Become an Influencer on Twitter

Written by: Gary Horsman

How Do You Become an Influencer on Twitter?

Increase Your Influence on Twitter

I want to state up front that for you to be influential almost always means that you have specialized. You know your topic well. You can discuss it from multiple viewpoints and in an in-depth way because of this specialization.

Of course, there are some exceptions. Some people have influence beyond their expertise just because of their reputation or their position or their perceived intelligence. This post is not about those special influencers. It is a post for people who do not have that special position of influence and who want to become more influential in their specific area of expertise.

To become influential, you first must have a passion for your topic and demonstrate your passion. A passion for your topic will help others to feel the excitement about the topic and this excitement translates into influence.

Also, if you are not passionate about your topic then you will not have the commitment and energy to follow through on the items on this list of success tips. Therefore, it all starts with your passion.

1. Be Consistent

If you are excited about your topic one day and then become distracted and go off topic the next day, then you will never be as influential as you could be.

Consistency counts!

Be consistent with:

• Your message
• Your quality
• Your quantity
• The details

To be influential in the digital world and specifically on Twitter means that people will not be able to see you or talk directly with you. They will experience you on their computers, tablets, and smartphones. You will be judged on your content and your consistency.

2. Be Genuine

You need to be authentic. If your passion is real, then people will know. If you try to fake your passion, then this will be detected as well.

You don’t need to try to be influential to the entire online world. You need to be true to yourself, your topic, and to your specific audience. When you are genuine and authentic then you can connect more solidly with people.

Another aspect of being authentic is to not to try to be invincible. You can admit when you don’t know the specific answer and still provide your insights or an approach to gain a better understanding.

To be a bit vulnerable will help people to view you as genuine and help your ability to influence.

3. Grow Your Audience

You may be able to create delightful content but if it is not seen by the intended audience it is not contributing to that audience. Therefore, not seen means your delightful content has no chance of increasing your influence.

Without an audience, your content creation time and effort does not increase your influence. Therefore, before you become influential you need to build your audience on Twitter before you need them. Always do things to expand the reach of your content on Twitter.

Note that while this post is about increasing influence on Twitter to have influence on other social platforms can help boost influence on Twitter. For example, if your audience also spends time on YouTube then a presence on YouTube along with high-quality delightful video content will help. If you create YouTube videos, then to tweet about them helps increase exposure on YouTube. Tweets with video content help to provide interest and engagement for your Twitter feed.

Use multiple social platforms that complement one another to increase your influence.

4. Weak Connections to Strong Connections

On Twitter, you send out tweets and hope that someone will view and follow. A simple ‘follower’ is the weakest of connections. To have a follower is a start but you need a stronger level of engagement to increase your influence. Therefore, to tweet consistently to your followers is the proper starting point but to take it to the next level requires more engagement and interaction.

How do you increase engagement? Start by using Twitter lists! Think of ways to build lists on Twitter that help you to focus your attention. With Twitter lists, you can quickly check on a select group of accounts to see what people are tweeting. To scan a focused list is much faster and more efficient than scanning your Twitter feed which will be filled with tweets from all accounts you follow

You can create Twitter lists for topics of interest, such as your industry, business improvement topics, authors and book topics, and more. Your lists enable you to focus and to engage in a more meaningful way. Tweet, like and retweet the content of people on your lists. Compliment people who you add to your lists using a Twitter Direct Message (DM). People will start to notice and if your lists are formed with people of influence then you are engaging with influencers and this is a move in the right direction.

Next, if you can use the phone to further the relationship or even meet face-to-face then this moves things along to a higher interaction level.

The technology of Twitter gets us started but good old-fashion human interaction is still what is needed to build the strongest connections.

We will do well to remind ourselves that it is always “who you know” that really matters.

5. Use Third-Party Twitter Tools

Influence is something that will increase over a long period of time. You may even see it grow and decline and then grow again.

To have influence is not really a destination but a journey.

To amplify your message, you need to focus and then have tools that help you to scale your message to a larger and larger audience within your niche.

A strength of Twitter is the abundance of third-party tools. Here are some that will help:

Buffer: A scheduling application that helps your consistency
RiteTag: A research tool to help you define the best hashtags specific to your audience
IFTTT: (If This Then That) A tool to help you to tweet the content of others automatically

Special Note: when you automatically tweet the content of other you must be confident of their quality. For example, you could use IFTTT and the blog RSS feed of someone who blogs about things that would be of interest and of value to your audience. This would be very good.

However, if this same blogger sometimes were to blog about something off message or even worse – off message and low quality – then this will reflect negatively on you if it shows up automatically in your Twitter feed.

I stressed consistency in tip #1 and this consistency must also be present in whatever you set up which is automated.

6. Keep Learning

Influencers always look for ways to increase their knowledge. Therefore, if you can help an influencer to gain knowledge then this puts you in a position to influence an influencer.

Know the influencers that relate well and who produce content for your niche audience.

Also, just as influencers never stop learning you cannot stop either. Continuous learning is a necessity if you desire to be an online influencer.

The digital landscape keeps changing and your tools, tactics, and insights need to keep evolving. Make life-long learning a life-long habit if you want to be an influencer.

7. Teach

Learning from others is important as noted above. However, to become an influencer you also have to become a teacher. This means you need to be a creator of original work and be willing to share your ideas. You can start sharing your delightful ideas on Twitter.

This may mean studying the work of others (multiple sources) on a specific topic and then adding your perspective and insights. Research topics and distill what you learn. Write a blog post or article and then tweet about for extra exposure.

To go one step further you also must conduct your own experiments to extend the knowledge of a specific topic. Create some focused deep material that you can count on to project your expertise to your audience.

8. Build Content Distribution Outside of Social Networks

Social media and Twitter, in particular, are ways to get your message in front of many people. However, don’t just rely on the social media platforms to amplify your message. Two channels that should not be ignored are search and e-mail. You need to search engine optimize each post you produce. Moreover, you can notify people of your post by e-mail.

Search is very valuable as if people are seeking information on the topic you are an expert in and they find your expert blog post then they are happy and you are too.

E-mail is valuable. Notify the people who you are seeking to connect with about new and valuable material. This is a benefit to them. Be sure to take a position where education is the focus with no pushy concentration on making a sale.

9. Create Evergreen Content

If you write a blog post that is related to something “hot” and in the “news” then you can achieve a great deal of exposure quickly. This is wonderful.

However, you also need to have some outstanding evergreen content that is in bloom for a long time (hence evergreen). One tweet about a delightful evergreen blog post you published is not giving it the exposure it deserves. One tweet is not enough. You can tweet about this post multiple times in multiple ways.

Silence is not golden when it comes to the social networks. Silence leads to being forgotten and this is not being very influential.

Delightful evergreen content that is tweeted multiple times has then multiple times to be seen, liked and retweeted (shared). This increases both your exposure and influence.

10. Write

Twitter is often referred to as a microblog. With only 280 characters to make your point, the term microblog is appropriate.

When you publish to a blog you can get more detailed and add more value for your audience. To blog (action verb) is essential.

However, you should notch it up even more to become an influencer. Consider writing ebooks and books. There is nothing that will do more for your credibility than a book. A book speaks volumes about your expertise and dedication to your topic and audience. When you have published your book then tweet about it multiple times with creative variations for each tweet.

A book is content of consequence. Therefore, it will have a tendency to be evergreen content and can remain as your pinned tweet for a long time. Pinning a tweet about your book or ebook helps define you as an expert and people want to listen to and follow experts.

Another variation or companion action to writing a book is to teach a course. If you create a course, then convert it to an online course. A delightful online course is premium content that can help to place you at the center of your industry and niche. Creating a course requires being disciplined and requires you to study, think, refine, and write. This is what influencers do.

More Twitter Tips

I hope you found these 10 tips on how to become more influential useful and if you even work on 1 or 2 of them then this post was of value to you. If you want to read other tips on how to improve your performance on Twitter then here is a link the Twitter Tips Category on this blog.