News: Tell-a-Friend Tips: How To Get More Twitter Followers

One of the ways you can promote Tell-a-Friend to a big audience is by using twitter. Today, Barry Carter gives you some hints and tips to become an influential and well followed tweeter.

There aren't many successful businesses that don't have a strong twitter presence, and becoming a successful Tell-a-Friend (TaF) referrer is no different. Many of our most successful TaF experts are using the power of social media to increase referrals.

Though I have not made as many TaF referrals as some PokerStrategists, I do consider myself something of a twitter expert. I have nearly 3,000 followers myself and I use Twitter every day share my PokerStrategy.com articles and learn what is happening in poker. Here are my top five tips to anyone who wants to get more twitter followers in the poker world.

Follow others

Follow others to get more follows

For some reason, people think it is a bad thing to follow lots of people, without having lots of followers themselves. One of the best ways to get new followers is to follow them first - in fact, lots of people won't follow you unless you follow them back too.

Get into the habit of following new people every day, even if it just 10 new people a day. Make sure they are "targeted" followers; in other words, people who like poker. You can find poker players a number of ways, but the easiest way to do it is simply to find someone well-known in poker like @RealKidPoker or @TexDolly and follow some of the people that follow them.

You will find that when they see that your tweets are about the things they are interested in, you will start getting regular follow backs.

Don't use auto-follow services

You might be tempted to increase your followers by using one of many services that promise to send thousands of followers to you instantly. This might make you look popular, but it achieves nothing. You want your followers to be genuinely interested in what you have to say and 99% of the followers from these services won't be "targeted" - in fact a lot of them won't even be human beings, just bots.

It is much better to have 20 genuine followers than 1,000 "auto-followers".

Provide good content

The biggest question new twitter users have is "what do I tweet about?"

Some people think they have to tweet about everything, from what they had for lunch to when they are going to bed. Nobody wants to see that, but if they are following you, then they will be interested in hearing about poker.

If it interests you, it will likely interest them, so I would advise you to mainly tweet links to poker news stories, strategy articles and forum discussions that you find interesting yourself. You will soon get recognised as someone who tweets about interesting things and people will start retweeting your tweets - which will be seen by that user's followers, who may in turn start to follow you.

Of course, look no further than some of the great content we have at PokerStrategy.com. If you have an account at HootSuite (A social media app with several great tweeting functions), you can even set your account up to automatically tweet our content via an RSS feed - so you can tweet even when asleep.

Interact with "Power Tweeters"

Get a re-tweet from Daniel

The best way to stand out in the poker community is to be seen to be rubbing shoulders with the most influential people in the game. If you have twitter conversations with some of the most famous players and most followed accounts and they start to reply back to you, you will find that your followers start to go through the roof.

So for example, recently I wrote a column about Daniel Negreanu and I tweeted something along the lines of:

"Here is my new column about whether @RealKidPoker is the saviour of poker"

Because I used his twitter name in the tweet, he saw it and obviously liked the column because he retweeted it - to over 150,000 other people. The next morning, I had about 30 new followers just from that one retweet.

So chat with, mention, and retweet all the best known players, journalists, and poker rooms (and feel free to say hi to my twitter account). Make it a regular thing and you will find people start thinking of you in the same terms as the people you interact with.

Don't spam

It will be very tempting to tweet every five minutes with your TaF referral code in the hope that putting in the volume will lead to a lot of referrals, but the opposite is true. Nobody likes a spammer, and the sure-fire way to turn a follower into a non-follower is to constantly ram what your are selling down their throats.

The consensus seems to be that keeping a 10:1 ratio of genuine content to marketing content seems to be best. That is, you should tweet about your TaF code once, for every ten other tweets that you think your followers would find interesting or entertaining.

Once people are following you because they find you interesting, as long as you keep up the interesting tweets, they will have no problem with the occasional marketing tweet. In fact, they will likely be much more interested if they are becoming a big fan of your tweets.

How to earn $500 referring friends to PokerStrategy.com

Before you create your poker blog, first you must set up your own PokerStrategy.com account with which to create your own TaF referral code. Once you have your account set up, you can start sharing you referral link (below) and creating TaF marketing material.

You will receive $25 once a referred player has earned 100 StrategyPoints, up to a maximum of $500 per player when they earn 20,000 StrategyPoints. You will also earn 10% of any future TaF revenue if your friend refers another friend to PokerStrategy.com.

Your referred friend earns....	You earn....
100 StrategyPoints	$25
500 StrategyPoints	$25
2,000 StrategyPoints	$50
5,000 StrategyPoints	$150
20,000 StrategyPoints	$250
Total	up to $500

Learn more about how Tell-a-Friend works.

by Barry Carter