It was meeting that I will never forget. April 26, 2012 at Jack Astor's in Etobicoke, where I held my Entrepreneur Speed Networking (meetup group) event.
Due to our success in Newmarket, there had been interest to start groups in Etobicoke.
On this day it was yours truly, Arlene Gray, Loana Morgan and Christopher van der Hoff.
At the end of the meeting I mentioned to Arlene how I had great success in building connections on Facebook, LinkedIn but had issues with Twitter. At that time I had 262 followers.
Arlene Gray came up with a great idea. Let's have a contest! First person to reach 1000 followers before December 31,2012 the loser buys a gourmet dinner to the winner.
I didn't event think about it "I said lets do it"
The contest started I thought being Mr. Social Media I would win. I did two videos and posted them online, shared my twitter handle at all the presentation that I did. (which were alot!)
As the weeks and months passed Arlene Gray began to pull away and I was getting worried. At one point I was within 50 followers (which is the closest I ever got)
In the end on Nov 17,2012 I got a message from Arlene Gray that she had reached 1000 followers! Yours truly was at 650.
On November 25th I completed the contest bet by having dinner at the Palace Restaurant on Pape and Danforth. Bret Deguire also join us where we had a great discussion on the contest, coffee and much more.
I would love to have you follow me at @jimpagiamtzis – see you on Twitter!
Congrats to Arlene Gray on winning the contest.
Arlene views on the contest
April 26th, a day I will never forget! I
attended the inaugural Speed Networking event in Etobicoke, hosted by
Jim Pagiamtzis. In chatting with Jim, we got talking about Twitter and
working on building followers. At the time, Jim had 262 followers and I
had 264. We decided to have a little wager to see which one of us could
reach 1000 Twitter followers first. Not that I’m competitive or anything
(LOL), however this was just what I needed to focus on building my
Twitter followers! There was NO WAY I was going to let Jim beat me!!!!
(Did I mention that I’m not competitive?)
So,
I started asking my friends who were active on Twitter, what worked for
them, what advice could they give me? I researched various tools to
help me. What did I learn? Well, here are some of the key things:
· To gain followers, one needs to follow people (however this doesn’t mean just indiscriminately follow anyone, nor does it mean that you need to follow everyone who follows you)
· Regular posting of Twitter messages is key (I chose to post 3 messages a day, 7 days a week)
· I found a source where I could preload my Tweets, and used it for most of the contest – unfortunately they discontinued the site (it was www.timely.is). I’ve now moved over to TweetDeck, which while not quite as friendly to use, still works quite well
· Being active on Twitter also means interacting with people – commenting on their Tweets, retweeting, etc.
One
might, perhaps, describe me as a little “intense” about things. I did
take this contest very seriously... when I woke up first thing every
morning, before even getting out of bed, I would grab my Blackberry and
check to see how many Twitter followers I had & then check to see
how many followers Jim had. I spent a few minutes every day managing my
Twitter account: following new people, unfollowing others, preloading
more Tweets.
Ultimately, I won the contest significantly before our deadline of December 31st,
2012. As excited as I was to win, truly the bigger win was what Jim and
I learned about Twitter and how to build Twitter followers. I’m pleased
to say that almost 2 months after our contest ended, I’m still slowly
building – I’m now at 1061 followers. I still “nurture” my Twitter
account, although perhaps I’m not quite as “anal”! LOL! I now sometimes
don’t even check my Twitter account until later in the day.... and
sometimes days go by before I check to see how many followers Jim has
now.
I would love to have you follow me at @arlenedfg – see you on Twitter!
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