this method, you can amass thousands and in some cases, tens of thousands of connections very quickly. The disadvantage is that the software can’t distinguish the human profiles from the bots (Profiles that are being controlled by computers) so the numbers are worthless!
You can recognise these profiles easily as no matter how many people they follow, nine times out of ten the number following them is less. Don’t be lulled into believing somebody knows how to use Twitter if they have 10k followers but follow 11k – the net result is that they follow 1k and nobody is following them.
That’s not an exact science of course but when you look at their tweets, more often than not they consist of just broadcasts which indicates that nobody is taking any notice of what they are tweeting anyway!
They won’t be generating much (if any) business through their Twitter presence and unless you want these results for your business, save your money.
Credibility
Nobody with less than 1,000 followers can justify calling themselves an expert. The low numbers of followers means they either have only just joined Twitter or they don’t understand how to build effective relationships on Twitter.
I’d take this one step further and say that anybody who is being followed by less than one thousand people more than they follow is not fully furnished with the skills needed to demonstrate they understand business marketing on Twitter either.
So if you see someone who is following 500 people but being followed by 1,500 or more, you can be confident that any Twitter training or management service they provide will be of value to your business.
I’d strongly recommend you do carry out a Twitter expert search before parting with any money.When you hire an expert it is important that you are able to separate those who talk the talk from those who truly know what works and what doesn’t.
4 checks to do before you hire a Twitter expert
1 – Google their name + Twitter to find their Twitter profile
2 – Look at the number of people following their profile. If this number is less than 1,000 move on.
3 – Calculate the net number of their followers (deduct the number of people they are following from the number following them.
E.g. if they follow 11k but 10k is following them, the net number is minus 1k.
If their net number is a minus figure, move on.
4 – In the Twitter search box at the top of the page, enter their Twitter Profile ID (@xxx) and click on ‘tweets’ on the left hand side of the results page. This will show you tweets that include their name. Is anyone engaging in conversations with them? If not, nobody is reading their tweets, move on
If someone has 10k followers, logically you should be able to expect that when they ask a question in a tweet, they would receive at least ten replies…for an automated account they likely won’t even receive one.
Finally…
When you pay money to someone for Twitter training or management who doesn’t demonstrate expertise and prove their credibility in their own Twitter activity, you can be sure they certainly won’t be able to add any value to yours…keep looking until you find the person who will help you get your Twitter marketing right.
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Good post, Veronica. It’s all too easy for someone to set out their stall as a Twitter or social media expert with no evidence at all to support that claim. I’ve heard of “act as if” but not at your clients’ expense. Very useful guidelines here, thanks for sharing.
Great post Veronica, all true of course. Quality of interaction and followers is the key to success for any business on twitter. Keep up the good work, Ursula