Using Twitter to promote a Toastmasters club (Part 4)

As mentioned in an earlier blogs, the bigger your audience, the more people will see your Tweet (not just your followers, but if the algorithm favors you, their followers will see your content too).  You should be trying to get the following types of accounts to follow you:

• Other Toastmasters-linked accounts
• Public speaking creators (such as myself)
• People who live in the catchment area of your club

This last one is the most important and the hardest to achieve.  Here are a few things you can do:

1. Get your club members to follow the club account. You can achieve that by repeatedly asking them to do it.
2. Another quick hack is to identify accounts in your area that will likely follow you back because they say they will. Many people who always follow back will say so in their profile. So, you can search for one of the following combinations, and you might find such accounts:
   • “I follow back” YourCityName
   • #IFB YourCityName
   • #follow4follow YourCityName
Be very careful with this tactic, however.  Check that you are comfortable with the content posted by each account before you follow them (as their tweets might be recommended to your followers. Many bots on Twitter exist only to spam people about NFTs, Crypto, or specific political campaigns. It would be best not to allow your followers to be recommended junk and irrelevant tweets because of you).
3. The most effective thing you can do (although it takes some time) is to entice large local accounts to follow you. You can best do this as follows:
   1. Identify local accounts with many followers. You can search for the names of suburbs close to where your club meets and see which accounts have mentioned that place. Follow the ones that tweet about self-improvement, local parks or community events, etc.
   2. After doing this, pick a few of these accounts to target (the bigger ones most closely aligned to personal development).
   3. Set an alert to be notified when they Tweet.
   4. Then engage with their content by commenting under their Tweets. Try to make the comments entertaining or valuable, not just platitudes.
      • Some people who follow your target account will likely notice you for the first time because of these replies.
      • They might then visit your profile and, if they like the content you are tweeting, might follow you.
   5. After some time, the person running the target account will also notice that you regularly boost their content and will feel positive towards you. If they don’t eventually follow you on their own initiative, you should send them a Direct Message (DM) introducing yourself with the objective of forming a Twitter friendship. Then when you feel comfortable, you can ask them to follow you back, so their audience might benefit from your content.

Congratulations on making it to the end of the four-part blog series on how the Vice President of Public Relations (VPPR) of a Toastmasters club can use Twitter to promote their club! Hopefully, you have found the actionable steps provided in this series helpful in overcoming the challenges of effectively using Twitter.

Remember, building an engaged audience and creating valuable content takes time and effort, but it is definitely worth it in the long run (for your club and for yourself). By implementing the strategies outlined in this series, your Toastmasters club can gain more visibility and attract new members through the power of Twitter.

Good luck and happy tweeting!

Part 1: Introduction | Part 2: Planning | Part 3: Content Strategy | Part 4: Audience Building