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Help I'm a Twitter luddite

I just launched a landing page for Front Desk and am now trying to find my beta users. For better or worse I have more or less ignored Twitter since I signed up in 2008. I have no idea what I'm doing there, and no history to speak of. Recently a few IH podcasts guests piqued my interest about it as a way to connect with your users.

What are your top tips for get started on Twitter?

This is how I'm starting

  • Create a twitter account for Front Desk
  • Find industry evangelists/influencers (Alexa, Slack) and following/tweeting them
  • Find interesting followers of the competition and doing the same

My short term goal is to find early adopters that at least have interest in being beta users. Long term I would like to build the brand and have a way to communicate with my customers.

I'll post updates about how well things go, so you might even see your advice in action ;)

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    My Cheatsheet that has a bunch of Twitter stuff:

    • Use tweetdeck (by twitter) and create columns that focus on your keywords i.e. I have a column that tracks twitter list of usernames (VCs) that I'm interested about. I have another list that tracks the tag #esports and another column that tracks a keyword. If you don't know how to do it, I can help.
      Using columns will allow you to keep your eyes focused on those things that matter to you and always be on top of them
    • Create columns for your own brand keywords
    • Create columns for competitors and related keywords
    • Don't be afraid to retweet or share material from your product's niche, it only helps build your image as someone who is deeply interested in topic(s). Extra points if you wrote them (inbound + track them)
    • Open your DMs to public, so anyone can contact you in private without having to follow. Maybe they have an urgent question and they don't want to follow you.
    • Once you identify a few key-players who seem to like your product ask them for retweets discreetly, they're cheap and show true love for your product (I think of them as kind of like putting their credit card down in a form on your site).
    • Track your links on twitter using analytics.twitter.com, UTM tags and bit.ly (or similar) services. A big spreadsheet will help you keep sane!
    • Create a cleverly thought out Product Hunt question in the "ASK" section that will allow you to understand and gauge who's in the space, what they're doing and who might be interested in your product. Once you gather a few votes and replies, follow them on twitter with your product. They might follow back...they might check your product out.
    • Do the same on Quora, also go around Quora to answer questions in your niche, you'll grab a few hundred or thousands views to your product page

    I think that's enough advice to get started from my secret manual 3:)

    1. 1

      Awesome, thanks! A lot to digest, and certainly some things that weren't even on my radar. I may have questions once it has sunk in, and now that I know there is a secret manual... ;)

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    I cannot help you very much with content, only recommed you buffer to schedule post if you need it aaaand do not forget Instagram! It is going very powerful and you can automate it easily. You can post two/three images per day with at least 20 hashtags related to your brand.

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      Thanks! I'll have to dig and see what kind of images voice apps use ;)

  3. 1

    I am not good at Twitter, so I can't help you much there. Just came here to say, nice landing page! How did you build it?

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      Thanks! I cheated ;) at least from my standpoint as an engineer. I bought a template and customized it, then added a really simple Slack integration to do the beta sign ups. I knew my tendency would be to dive into building the page and I would spend a lot of time on it. After all, that is what I do for a living. So in favor of getting out of my comfort zone and getting in from of users I took the quickest short cut I could find. This is what I started with http://thetheme.io/thesaas/ It is not mine, but is nicely done IMHO.

      I also ended up creating a serverless framework plugin to deploy it on AWS CloudFront and ApiGateway so I could repeat it quickly with other projects, but that is the subject of another post...

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        Haha I have the same tendency. At first I'm all like "I'm going to build this awesome website from scratch using my amazing code skills" then I decide "or I could just spend 5 minutes standing up Wordpress on DO and calling it a day".

        I'd be interested to here more about your deployment process. What do you mean by serverless framework plugin? Is that using AWS Lambda or something else?

        API Gateway looks cool, I hadn't heard of that before. So it basically lets you use AWS services directly as a back end to your app?

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          Serverless Framework It's an awesome tool to make configuring AWS ApiGateway/Lambda/Dynamo/etc (as well as other platforms) tractable. I'll message you with more detail...