The evening of July 12, 2008, was a normal sunny southern California day, and I was in my office cold calling clients and making deals. Just 3 months prior I had self-published my book Selling: The Secret of Success that years later I updated and released as Sell or Be Sold. I had to self-publish back in 2008 because nobody knew who I was. I had heard a lot about this Twitter platform the previous year (2007) but hadn’t taken any action with assuming it was silly and a waste of time. That evening, I finally decided to test the waters. I made my first tweet.
Check out my new book- Selling- The Secret to Success
— Grant Cardone (@GrantCardone) July 12, 2008
Did this tweet do anything? Probably not. It only had 1 retweet and 6 likes (before I retweeted it today). You could tell I was a newbie—no photo, no link to the book, no hashtags, no reason given for anyone to buy the book—just a plain, boring tweet. The important thing was that I started and entered a new space. You don’t have to be an expert at something to get started. Fast forward to now and in 2016 I sent 33,795 Tweets and hit 156.1 million impressions. I often get over half a million impressions a day on the platform.
Twitter has been around a decade and it’s still going strong with over 300 million people on it—with 67 million of those Americans. The average user has 200 followers and half of those people rarely, if ever, Tweet. Those that succeed big with Twitter tweet often. Overall, Twitter growth has slowed in recent years after peaking in 2014, but it’s still a strong platform for those that know how to use it right.
When I started tweeting in 2008, it took a little while to get used to compacting messages into 140 characters or less. I soon got the hang of it and tweeted daily. If I couldn’t think of something to tweet, I remembered that creativity follows commitment—so I got more committed to it. I began tweeting a lot. I kept increasing it to the point where today I tweet about 100 times a day.
Tweeting 100 times a day is a tweet about every 15 minutes around the clock 24/7/365. If you aren’t tweeting over 30,000 tweets a year, you aren’t tweeting enough. Frequency on Twitter is king. Don’t get sidetracked worrying about likes or lists, or even who you are following. Just start tweeting.
When you tweet 30,000 times a year, a few times you go over the top. My staff took down my Santa tweet it was so bad. There was a Miley Cyrus tweet that I later deleted, and the tweet to the governor of California that I later regretted. While I regret offending anyone that follows me, I’m not going to censor myself—and neither should you.
Tweeting 100 times a day may seem too much to you, but if you are committed you can make it happen. There are programs you can use to schedule them out. I sleep 8 hours a day, I’m not waking up every 15 minutes in the night to write a tweet, but I write every Tweet I send out. Believe me when I tell you that Twitter, more than any other platform, requires quantity to make an impact.
There are over 6,000 tweets made every second on Twitter. That’s 350,000 per minute. You can take all my tweets from the past 8 years and post them at once and I’d take over Twitter for less than 30 seconds. If you do 1 or 2 tweets a day that is nothing—literally.
I want to give you some tips today to help you blow up your Twitter. Let’s start with your home page. Take a look at mine:
Get a good professional photo of yourself for the picture above your name. People don’t want to follow someone they can’t see. In the description below, make sure you promote your most important traits and hashtags. Write a short description of what you do—and don’t be shy about it. This is the place to showcase what you’ve done and what you’re doing.
I personally use the bigger wall photo above to promote whatever it is I’m currently pushing. This photo can change several times a year. Right now it showcases my upcoming 10X Growth Conference which is being held in Miami in March. If you went to my Twitter last fall you would have seen a big picture promoting my newest book Be Obsessed or Be Average.
Hire a graphic designer if you need to, because you need to get this wall photo right if you want to be a professional. Once your homepage is right, it’s simply time to start blowing up your feed. My personal commitment to getting attention is to take massive action. I live my life this way. There is no such thing as too much! There are no laws against over-commitment, and the only punishment is criticism from those who never seem to do enough of anything—so get out there and get some attention for your business, your services and yourself.
Once your homepage is right, it’s time to simply start tweeting like a maniac. If you are short on ideas, here are some things I do that should spark your creativity:
1. Polls—These are great ways to get people engaged with you. I also can learn a lot by the answers. If I want to know how my audience feels about something, I just ask the Twitter universe. Polls are easy to do on Twitter. Try doing several a day. Here’s the first poll I ever made.
What causes more problems in relationships? Poll results revealed on Live show today 12pm EST GrantCardone TV
— Grant Cardone (@GrantCardone) November 4, 2015
2. Image Quotes—I do a lot of images with quotes because it works great. Quotes by themselves usually don’t work as well because people like to see something. It’s great to use quotes that make people think or laugh. You want to promote yourself so it’s best to make your own quotes. This is a very important part of Twitter so if you don’t have the technical skills in Photoshop to do this, take a course to learn to do it or hire a graphic designer to do it for you.
I do everything I can to pay as LITTLE in taxes as possible cuz Politicians squander it all no matter how much they get. #taxes pic.twitter.com/PEuoIHumpp
— Grant Cardone (@GrantCardone) October 2, 2016
3. Article Sharing—Twitter is a great place to post articles and blog posts you’ve done on other platforms. I always try and post links to articles I’ve written to my Twitter account so that more people will find them. It’s also a great way to give value to people—you never know who may stumble across your tweet that needs to read your material.
SUCCESS & SURVIVING HARDSHIPS https://t.co/WxQjnOEiag #success #entrepreneur #survive @Medium pic.twitter.com/s8gmdVoy72
— Grant Cardone (@GrantCardone) August 16, 2015
4. Trends—If you want attention, get yourself trending. Trending is defined as a topic that is the subject of many posts on social media within a short period of time. When I do a webinar, I have thousands of people watching and I tell them to start tweeting out a specific hashtag. When you get enough people tweeting and retweeting about a specific topic, you can get in the trending section of Twitter. You can find top trending topics when you sign into Twitter, it sits below your stats for tweets and followers.
It feels great to be trending, but remember that it can be very short lived. It’s one thing to climb the mountain, quite another thing to stay there. While getting trending is a worthy goal, the main thing is to just pound out Tweets hour in and hour out. Never think a tweet a day is ever going to do anything. Go massive or stay home.
I hope @realDonaldTrump keeps tweeting. I'd rather get it from him than the Merchants Of Chaos & Lie factory aka "Media" #Truth
— Grant Cardone (@GrantCardone) December 6, 2016
5. Video—It’s an established fact that people like to see videos online. Videos get high engagement and lots of shares. In the early days Twitter couldn’t do this but now, if you aren’t tweeting some videos, you’re a dinosaur. People want to see videos. It’s easy to take your phone and record something and then tweet it. Just keep it short, 2 minutes or less.
#TrumpRiot Message to Protestors -No one can help you as long as blame others you're screwed. pic.twitter.com/QmdSEcabb1
— Grant Cardone (@GrantCardone) November 11, 2016
6. Sell Your Products—You better believe I sell my products on Twitter. I tweet out every product in my store. If you aren’t selling on Twitter, then what are you doing? Whether you have a service or sell tangible goods, get pictures of what you are selling and combine the photo with a short pitch.
Let others do whatever while you do Whatever It Takes. https://t.co/nQRGly1UZ8 #WIT #hat #success pic.twitter.com/I1FXtyyDwF
— Grant Cardone (@GrantCardone) January 5, 2017
7. Hashtags—I make use of hashtags. A hashtag is a word or phrase preceded by a hash or pound sign (#) and used to identify messages on a specific topic. Hashtags allow for people to search for Tweets. This prevents your tweet from being lost forever after 30 seconds. People search hashtags and your tweet will come up. Always try and tweet with hashtags. Don’t make them super long, just use simple words associated with what your Tweeting about that might get searched. See how I used hashtags in this tweet:
#SeizeTheDayBy taking massive ACTION – stop losing in the planning phase #BeObsessed https://t.co/9JQpLLkpKq pic.twitter.com/Io71TfAV4P
— Grant Cardone (@GrantCardone) January 5, 2017
8. Flow Power—I like to flow power to others by retweeting and sometimes promoting other people. This is beneficial because they will, in turn, promote you and retweet your tweets. Flowing power to others will help you gain more followers. If I’m not retweeting, then I make mention of them using their Twitter handle in my post. See this recent example:
Who would like to see @TheSharkDaymond and I do something together – would you show up? pic.twitter.com/aggM02olXs
— Grant Cardone (@GrantCardone) December 7, 2016
And sometimes people flow power back to you:
Check out @GrantCardone's Be Obsessed or Be Average. Great book on turning obsessions into success. #BOBA #SharkTools pic.twitter.com/1EAdLe0bqa
— Daymond John (@TheSharkDaymond) October 13, 2016
9. Contests and Giveaways—These bring a lot of interaction and attention. People love getting free stuff. Whenever I do a contest I get a lot of engagement. The person that wins is always thrilled and I’m glad to be able to help them out in some way with one of my products. You can make these contests up, but try and tie them in with something that’s happening in the world. This means putting a hashtag of something lots of people will be searching for in with the post.
$500 giveaway. The #MannequinChallenge How many GC products do can you count.the first person… https://t.co/YZUeSPgTaN
— Grant Cardone (@GrantCardone) November 24, 2016
To Get Successful on Twitter You Must Get Successful in Creating Attention for Yourself
If you want attention you need to answer two questions:
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How far will you go to get attention?
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How frequent will you be in your attempts?
If you aren’t committed to Twitter you won’t get big on it. Your tweets will be boring, repetitive, and nobody will retweet you. As Gary Vaynerchuk has said, “if you are going to interrupt people’s entertainment, you better be entertaining.”
Does Twitter have a bright future? I don’t know—but I’m banging on it like it’s going to last 1000 years. Follow me @grantcardone.
Be great,
GC