My Twitter Challenge Is A Success

About a month ago, I announced my Twitter Advertising Challenge. What was my challenge all about? In a nutshell, I decided to follow no more than 200 people, redesign my Twitter background, and start advertising. About a month ago, I was following 16,826 people, with 17,060 following me. I’m now following only 68 people, with 14,417 following me. The strategy worked! I did lose some followers, but that’s ok. I lost fewer than the 5,000 I projected and now it’s so much more fun to use Twitter.

I also got a really cool new background. Head on over to My Twitter and see for yourself! I’m super happy with how it turned out. It’s really consistent with my blog! I have not started advertising on Twitter yet, but that’s still in the pipeline.

I was so thrilled with how my Twitter challenge worked out, that I also did a mini-Facebook challenge. Basically, I went out and got a new Facebook banner and also landing page. The landing page is interactive. If you like me, you get to download my eBook for free. Head on over to the PPC Ian Facebook Fan Page and check it out. (I also have a screenshot of my new landing page below.)

Big thanks to Collabo for reaching out to me and inspiring today’s blog post. I’m more excited about social media than ever before and am glad my challenges helped me take my social profiles to the next level. I hope you challenge yourself to make your social media campaigns amazing!

Images in this post © PPCIan.com

I got started with Twitter early on and leveraged smart strategies from day one. These strategies have propelled my following to over 17,000 on Twitter and have driven a significant amount of traffic to PPC Ian. That said, I’m always looking to improve and have set a challenge for myself. Twitter is hot right now so it’s the perfect time to revamp my Twitter account. Today, I’m going to outline the challenge I’m setting for myself and one month from now I’ll report back on the results!

Initiative One: Follow No More Than 200 People

Right now, I have 17,060 followers but am following 16,826. My Twitter stream is basically unusable. I want to be able to log in to my Twitter account and make sense of things, only seeing tweets that are relevant and interesting to me. If I am following no more than 200 people, I’ll be able to use Twitter once again.

Why am I following so many people right now? It was actually part of my initial strategy. I went out there and followed a ton of people knowing that a certain portion would reciprocate and follow me back. I would then unfollow those who did not follow me back. I did this many times and was able to drive a significant number of followers with this strategy. It’s a great strategy I still recommend for building out your initial base of followers. More followers equals more social proof and brand equity.

How am I going to remove 16,500+ followers? I’m going to go through all my @ messages and find out who I’ve interacted with. Then, I’m going to put them on my Tweet Adder white list. (Tweet Adder is a really helpful Twitter utility that I recommend purchasing if you’re serious about advertising on Twitter.) After my white list is loaded with my favorite people, I’m going to remove 1,000 people each day (who are not on my white list) until I’m done. Sure, I’m going to remove some good people by accident, but I can always add them back later.

Will I lose followers with this strategy? Absolutely. That said, I don’t think I’m going to lose more than 5,000 followers. I’m ok with this, and believe that I’ll retain most followers.

Initiative Two: Redesign My Twitter Background

My Twitter background has not been updated in years. It still looks ok, but could be a lot better. I’ve decided to engage the same designer who designed and built IJL.net for me. I’m sure the results will be great. Also, I’m sure my new background will help drive even more followers in the future.

Initiative Three: Advertise and Gain More Followers

After I reduce the list of people I’m following, I’m sure to lose a few followers. I’m going to partially make up for this by running a paid advertising campaign on Twitter. I’ve had phenomenal results running Paid Like Campaigns on Facebook. I have not tried this yet on Twitter, but am quite excited. At the very least, I’ll get that cool “Verified Account” badge by signing up as an advertiser. Also, I hope to gain some serious experience that I can then leverage at my job. In my opinion, it’s critical for all PPC professionals to master Facebook and Twitter in addition to AdWords and adCenter.

Stay tuned, I’m hoping to have some interesting findings in my journey to optimize my Twitter account. Want to connect on Twitter? Please don’t hesitate to reach out, my Twitter handle is ianlopuch.