The "Oprah Effect"
Last week (4/17/09) Oprah Winfrey joined the Twitter community. I originally wanted to put a link in this article if you missed it, usually you can find 100's on You Tube, but the HARPO Publishing empire has had them all pulled, that is an amazing feat in itself! I did find news coverage of the event, and you can see that here.
The impact? Traffic on Twitter was up 43 percent compared to the previous Friday, and 24 percent from the day before the segment aired (see chart below for a visual perspective). Estimates put the number of new users signing up in the post-Oprah days anywhere from 500,000 to 1.2 million. Added to that was the "first to hit a million followers" competition between Ashton Kutchner and CNN (Ashton won).
What does that mean to you and your business?
It means the opportunity to get in front of a lot more people. To increase your visibility and thereby increasing your online traffic. There are a whole bunch of newly minted Oprah followers, housewives who may not have had any previous social media experience. They don't have many followers yet, and they don't know what to do. Well I do! ENGAGE them.
Start by taking a look at who is following Oprah, if they seem "new" take a couple under your wing and show them what to do, what the etiquette is, etc. Pretty soon you have started a conversation, and they will tell people about you, and hey, by the way, I also do this service, or sell that product, and you are no longer a stranger, but one of the tribe. Familiarity goes a long way.
What not to do? Immediately starting "selling". Not going to work in ANY social media environment, and you are going to turn off a lot of potential new clients.
Now get out there and make some new Twitter friends!
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