Marketing True Magics 15: 10,000 Twitter Followers! Now What?

I now have 10,000 twitter followers!  Joy! Excitement! Thrills!

Sort of…

Why 10,000?

Because it’s big shiny number and it looks impressive!

No, seriously.

I wrote here why I used follow-backs to gain followers. In short, it allows me to find people with similar interests and market to them. Cold blooded? Yes. Effective? Time will tell.

What Does Having 10,000 Followers Get Me?

1. ReTweeters!

If you talk about interesting things, people re-tweet you. Last week, I got 21.9K views of what I tweeted, and 177 link visits. Not bad at all. Because more views lead to…

2. More Followers!

 10,000 followers sufficiently large enough that anyone who sees one of my tweets or re-tweets and clicks on my profile might say, “Hey, this guy has a lot of followers. Maybe he’s interesting…” and read through some of my posts, which should (if I’m doing my job right) make them decide that yes, I am worth following, which then turns them into…

3. Potential Customers

I need people to buy my books so I can eat.  And every person who follows me on Twitter is a person who may buy my book. And in the end, that’s what this is all about.

What Having 10,000 Followers Doesn’t Get Me

1. Fans

Followers are not fans. Fans buy your books, read your stories, come see you when you are in town, and promote your work to other people. Followers follow you on Twitter.

The good news is you can convert followers into fans with work. Not all of them, but enough to make a difference which is why I don’t have…

2. Time to Relax

Must keep the information flowing.  Must keep the fun and exciting tweets going out. Must start the Christmas “Buy my Books” Campaign.  Must begin developing contests and twitter talks and other exciting things so people will keep paying attention.  But doing all that on Twitter does not give me…

3. An Excuse Not to Use Other Marketing 

Twitter is nice, and I started with it because it’s the easiest. But email lists work far, far better and that’s an area I haven’t even started figuring out yet. I still need to develop my Google+ presence, and my Facebook page for those who are already fans. Then there’s planning next year’s convention and promotion circuit to go with my new book (True Magics, out in April).  And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

And speaking of that…

Next week: Marketing Plans 2: Why do I need all this background stuff?