Finding Your Esports Followers

Originally published at esportsentrepreneur.com on January 5, 2016.

Recently, Esports Entrepreneur’s twitter reached 1000 followers, now this might not seem like a big deal to some, but for us, we are excited about how far we have come over these past 6 months. Now I want to share with everyone a few different technique we have utilized to grow our content, social media platforms, and total followers.

Social media technique will vary from business to personalities to organizations and players. These techniques will be best utilized for those that are offering a service, a niche site, or products. With any strategy for developing a product or service, you must look at how you are adding value to the consumer, the same approach can be taken for developing social media strategies. In the last 2 months, we have grown our following from roughly 250 to over 1000. We did this through

• Content Sharing
• Keyword Engagement
• Automated Content Posting

Keyword Engagement

Esports Entrepreneur focuses on several different keywords such as Esports organizations, Esports Professionals, Esports Management, and you get the idea of where I am going with this. Knowing what language your potential consumers are using will continue the development of your engagement strategy.

What do you do with these words? On twitter, you can search for each of these keywords and you will see tweets and accounts related to your keywords. Now you can look at them and see who your potential is, or you can engage with those users with 4 different effective options.

Favoriting/Liking

Favoriting is the quickest and easiest route to make a quite conversation which can result in a pretty high conversion ratio of followers to liking or at least have the person investigate who you are.

Retweeting/Quoting

Want to make a splash and have a positive experience for a consumer? Retweeting creates a positive impression and typically has a high conversion per retweet. If you want to strike up a conversation, quoting the tweet and adding your two cents about the tweet or content posted is a great way to provide value to the tweeter and your followers.

Replying

Did someone mention your brand in a recent conversation? Make sure you follow up and thank them! A great example of this is Canva

https://twitter.com/canva/status/684185230303977472

Even if it’s negative, offer some sort of support. Esports is a large industry full of opinion based conversations. If you get the opportunity to have a public conversation on twitter with an important industry influence, take every chance to pick their brain and get them on board and interested in your brand.

Following and Listing

Twitter has a unique function which allows you to build lists of accounts that would be potential customers, influencers, and other important people. It creates engagement and makes people feel special for being added to a list. Many accounts starting off will following as many people as they can to build a following going off the if I follow you, you follow me back. This works in some instances, but not all. Don’t follow people and then unfollow, follow baiting is very frowned upon and will hurt your brand.

Content Sharing

Content Marketing is utilized with original content and social media sharing. Now content sharing also utilizes other people’s content by positing it to your followers who would be interested in that content. It’s all about creating value for your followers! I believe that my followers find value in seeing news in the industry, so I set up an IFTTT which any time that Esports Observer has a new rss post, it gets put into my buffer queue which then gets sent out to my twitter followers.

Now this does a few things, it engages with providers as I have it set up to mention the content producer along which brings my brand in anytime someone searches for their content on twitter. Now don’t think it’s all about you because you are building their brand to, you are acting like an influencer for constantly sharing content.

Automated Content

As I mentioned above, I use software like IFTTT, Buffer, and other social media tools. You need to always be posting content to your platforms, you should not disappear for a few days, even it if means posting once a day while you are on vacation which you can easily do with buffer. Always be providing content!

At the end of the day, your followers need to find value and interest in following you, if you are an entertainer on twitch, then you will want to use tools like Kapsuli to offer a beautiful live twitch stream in a twitter post. There are lots of different ways for you to provide content and engagement, but it will vary depending on what you do.

tags: branding content esports marketing Marketing social media