We invited Julia Dale, a blogger behind The Russian Fashion Blog to guest blog for us on the subject of enhancing social media visibility for emerging designers. Julia’s Twitter account currently has 40,519 followers. Here, Julia shares tips on how to successfully build your Twitter community.

You will find the first part of Julia’s post dedicated to building relations with bloggers here.

 

 

 

Social media management is a very time consuming task that I would highly recommend to delegate. As a designer you may not have enough time exactly when people need your updates, i. e. before and during fashion weeks.

 

There are many good examples of PR people taking over brands’ accounts, like @OscarPRGirl and @TibiPR girl. If a person is charismatic, optimistic and posts all important updates on time most people wouldn’t care who is twitting for a brand (just make sure your followers understand it is not you). So get somebody passionate on the task and stop worrying. You can even both tweet from the same account like The President of the U.S. and his team do.

 

 

What may sound like an easiest job ever – just sitting at your computer with a cup of coffee and chatting all day – requires a strategy and professional approach. This person represents your brand and has to keep that in mind while replying to angry customers or deciding how much humor is too much. A social media management professional would develop a posting strategy – what to share and how often, and set clear goals.
My perception is that the best strategy on Twitter is balancing between brand-related information and general entertainment. This way you have a chance to broaden your reach and attract new followers with your charisma.

 

 

In a tricky business of increasing your follower count a good old method of following people first works well. After some time you can unfollow those who isn’t interested (read: doesn’t follow back). Imagine you are at a party. You approach a person you never met hoping for a nice chat – he turns his back on you. The natural reaction would be moving along, right? The same is true for the biggest party in the world (regarding parties: read a brilliant article linked first below. You will love it, I promise!).

 

When you have a decent number of followers people start coming by geometric progression provided that you still do the following:

 

1. Tweet often.
2. Reply.
3. Retweet.
4. Don’t self-promote too aggressively.
4. Follow back nice people.
5. Post your Twitter handle everywhere
6. Run Twitter promotions and contests (optional). It can be really entertaining if done right, not too often or too rarely. Put your contests on schedule to keep your followers hooked.

 

Content people love on Twitter (from my experience): famous quotes (but not too famous, please), humor, useful links, breaking news.

 


My most retweeted post. Ironically yet expectedly it has nothing to do with Russian fashion.

 

Cool apps:
who.unfollowed.me
www.hootsuite.com
www.mvfapp.com
www.tweetbackup.com
www.klout.com
www.crowdbooster.com

 

Further reading:
http://heartifb.com/2011/10/10/how-to-be-a-social-media-butterfly/
http://www.twitip.com/category/twitter-for-beginners/
http://inspirationfeed.com/articles/social-media-articles/build-your-following-twitter-marketing-tips/

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