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Maximise your influence for social network leverage

How can we use Twitter and maximise what we Tweet to extend our influence, increase our followers and delight those who are following us? By understanding and applying the science of influence to Twitter we can do all of this.

Firstly a little about the science of influence (bear with me, this bit is important). Robert Cialdini, a distinguished professor of psychology undertook a big study of professional influencers, and found that the skill of influence is captured by six universal factors :

• reciprocity – the desire to give something back to those that give to us
• likeness/rapport – People are easily persuaded by other people that they like (this is the basis of Viral Marketing after all). i.e. People are more likely to buy if they liked the person selling it to them.
• commitment and consistency – being congruent and authentic with our values
• scarcity – a desire to have those things of which there are less (i.e. original content)
• social proof – people want to follow the lead of people just like them and people will do things that they see other people are doing. For example, as a child have you ever run into the middle of a busy market square and just stood there and looked up into the sky? Remember the crowd that soon gathered to stand by you and look up into the sky to see what you were seeing!
• authority – if we claim to be an expert on some topic we are more likely to be successful at influencing others

The term social media and social network inherently implies the act of influencing. After all, why are teens suddenly the fastest growing Twitter group?  They are influenced by celebrities. Here’s how you can use the science of influence to leverage your social network on Twitter to achieve this:

1. Add value, educate or make people’s lives better in some way - Use a URL shortener such as bit.ly to share a link and to add value. Use a link to a photo to illustrate your tweet (TwitPic), upload a video from your phone via an email to YouTube, use qik.com live video streaming from your phone. Also use Twitter’s retweet functionality to add value to your network, by retweeting those that add value to you.
2. Manage your followers –Use the power of reciprocity send them a DM tweet, offer to introduce them to your network (tweet intro), are they actively contributing to your network with regular tweets that are adding value, educating you or making your life better in some way?
3. Who are you following? – are they following you? Are you enough ‘like them’ for them to want to follow you? Monitor if they follow you, if they don’t and they don’t power up your network, should you unfollow them? Have a good ‘purge’ of who you are following every now and then
4. Power up your retweets:
   •  Use retweetable words: ask for help! Please retweet, use of ‘you’, mention the following words: blog post, help, how to 
   • don’t be boring – avoid idle ‘what are you doing’ ‘status’
   • make sure you use good grammar and spelling
   • work hard to write original content and be original
   • don’t swear or self-reference
   • 1pm to 11pm and Thurs/Friday are the best retweet times – focus your activity here
   • Monitor your retweets and @replies – so that you can track what’s working  (see a great post here on this)
5. Aim for quality not quantity – it can be easy to fall into the trap of thinking that you need to get as many followers as possible, perhaps you feel that popularity is measured in how many thousands of followers you have? But, like everything in life it is quality not quantity that matters. Quantity will follow quality anyway. Aim for quality of:
   • followers 
   • following 
   • quality of content
6. Promote conversations – Twitter is a marketing tool to promote conversations around your brand, your company and/or your chosen topic areas. It is forcing a move in the culture of marketing from one-way broadcast campaigns to two-way conversations. So make sure that your conversations are truly two-way – and not rambling monologues, or boring rants:
   • Make an effort to find out what topics are trending and what people are interested in – use hashtags to monitor trending topics and twitter serach to search on keywords.
   • Use tweetdeck to manage multiple conversations and trending topics
   • Use keyword optimisation – so people can spot you on twitter search directories like wefollow and track you on twilert
   • Retweet other people using their words and giving your own personal authority/endorsement