Monday morning, I surpassed 5,000 Twitter followers. Woohoo! A huge, heart-felt “Thank you” to all of you!
I don’t think the number of the number of Twitter followers is really all that important. But 5,000 is a nice, round, shiny milestone. And I’m always looking for a reason to celebrate.
I could giveaway an iPod, an iPad, or some other gadget, ask you to comment & retweet, blah, blah, blah. But that’s been done a thousand times. Bor-ing.
I’d like to celebrate this milestone by doing something completely unconventional. Something in line with true spirit Twitter.
Twitter is all about building relationships, right? It’s about adding value to those who follow you. It’s about giving and serving others.
So, I’m going to celebrate this milestone by giving away myself.
Throughout the entire day I want to serve you by giving you my time, my energy, my knowledge, and anything else you can think of. So…
- How can I serve you today?
- What question can I answer for you?
- What favor can I do for you?
- What can I give to you?
- What can I do to make this day better or brighter for you?
Post a comment and let me know. I will try my best to respond to every request posted. If you think it’s too big an ask, try me and find out.
If the request is too personal to post publicly, you can DM me.
I would love for you to retweet this post and help get the word out, but you don’t have to. This is my gift to you and it wouldn’t be a gift if I required something from you in return.
I would love nothing more than to celebrate 5,000 Twitter followers by doing 50 acts of kindness today for people like you.
[image by wwworks]
Paul,
Please share about a podcast I am producing: Compassion365. Myself and several other podcasters are releasing a podcast a day this year to raise awareness and funds for Compassion International. Do this any way you please.
Thanks,
John
Hey John, I’d be happy to. What’s the URL?
Got it… http://compassion365.com
You’ve been tweeted. 🙂
Question: I am running social media for my church (http://www.thrivechurch.cc or on facebook http://www.thrivefacebook.info)
Took it over a month ago and grown from 200 fans to about 750 and getting alot of interactions..
We aren’t the “typical” church and tend to think outside the box on most things..
How many facebook postings would you consider too much and become annoying? I think 5-6 per day is acceptable with probably 4 of them being non-church related and 1 or 2 about the church. Some think that is too much and only 2 or 3 max… Thoughts?
Scott
Hey Scott, glad to hear you’re getting a lot of interactions. That’s at least as important as the number of Fans.
Great question! Personally, I think more is less when it comes to organizations on FB. I would be more inclined to go with 1 or maybe 2 church-related posts a day and 1 or 2 non-church related posts. But it really depends on the posts. If they are all promoting church activities then people will perceive it as self-promoting. If you’re posting pics, devotionals, or ways to help people then people will probably appreciate more posts.
Probably the best thing to do would be to poll your fans & see what they think. I’m pretty sure you can add a poll to your FB page & people can not only vote but give their feedback & comments.
Ok.. Our leaders want the page to remain “non-churchy” and not like a big billboard for the church. Which I agree with. But at the same time I think we need to offer people some “spiritualnees” (is that a word?) via FB and Twitter..
our average attendee hasn’t gone to church in over 10 years so our church in general is very laid back, seeker sensitive and isn’t congested with typical “church” talk..
I guess I’m trying to find the fine line between being interactive and creating conversation, and being annoying.. For me I want the fan page on the top of their news stream as much as I can and get people talking about us and with us.
churches that are successful with “viral” marketing.. are they posting lots of church related stuff or just stuff in general?
Scott, I skimmed your previous comment a little to quickly and missed the link to your church’s Facebook page. After taking a look at it, I think you’re doing a great job of creating interaction rather than just being self-promoting.
Thanks.. learned alot just by playing around with my business fan page and applied what I’ve learned to the church. (http://www.facebook.com/IQtransport) Even went so far as to buy .info domains to help people find our twitter and facebook account easier..
Is there a magic number or goal for interactions a church should seek?
Paul,
We’re a small start-up and need help spreading the word about our new educational product. We make and market a cool new hands-on science product we call a KitBook (http://www.KitBook.com ). It’s the combination of a science kit and a text book.
We’re trying to create US jobs while preparing children for a technology dominated life.
Our first title is Electric Circuits. We sell to schools, homeschoolers, and families with school-aged children (ages 7-13). It’s fun and effective. Kids love it, teachers love it, and parents love it. Plus a university study shows that it improves test scores 32%!
If you could help spread the word around twitter and with your local educators, parents, and school communities, we would be eternally grateful.
God Bless,
David J.
Sure David. My college degree is in electrical engineering, so I was drawn immediatly to the circuits kit. Looks cool. My mom & sister in law are both teachers too, so I’ll pass along the word. Thanks for following!
Wonderful & giving idea Paul. Congratulations on hitting a milestone.
My wife Julie & I have been entertaining Florida seniors in senior living facilities & hospices. The economy has played havoc with their budget as is the new HC Bill.
Please help us promote the website we just creted to raise more money for them. The proceeds from http://www.Heirloomdvd.com will go to the senior facilities’activities programs & it is a wonderfully enjoyable & rewarding service for all people.
Mike, thanks for what you and you’re wife are doing to serve seniors. Our society is very kid-focused and unfortunately we often ignore our seniors and don’t give them the care and respect they deserve. Keep up the good work!
Another question for ya..
If a person wanted to learn SEO, SMO and etc on his own.. What is a good source to do so? Online schools? reading blogs? what’s your thought? Where did you learn it?
I learned just by reading blogs and experimenting with it. I know there are lots of good resources out there – books, online tutorials, etc – but I’m not familiar with any one of them enough to make a recommendation.
Ok.. thanks.. what’s your formal background in? and how long have you being doing this sort of business?
I graduated from Valparaiso University in 1994 with a degree in Electrical Engineering. I designed circuit boards for several years and there was a lot of software development that went along with that. Once you learn a couple of programming languages, it becomes easy to pick up new ones quickly. So, I taught myself HTML, HTMLScript, and PHP. In 1996 I resigned from my electrical engineering position, wrote the software for our first web builder, and my brother Mark and I started OurChurch.Com.
For just about every service we provide now, we started by reading all we could online and experimenting on ourselves – designing our own sites, optimizing our own sites, managing our own AdWords campaign. Once we started getting proven results and thought we knew what we were doing, we started offering to provide the same services to clients. It’s been a wonderful, creative, unpredictable journey!
That’s awesome man! I can understand unpredictable journeys.. I’m a former youth minister with a Church Recreation degree running my own transport company!! God is funny.. and perfect..
I play around with a few blog sites and have gotten some decent traffic to them with some of my own efforts, but haven’t figured out all the secrets the big boys know!! haha.. Internet marketing is so interesting to me.. so is blogging.. just gotta make myself do it more often..
I just wanted to thank you for your generousity of spirit. Thank you!
Thank you Mary-Lou. I’m having a great time helping people today. Is there anything I can do for you?
I would like to ask others that have not posted requests yet to try to think of something other than tweeting a link to help promote your site. I probably can do it a few more times today, but I just want to be careful not to irritate the very people I’m trying to thank and serve today. 🙂
Paul, congrats on hitting 5000! Great milestone. Here’s a question for you that will help me with an ebook I’m working on:
In one sentence, how do you define “living intentionally”?
OK, gotta ask a second question 🙂
What’s the top 1 or 2 methods you used to grow your twitter followers?
Thanks!
Thanks Bill! Great questions. (Perhaps you noticed my about page is sorely lacking)
I define living intentionally as planning and taking action each day to create the life you want for yourself rather than allowing circumstances and other people to dictate who you are, how you feel, and what you do.
The top 2 methods I use to grow my twitter followers are:
1) Seek out and follow new people who share some of the same interests I have.
2) Interact with people. (reply to DMs, RT followers good stuff, publicly thank people for mentions, RTs, FollowFridays)
Hi Paul,
Pray with my family and I. My father who only 58 has recently been diagnosed with Alzheimer`s.
And a second request: if you are married with children, spend more time with your wife and kids.
Douglas
Douglas, sorry to hear about your father. I just prayed for him, and I prayed for you and your family as I know Alzheimer’s is really tough on the family.
#2 – will do. 🙂
Hey Paul,
I’m slowly catching up on my RSS backlog. This is a fab idea and should I ever get to even a 5th of that number I’ll be sure to think of some novel way of celebrating it.
But serving is a top notch one – it is what we christians are called to do and you are spot on with the bit about relationship building on twitter.
So I’ll take you up on the what favour can you do me?
It’d be alonger term favour I guess but, should you ever visit the UK and specifically Wales then allow me the privilege of having you for dinner/food and visiting my place of worship.
Not hard really 🙂
Stuart, I would love to share a meal and worship with you. I hope some day I can take you up on your offer.
Hi Paul,
First, I just want to say thanks for shining your light and bless you.
HELLLLLLLLLLLP! LOL. God has blessed me in my business but I’m so completely overwhelmed with all the internet marketing that I don’t have time to create! I feel like my work has become an idol and I hate that. I’m not sure what to do to manage everything…just maintaining all of my sites is mind boggling. Can you suggest anything for me?
Thanks so much!
Ruth
Hey Ruth,
It’s awesome to have too much business! What kind of help are you needing?
Hi Ruth, that’s great to hear God is blessing your business. There are a lot of options when it comes to websites and online marketing. I don’t think I could make a good recommendation to you without hearing more about your business, where it’s going, what’s working, and so forth. Could we schedule a call to talk?
I’ll send you an email to follow up.