One of the biggest challenges for Bootstrapped Businesses is figuring Low Budget avenues for lead generation and growth within the existing ecosystem of digital channels and social media platforms. While big businesses can spend big bucks on advertising. However, startups and small businesses need faster results with lower, and often no ad budgets. Growth Hacking enables startups to reach their goal faster, and with fewer resources.
In this post, we’ll look at some of the most effective growth hacks you can use. As a marketer or entrepreneur, it is to scale your business using Twitter. Before we dive into the growth hacks, let’s understand why Twitter makes for a perfect growth hacking channel:
- Direct mentions
- Twitter lists
- Message automation
- Public followers
- Bots and apps
- Competitor information
- Public tweets
This is very different from the possibilities you have on Facebook or LinkedIn. And hence the growth hacks vary across channels.
Here are the top growth hacks for Twitter for 2017:
Growth Hack #1: Competitor Analysis using Tweepi
Tweepi is a tool that lets you analyze information about the followers of your competitors. It includes their locations, influence, follows ratios, and bios. This has a huge potential as it allows you to extract information about the competitor itself.
For instance, if you’re a B2B service company and you use Tweepi to find information about the followers of a competitor.
- Step 1: You can list their followers and start filtering them by location and other factors.
- Step 2: You can potentially find their clients, employees, freelancers, vendors, and partners by filtering down their followers by using the right filters.
- Step 3: You can then export this data into a sheet and run automation to outreach to the various segments of data created in Step 2.
Growth Hack #2: Provide ORM for your Competitors
ORM is essential for a business. It is to maintain its brand image, improve customer retention and satisfaction, and grow relationships. Twitter and Facebook are the channels where ORM is needed the most. However, most brands have not mastered the art yet.
While traditional marketers and digital marketers focus on ORM, growth hackers must also focus on providing ORM for their competitors.
Let’s explain that with an example. Say you’re a hosting company called HostGoose. And you target HostGator (your competitor) to provide ORM.
- Step 1: Find HostGator’s support handle on Twitter (If there’s no dedicated handle for support, head on to the main handle)
- Step 2: Go to the ‘Tweets & Replies’ tab and find all the negative reviews about HostGator. Alternatively, you can use advanced search on Twitter and filter tweets with negative emotion.
- Step 3: Tweet to all the negative tweets offering a solution to their problem if they use your service. To top it up, offer a welcome discount for all these users to move to your hosting.
The same can be applied to any other business. Let’s say you’re CarZoom a competitor of ZoomCar. Here’s the gold mine for you:
Growth Hack #3: Get Online PR Using Twitter
It is easy to get a list of websites to get PR for your business or startup. But the response rate of these websites on your emails or contact forms is depressing. However, as part of their internal process, these websites tend to be responsive and active on Twitter.
The trick is to export a list of PR sites from Twitter using Advance Search. You can also deploy Boolean Operators to your search for better results. And then automate tweets to them for featuring or reviewing your product or service.
Here’s an interesting keyword search to find active PR platforms to get your startup featured:
Another hack is to feature influential PR platforms based on your industry and business. And mention them on your tweets to get a response or Retweet from them.
Replies from brands like Hootsuite are good for great brand visibility for a digital marketing company like Mapplinks. You can try this one with the most engaged brands in your industry or domain.
These growth hacks can be applied to any product or service. To learn more growth hacks, watch our 30 growth hacks series on YouTube. For any questions on implementing growth hacking for your business, connect with us at rishabh@mapplinks.com.