1M/1M: Need Twitter Help

Readers, we need your help with helping spread the 1M/1M movement through twitter. We have 88 ambassadors in the 1M/1M LinkedIn group at the moment, and 95 requests to join. We also have 100+ supporters who are not actively working on the project but are nevertheless helping spread the word. Over the last four months, we have processed over 750 requests to join. Those who have become ambassadors have committed to spend five hours a week on the program. Those who cannot, but still want to help, are on our supporters list. I am sure many of you also belong in this category of supporters who believe in the mission and would like to help in small ways.

Well, you can potentially become an active promoter of the 1M/1M by using Twitter effectively.

So today, I would like to discuss a proposal for using Twitter as a much more integral part of our initiative. I have been doing a fair amount of research on this, and read two books [The Twitter Book by Tim O’Reilly, Sarah Milstein, and Twitter Power 2.0: How to Dominate Your Market One Tweet at a Time by Joel Comm]. Much of what I suggest below is based on my own experiments with Twitter, and this research. Since twitter has become such a big part of the social graph these days, I hope you will find this useful much beyond 1M/1M.

Here’s how.

1. You need followers. Many of you already have followers. How do you get more? Typically, by following people who share your interests – in our case, entrepreneurship – you will be able to connect with others. I personally try to follow everyone who follows me, this way, we establish a 2-way communication channel, not just broadcast. Not everyone does the same, but it is certainly a good way to build a following.

2. You need to tweet. Otherwise, why would people follow you, right? I use twitterfeed to connect my blog to my twitter account. Automatically, all my blog updates go to twitter. For 1M/1M, those of you who feel comfortable doing so, are very welcome to do the same. The feed of our blog is: https://feeds.feedburner.com/sramanamitra. This way, you will be amplifying high quality entrepreneurship related content on a regular basis, and those who follow you will get to know of your interest in entrepreneurship. The other thing that would happen is that you would be automatically broadcasting the roundtable schedule, since Maureen keeps updating the blog with posts about the roundtables regularly. Finally, all the ambassadors who are publishing Incubation Radar posts, Seed Capital interviews, as well as my Deal Radar and Entrepreneur Journeys series of 1M/1M-related content will constantly keep your followers “fed” with quality information. Remember, people follow you because they’re looking for high quality content from you.

3. You need to retweet. In addition to my regular twitter page, I use a plug-in called Twitterdeck to follow a specific list of people whose content and tweets I find useful and contextual to 1M/1M. I tend to retweet their content, or send them reply messages often. This also adds to the flow of high quality content that comes out of my twitter account. And my followers like that. I also often retweet stuff that I see from my followers (whom I also follow) that is relevant.

4. Follow me @sramana to get access to what I am doing. I will follow you back.

5. Follow each other. I suggest all of you put in your twitter handles in the format https://www.twitter.com/XXXX into this thread, and let’s all try to follow one another.

6. Use #1M1M to brand your messages to get the benefit of your association with the movement.

7. Big picture: If 1000 of us managed to collect an average of 1000 followers each, collectively, we would be touching 1,000,000 people. Imagine how much momentum this would give to the 1M/1M movement?

And for all your other professional endeavors, having a strong twitter following that you build up over time will always come handy. So this is an investment in yourself, your future, not just a 1M/1M agenda.

This could be a simple and easy way for you to contribute to the 1M/1M movement even if you only have a few minutes a day to spend on the project.

We appreciate any help you can give us.

This segment is a part in the series : 1M/1M