May 21, 2014 no responses DC Girl General
I’ve talked to many Ultracoin community members about Twitter and how we can use it to spread the word about our awesome coin. The most frequent response I get is “I don’t use Twitter”, followed by “I just don’t understand it”. So I thought it would be helpful to talk a little bit about how we can all use it, without taking much time at all, to tell the world about UTC.
Before getting into details, however, I’d like to share one experience I had. Last fall I ran a campaign about a software product that had drastically changed its features. Part of my campaign was a petition on change.org, but most of the campaign revolved around Twitter. Between sending tweets, finding followers and gaining a twitter army around the world, we were able to get the software provider, one of the largest software providers in the world, to change their core product. And we did it with Twitter.
What is Twitter and How is it Used?
Twitter is a messaging system that allows you to send 140 character messages. You are able to “follow” people – see what they send, and other people can follow you, to see what you send. You can also search for words, to see what’s being talked about.
The key to success on Twitter is to have people follow you, to send tweets that include words people are interested in, and to retweet posts from other people that you want others to hear about.
So how do I get followers?
The best way to get followers is to follow people, and retweet what they post. People are on Twitter because they want to connect. If you follow someone, they will often follow you back. And if you retweet what they post, you have done them a favor – you have helped spread their information.
Very often new Twitter users will follow celebrities, thinking that will get them followers. Generally that’s not the case. Follow people tweeting about your interests. A quick way to tell if someone will follow you back is the click on their name. If they have many more followers than people they follow, they probably won’t follow you back.
How do I write an effective tweet?
Your tweet should include several key pieces. First, you want to target your audience. You do this by including words that people might search on, and preceed those words with a hashtag (#). So, if I am writing a message about ultracoin, I will type in #Ultracoin. Now anyone that searches for Ultracoin (please note, Twitter is not case-sensitive), will see what I posted. Next include the text of your message, and links to any online sources – blog posts, magazine articles, bitcointalk posts, etc. And finally, if you want you can also include a photo.
Let’s look at a post I recently made, about the coinpayments.net vote. My goal with this tweet was to let people know about the vote and the giveaway, and to make sure they had a link to the giveaway rules. I also wanted to target people outside of the ultracoin community.
First, I included URL links to both coinpayments.net, and the bitcointalk post with the rules to the contest. Next, I included hashtags for both references to ultracoin, so anyone searching for ultracoin or utc would see this post. And finally, I included hashtagged references to crypto and dogecoin, so anyone searching on either of those words would see this as well.
So who will see this tweet? All of my 1000+ followers, plus, if any of them re-tweet it, all of their followers. And anyone searching on the terms ultracoin, utc, crypto or dogecoin will see it too.
Other ways to send targeted tweets
Tweets can also be sent to individual users, and keywords can be added to further distinguish your post. Let’s look at another tweet.
This one uses the keyword RT (retweet) to get people to retweet it. Seems silly, but it works.
And another one:
In this tweet, I included a specific message to @mrcashking, which means he is notified that I tweeted him. MrCashKing is an ultracoin supporter with a LOT of followers. So I like to make him aware of very important topics that need to be retweeted.
Any tweet can include @ names, but be carefully sending messages directly to people that don’t follow you – Twitter can freeze your account if you send too many “unsolicited replies”.
Another good keyword to use is #SHOUTOUT. Send a shoutout tweet whenever something significant happens – like #SHOUTOUT #bitcoinwomanmagazine for joining #ultracoin in sponsoring Elsa Hammond!
Summing it all up
I think everyone would agree that the key to Ultracoin’s success is how well known it is, how many people are talking about it and how informed those people are. There is absolutely no better tool to use than Twitter for this. I want to see Ultracoin being talked about, every day, by thousands of people. We CAN make this happen.
And just to show you what we can do if we try, here’s one final picture. Twitter tracks what words are searched for the most at any time, in local areas, in countries and worldwide. When my campaign was running last year, we trended worldwide. And because we did, Yahoo, the company we were targeting, started calling me, started working with me, and ended up changing their product. THAT is the power of Twitter.
