How To Be Famous on Twitter - Tips by a Twitter Celebrity

[caption id="attachment_176" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Pramit presenting his own case study"][/caption]Recently Digital Vidya (the company i work for) invited a very famous Twitter personality from India, Pramit J. Nathan in it's recent Social Media Bootcamp held at New Delhi. He has over 165,000 followers on Twitter! During his session on Twitter he explained how to gain popularity, credibility & mass following on Twitter. Here i would like to capture the essence of his enlightening talk.

1. No Rights or Wrongs: First thing he told us was that there are no rights or wrongs on Twitter. It is up to the Twitter users to define their own guidelines. Whom they follow, how they follow or for what purpose they want to use it is entirely dependent on them. Some one may want to maintain his time line clutter free & thus follow only a few hundred people & other may want to follow thousands of people & get followed back by them in return.

2. Going Mutual: Second thing which he mentioned was his approach to gain large number of followers & influence on twitter. He suggested to follow like minded people & let them follow you back & also if some one follows you then following them back. This way a mutual relationship is created. If some people don't return the favor by not following you back, you always have an option to unfollow them. Also lists can be created categorize the tweets of people whose content is dear to you.

3. Content is the key: Third thing he suggested was to create & distribute interesting content. Keep in mind that the content should be interesting to your followers which can help them & which they feel like sharing further. For this, one can write interesting blog posts & then share it and also one can retweet interesting content of other people. This also helps in building strong traction & relationship with fellow tweeple.

4. Target the influencers: He recommended that twitter users can have a much better twitter experience by friending the twitter biggies and the prolific tweeters. By retweeting them and conversing with them one gets the opportunity to reach out to their followers too and make friends with many active tweeps. He said that Twitter is his Window to the Web and his daily source for news, knowledge, humor and wisdom.

5. Don't limit: His important suggestion was not to limit yourself to a particular place or country on twitter. One can create a global personal brand on twitter. Just be open. One can find very good friends far away from your country & he even related his example when he visited Hong Kong with his wife & they met with a tweep (twitter friend) who hosted them for a great dinner and also helped them with many tips to have a great trip.

6. Hard but Easy: According to Pramit, any one can gain 1,00,000 followers on twitter. It’s just a matter of putting in the time but it’s simple to do. All you do is follow a few hundred people daily whose profile seems interesting to you & then wait for them to follow you back. After few days unfollow those who haven’t returned the favor so that you can follow more. This way one goes on increasing the number of friends (mutual followers).

Having a large twitter following does have many benefits. Pramit has been invited to many events as an expert. Also he gets the opportunity from top blogs to be their guest blogger. Apart from that there are various direct or indirect monetary and business benefits too.

What do you think can be more ways to be famous on Twitter?

Journey of Digital Entrepreneurs – From Whizlabs to Sochla

Recently my colleague Pradeep Chopra, one of the co-founders of Digital Vidya got interviewed by The Tribune on his entrepreneurial journey. This interview was published in their Jobs & Career column to inspire young & budding entrepreneurs. Here's the summary of his interview:

1. Starting Entrepreneurial Journey: Pradeep along with his IITian friend Kapil Nakra co-founded Whizlabs Software (p) Ltd with the initial investment of only 1,00,000 Rs in the year 2000. They created a product about Java certification preparation which was their first big success.

2. Challenges faced: Both of them faced stiff opposition from their middle class families as their parents being job oriented couldn't conceive of them being entrepreneurs. Also the Dot Com bust happened during the time they started their company. Not to forget the lack of sales & marketing and fund management skills in these young engineers.

3. Current Playground: After Whizlabs they ventured into Digital Vidya and now Soch.la. Digital Vidya is another success story while Soch.la is a new social networking platform based upon cricket & growing steadily.

4. Advice for budding entrepreneur: According to Pradeep, 'Passion' is the most important ingredient for being an entrepreneur. Rest all is secondary. If you want to be an entrepreneur take a plunge, don't wait to acquire all the necessary skills as the learning will take place along your entrepreneurial journey & you will pick up the skills too with the time. But if you keep on waiting & delaying then forget about being an entrepreneur.

What do you think young or budding entrepreneurs should have in them to be successful?

Ways to Use Twitter & Facebook to Build Communities & Generate Business

Twitter & Facebook have been at the centre stage as far as consumer internet is concerned. Tens of thousands of blog posts have been done all around the world citing the importance of these & various other social media tools which companies can leverage to connect to their customers directly. In this post i would like to cover some ways using which companies can build communities & generate business via social media tools mainly twitter & facebook. These were presented earlier by my colleague Pradeep Chopra at 'Gripel Social Media Marketing Excellence' and a very high profile 'Click Asia Summit'. Both these events were held in Mumbai.

Here's the gist of these presentations:

1. Twitter can be utilized by businesses first of all to listen the existing conversation going on among consumers about their brands. They should also track the conversation going on about the competitors. This will help in two ways. One is that you will come to know pros & cons of your products & services and how the consumers think of you. Second is that you will come to know about the weaknesses (which you can take advantage of) or strengths (which you can emulate or surpass) of your competitors. Apart from listening, also participate in the conversation & actively engaging with the consumers.

2. Twitter & Facebook both can be used for online reputation management. You can avoid disasters simply by being alert about online conversations about you. In fact you can convert the potential criticizers into great evangelists if you can solve their problems quickly & on time. And it helps to spread the word online very quickly. So, manually tracking the online conversations about your brand is a great necessity these days. Several tools are also available for this purpose but all of them have certain limitations.

3. The way Dell has done business worth millions of dollars via Twitter is a case study in itself. Similarly several small businesses are also doing business via twitter these days. One good indian example is Pune & Mumbai based Faaso's restaurant. They have an interesting Tweet-to-Order business model which is a great success in these two places. So, definitely, businesses can look forward to exploring twitter as an additional touch point to do the business. And it helps spread the word very fast if consumers like your products. Similarly various brands are doing business via their facebook pages.

Rest of the article with detailed examples & slides can be found out here.