Creative Twitter Marketing Automation in 15 Minutes Per Week – Ryan Battles

0:11All right. Yeah, Ryan Battles. I am a uh I own I'm co-founder of Harpoon app, which is a uh freelancing application for uh or a time tracking and invoicing application for freelancers. I also do a little bit of content marketing um and have some info products for SaaS marketing as well. So, a tool that I found to be helpful and useful for me doing both of these is um Twitter marketing automation. And I was telling a friend of mine at lunch at breakfast this morning that um I'm a little nervous to talk about this subject because some people might think it's like the bane of the internet. And

0:49while some people are like, "Sweet, growth hacking. Like, let's do it." So, then I was like, "Well, they upvoted it. They want to hear about it. So, here it is." Um and with with marketing automation through Twitter, you know, you can decide to go like on two different ends of the spectrum, you know, you can just automate a few things or you can have like a lot of automation and a fully automated account. So, it's really kind of up to you like how much you want to implement out of this talk, but I'm just going to run through a few of the things that I've done that have

1:17brought success my way. So, with with Twitter, there are you know, there are a lot of accounts out there and a lot of those are spammers um which are fully automating a lot of things that they're doing. 1.3 billion accounts on Twitter and 44% of those have never tweeted. I was kind of shocked to hear that. 43% of those

1:38tweeted over a year ago. So, there are a lot of accounts out there that are not being used um or being used strangely enough. But, there then there's something that is um a little bit more, you know, enlightening here that 29% of people check Twitter multiple times a day or 29% of those 1.3 billion accounts. So, even though there's a lot of people who aren't tweeting, there are still a lot of people who are checking it or, you know, monitoring it even though they are not um actively tweeting on it. So, that's 377 million people that are ripe for reaching out to via via Twitter. It's a

2:14It's a pretty um valid marketing channel. So, with my own personal site, ryanbattles.com, 33% of my traffic comes straight through Twitter links. Um Google and email marketing bring up most of the rest with with the other being the small slice there. But, 33% I mean, that's a lot of marketing or a lot of traffic coming to my site through some of these things that I'm doing. So, my plan is a three-step approach. First, I I got to try to figure out how to get people to notice me on Twitter. Then entice them with a reason to follow me and then to convert. And it's not just

2:45me. This I I run multiple accounts. I even consult for clients. Uh one of my most challenging clients is a uh is in the waste industry. They They hired me. They're like, "You know, can you get us a Twitter account up and running for our um our waste application?" And I'm like, "You know, I don't know if anybody in the waste industry is tweeting or what

3:05we would even be tweeting." Um but, I'm proud to say we're up over 2,000 followers of people in the waste industry. And every time we tweet out some news about waste industry, it gets retweeted and favorited and it's it's a little insane. So, I'm like, "If I could do this with the waste industry, there's really nothing that's off limits here for going after this with Twitter marketing

3:25automation." So, first to get people to notice you, you've got several different thing things that could happen within Twitter that would bring you a notification, whether that's on your phone or your email or on your smart watch. And that's whether you get a favorite, a follow, a retweet, a mention, someone adds you to the list or a direct message. Now, one thing I will say, I'm highly against direct message automation. I I think that it's just the worst. I hate when I follow somebody and they're like, "Hey, thanks for following, you know. Won't you download

3:56my ebook here?" Uh I think that that's kind of scammy. But a lot of this other stuff, you know, if you just favorite someone's tweet, like what's wrong with that, you know? You You get a lot of people to notice you that way and that's how I can grow into other niches where I haven't been

4:08before with different accounts. So the two tools that I started off using, first of all, to automate some of my Twitter usage, uh first was If This Then That. And what you can do there is you can automate the list um building within Twitter. So if you you say like, all right, anybody who tweets out I'll I'll just keep using the example of waste management. Uh anybody who's tweeting out news about the waste industry, I want you to add them to a list called waste industry. Simple enough. That's an if-then

4:39if-this-then-that recipe. And uh in doing that, I started notifying all these people like, "Hey, this company just added you to the list of waste management." So that got them to our profile and then they would follow us and that was pretty sweet. And then uh Crowdfire, has has anyone used used that tool or heard of that tool?

4:55Used to be just unfollow. It's uh it's a way for you to follow other people based off of the people that they follow. Um and it's like a rapid way to do it because you just like use your thumb and click click click. So it's a it's a free app on your phone. Uh but I didn't I didn't quite like using that cuz it's not fully automated. It required me to log in and do that every day. So uh something that I came across, my friend Justin McGill, uh recommended it, was this this book called um Become a

5:22Technical Marketer. And that is a $2.99 ebook that if you're at all interested in learning how to hack your way through some marketing stuff, um highly recommended. It gives you a lot of recipes for how to leverage different technologies out there and get some of the things done. But so that taught me how to use Python to to use a Twitter library to actually automate a lot of these things that I

5:45was doing. So, um through that I would create a script that would retweet, favorite, um that would follow people based off of certain things, and I was able to plug that into some of the accounts that I was managing, which really grew the following. But, the problem is that required me to um like log in my terminal every morning and type in a command to make it happen. So, I was like, "Surely, if this is just a script, there's got to be a service out there that I could throw this on a server and

6:15have it run automatically." So, that's when I discovered PythonAnywhere. And PythonAnywhere is a service. With the free account, you can upload a Python script, and uh and it'll execute for you uh on a daily basis. So, once I discovered that, I was able to greatly grow the following in a lot of different ways. And uh one thing I did notice is that if you uh some people, when I was telling them about this presentation, they're like, you know, "Well, doesn't Twitter like shut you down for some of this stuff?" Uh and yes, in a way. So, the problem is don't be aggressive like with any of this automation stuff. Like,

6:51don't be like, "Yeah, let's follow 500 people a day and like see how it where that gets us." Um I I just did it with like a small amount, like a very uh I try to keep it under 100 touch points, whether that's like a favorite or a retweet or a follow or an unfollow. I just try to keep it under 100, and uh I fly, you know, under the radar. One One uh when I first started, I had it like at 200 different touch points per day, and Twitter was revoking my my off, and I had to go like re- restart it. So, um so, yeah, it's just something that, you

7:22know, you kind of want to be smart with. You don't want to be too overly aggressive with it, but it is a way to, you know, keep some some basic touch points out there on Twitter to uh increase the following. So, the script that I have, um originally there was I would unfollow 50 people who hadn't followed me, um and then I would follow some followers of others that were in the same niche. Then I would follow people who were tweeting

7:47out certain keywords. I would favorite anybody who had mentioned my username. And And when I say my, I'm not just meaning my personal account, but the other ones that I was managing. Uh so, anybody who would favor or you know, at mention us. So, typically it was like they were tweeting out an article or talking about us, you know, we just wanted to give them a little like, "Hey, thank you for talking to us

8:08on Twitter." Just with a little heart. And then um so, I would also favorite any um tweet that came out from certain articles. So, this really helped out with that waste management company because there are two big publications online that blog simply about waste and uh all the different things that happen in the waste industry. So, I'm like, "If anybody's tweeting out stuff from this source, then clearly they're interested in, you know, the waste industry and maybe we want to get them on our radar as well." So, that was a big one to just favorite those articles coming out and

8:39uh grew a lot of people that way. So, after you get people to notice you through some of those automations, now it's like, how do you get them to follow you? Well, you have to have quality content on there. And uh to automate the content, um it's not fully automated. I mean, you have to craft the tweets that you put in there, but you can use tools like Buffer to spread it out over time. Edgar, which does essentially the same thing, but will repeat your queue within different buckets. Um Q, q u u u.com. They uh actually if you select like certain uh interest categories, they will help put different

9:17tweets in your buffer um to go out. So, something I like to do there is for an account like maybe I want every day or every other day to at least have something go out via Twitter even if, you know, I didn't have the time to create my own tweet. And then if this and that is uh also allows you to set up recipes where you can follow different RSS feeds and send things out. So, what I what I did with this if this and that is I created an RSS feed of inspirational quotes and then I told it to go pull from that feed and every once in a while send something

9:48out um for a couple of the accounts that I manage. So, here's a tweet from the Waste Management. I just wanted to show like, you know, when you when you put a graphic in with any of your tweets, it's much more likely to get favorited and liked. Here's just a simple example. I just grabbed this one when I was creating the presentation. But uh what is that? Yeah, six retweets and and seven favorites just from, you know, the

10:10random industry of of Waste Management. So, there there is something, you know, to be sharing with the world even if they're not all like, you know, designers and developers, which is, you know, initially what um what I was targeting with my own stuff. So, then the final part of the recipe I mentioned was to convert. So, you get people to follow you, you get uh people to notice you, you're putting out content out there. Now, how do you um get them to subscribe to your email list or come to your side or something like that? So, you can create these Twitter cards and uh and then I pin them to the

10:42top of the Twitter profile, but it's uh it's a simple one-click um because Twitter already has their email. All they have to do is click once and then they get added to your email list um if they choose to subscribe. So, this is actually um there are tutorials on how to do this both for ConvertKit and Drip. You just can Google those and so, if you use one of those two tools, they'll show you how to um type in, you know, your your email

11:08marketing list and create one of these. And then I also put the URL to the site on the left column there. Now, a lot of people put their Twitter URL in the URL field, but I also put it in the bio because a lot of people use Twitter on like like apps on their

11:23mobile device or something like that. And some of those apps don't show the URL for the profile, they just show the bio. So, if you put your URL in the bio, you'll get a lot more click-throughs as well. So, finally, to close up, uh what I would uh say if you only had 15 minutes um per day cuz or per week, I would spend that time buffering up some relevant content. Maybe you're following

11:47some RSS feeds. Um maybe you are uh you know, following news or or recent industry stuff. So, uh buffer up some relevant content. At-mention some other people who are, you know, follow other accounts and and mention those people. You can even uh add retweets to Buffer. So, if some, you know, a bunch of people are tweeting some interesting stuff, and you don't want to just like plaster your list with them all these retweets, you

12:13can buffer those up as well. And uh always reply to at-mentions when people are trying to start conversations with you. Um and then just to close, if you um want to read a case study of how I just 2 weeks ago spun up a um Twitter account and tried to do some of this automation for this account, Freelance Kick. Uh I did that and already we've got hundreds of followers on our already sell. I have some plans for how to take this to another level later on down the road, but um you can read more about that here. So, uh to get these notes and and

12:45links to everything I mentioned, go to ryanbattles.com/microconf and uh