Christine Lu created a Twitter profile that has served her extremely well. She made herself the go-to person for people interested in China.
Christine has always tweeted authentically and established relationships with her followers. She was able to bring most of her followers with her as she gradually focused her tweets on topics related to her new interests.
When Christine realized there was an opportunity to expand travel from China to Hawaii, she was able to use the networks she had built through Twitter to engage the key relevant players in a way that could make a difference both on-line and off-line.
Some key points to learn from Christine:
– Be a human being, tweet with personality
– It’s good to develop a focus topic but you can have more than one
– It takes time to develop a genuine following of people interested in what you have to tweet. “It doesn’t happen overnight.”
Brief bio from Christine Lu About page:
Christine Lu is an entrepreneur, geek and foodie. She’s a co-organizer of GeeksOnAPlane, founder of the [re]think: Hawaii conference series and Liaison To China for the Oahu Economic Development Board in Hawaii. Her latest startup is Affinity China – a Chinese luxury lifestyle and travel network launching in 2011.
Techie Words Used in this Video:
bot: On Twitter, a bot is a completely automated account. It may be delivering a news feed. Bots in general are internet robots. You encounter places on the internet where you are asked to fill in a word you see (captcha) to show that you are human and not a bot before you are permitted to post on a site. Typically, bots perform tasks that are both simple and structurally repetitive, at a much higher rate than would be possible for a human alone.
In the video with Christine Lu, I refer to being followed by “bots” in a negative sense because you cannot create a relationship with a bot. In the early days of Twitter, it took time to build followers. It still takes time today to build genuine followers. By “genuine” I mean followers who are interested in your topic, who will interact with you.
I use the expression “being followed by bots” in a very broad sense to include twitter accounts that follow back indiscriminately. Today you can quickly build a twitter account that will have numbers of followers but no genuine interaction simply by searching for accounts that plainly state they will follow back anyone. You can find lists of Twitter accounts that follow back indiscriminately on Listorious which is at the same time an excellent resource for finding people who tweet about topics you are interested in. The “followback” accounts are certainly not all internet robots but some could be.
