Jeff Bullas is a consultant, coach, mentor and speaker, who works with companies and executives to optimize their online personal and company presence. His strengths lie in digital marketing, social media, web and mobile technologies. Jeff is also a talented blogger (his blog is jeffbullas.com) who writes extremely well for the web. He even answered our questions in a nicely structured way, just like a professional online writer. (We kept them that way to help you get an idea of what we mean.)
Jeff Bullas
Jeff likes using popular Twitter tools and apps to maintain his online presence. He thinks that automation is not a bad decision when it comes to your social media accounts. He is on Twitter mainly to communicate with people and to promote the content he creates on his blog.
Here are his practical tips how to use Twitter successfully and how to become popular online in 2 years.
Twittering from: @jeffbullas
Number of Followers: 66,637
Number of Tweets: 65,027
When did you set up your Twitter account? Do you remember why you did it?
I set up my account in December 2008 after stumbling upon conversations about Twitter on blogs I was reading at the time. It seemed a curiosity at the time with some potential so I started playing for a few months until I discovered its marketing power in March 2009 when I started my Blog jeffbullas.com
Do you have your own Twitter strategy?
My strategy is quite focused:
- I use it primarily to promote and distribute my blog posts to a targeted audience globally
- Engage and have conversations with people on Twitter
- For networking
How should marketers use Twitter? Any tips or tricks that work for you?
- Know who your targeted audience is and follow them. The secret etiquette of Twitter is that a lot of people will reciprocate and follow you back. Great tools for doing this are Twellow.com and Tweepi.com
- Create great content on your blog and tweet it to that audience
- I use a tool to automate the distribution of my archived articles from my blog. Each post is broadcast once every 6 days. Some people don’t like this strategy but Twitter is a tool and I use its reach to market my blog and with 65,000 Twitter followers it is very effective.
Why do you think people are following you? Is it because you are popular in your field or it is more about the way you are using Twitter?
I believe that people follow me because of the content I create on my blog which I then promote by tweeting. This has now created such momentum after 2 years of concentrated effort that 3,000 to 4,000 people new followers join every month
What are the main lessons you are usually teaching your clients when it comes to Twitter? What are your observations – do they know how to use it successfully?
For most people Twitter is a mystery. I treat it as a networking channel on Steroids. The main lessons are
- Know your audience
- Get clear on your goals for Twitter. Eg increase followers, drive traffic to my blog and create new contacts that I can meet in person that create business opportunities such as speaking engagements and consulting .
Do you think that Twitter is a “magical marketing tool”? Or is it a new way of communication that we need to learn how to use?
It can seem like magic because it is new and exciting. But it is a new way of communicating and marketing that needs to be learned with its own strange vocabulary such as #Tags
Can you be a Twitter “star”, if you are not doing something substantial offline?
Online influence can be created without being an offline somebody. There are many influential people on Twitter because they learnt the art of creating online influence. A great tool for measuring this influence is Klout.com What I am experiencing is that online influence becomes significant in real life and people start seeking you out for writing books, interview, ideas and business opportunities.
Does Twitter help you to “sell” yourself and to promote your services?
The short answer is ‘Yes’, but to elaborate it opens doors to paid Keynote speaking engagements, consulting and workshops.
In combination with my blog which is my name as a domain name (jeffbullas.com) it has created a very synergistic personal branding platform. What is also important is that my Twitter handle “jeffbullas” is consistent with my blogs name. I suppose you would call that congruent branding across multiple online properties.
Have you got a special Twitter story? Something that you still remember and makes you smile/laugh/cry/angry?
I remember being contacted by Scott Monty the Global Social Media Director for Ford about a positive article I had tweeted about Ford and that they had picked up with their Twitter monitoring tools. It surprised me that my little Tweet had been sifted from the ‘noise’ on the web that has led to us now becoming Twitter friends and communicating regularly via Twitter.
To add to that I wrote a critical article about General Motors and Chris Barger from Detroit headquarters and he responded with his response on a weekend.
This could never been achieved with any other marketing tool.
What does “success on Twitter” mean to you?
Success on Twitter is to be able make a difference by putting educational and original content into the Twitter torrent and to influence a global audience one tweet at a time. It has continued to surprise me with its reach and immediacy.
It has significantly contributed to making my blog a success in just 2 years with readers to jeffbullas.com now numbering over 140,000 per month in 190 countries.
