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2008, I got entrepreneurial ADD and started an online office supply store. Back then, there weren’t a lot of larger corporations actively listening on social media and on Twitter. That’s really the big power of Twitter. I put a team in place, and anytime that Office Depot, Staples or what have you was mentioned, our folks would just jump in and start having a conversation with those. You know, for instance, heard somebody inside the Staples complaining that they couldn’t get help. They were trying to buy HON desks. The service rep said they’d be back in a minute and ended up never coming back. The person went to Twitter. They complained. We jumped on, answered it. The person stepped outside the store. They said, “Can you get us an answer?” We’re like, “Well, have a direct relationship with them. Let us give them a call.” We called 27,000-dollar order from that. I’m like, “You know what? This is working.” We started doing it real aggressively. I mean I’ve had names like Gary Vaynerchuk if you know who he is.

Mark S A Smith: Of course.

Mike Kawula: It wasn’t even Gary that I was following. I was following the keyword, “Moving my office.” Gary tweeted exactly, “Moving office,” and our team jumped in. We started conversation. Gary ended up spending tens of thousands of dollars with us for VaynerMedia when he opened it up. I just saw the power of it. When I sold those two companies and was deciding what to do next, I was at a conference down here in Florida, met this individual. He’s a data scientist by the name of Dr. [Morten 00:02:57]. He had this algorithm that was phenomenal for Twitter. Being such a Twitter fan, the folks there were just like, “Morten, you’ve got to meet Mike. Mike, you’ve got to meet Morten.” He wasn’t doing anything with this algorithm. I’m like, “There’s huge potential here.” I jumped in, developed this into a SAS company. Now, we’re at 5,000 plus customers. We’ve connected now, actually, as of today, almost 19 million people on Twitter and analyzed over four billion tweets.

Mark S A Smith: Wow, four billion tweets, that’s a lot of analysis. I think what’s really important, and I want to point out clearly to our listeners, that your secret to success here is actively listening to what people are tweeting about and using that as a conversation started to engage the conversation that leads to business. A lot of people use Twitter as a broadcast medium. “Hey, look at me. Here’s what I’m doing.” Blah, blah, blah. Then, your point is, “No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Listen to what they’re complaining about. Then, connect with that pain point to start the sales conversation.”

Mike Kawula: 100%, so for instance, before the show, we were talking about traffic and conversion summit, right?

Mark S A Smith: Yes.

Mike Kawula: It’s got my audience there. The folks who are there, they want traffic to their website. Obviously, what I’m going to do now is again listen. I’ll use that keyword which is the hashtag for that event. Anytime somebody starts mentioning that hashtag, my company is going to go out and follow that individual. When you follow people, if you’re relevant in following the right types of folks, 10 to 20% of those people are not only going to come back and locate your profile and follow you back. 10 to 20% of those people that follow you are going to click on whatever your pinned tweet is. If you have something that speaks to their pain point, if you’re following the right people, they’re going to come to your website as marketers, as CEOs. All we should care about is traffic to our site and converting that traffic for a positive ROI.

Mark S A Smith: That’s it. Trigger those relevant conversations. Now, the important thing is that it’s not just about following anybody. It’s about following people that have a shared interest or our tribe that we can connect with.

Mike Kawula: 100%.

Mark S A Smith: Then, having a solid Twitter header that sells them, entices them to learn more. Then, the pinned tweet which is a really critical aspect that takes them to something of value immediately, I get, I don’t know. Probably on the order of 1,000 people viewing my header every day. It’s extraordinary how much free and targeted connection that I’m getting out of that. I’, finding that Twitter is becoming a better and better source to connect with my tribe. Mike, this is absolutely brilliant. You created some tools to help people automate this.

Mike Kawula: Correct, so what our software does and what our company does is we actively listen out there to conversations taking place around either words that you believe your target, your avatar would be using on Twitter or possibly using the at symbol, the Twitter handle of maybe a competitor. If you know who your competitors are, and they’re actively mentioned on Twitter, use their Twitter handle as a keyword. Now, what will happen is anytime that we hear somebody using that Twitter handle or keyword, we run them through an advanced algorithm, make sure that they’re not talking about other crap that might not be relevant like porn or what have you that you wouldn’t want. Then, eliminate those out. Then, out at the end of the funnel will come. That’s 1,000 people that go into it. Maybe 100 come out in the back-end. Then, we’ll follow those individuals and see if they follow you back. If they do, great. You’ve got a win. If they don’t, we just unfollow them.

By doing that very actively, what happens is not only will you get a tremendous amount of followers which is nice from an influence standpoint, but at the end of the day, you want traffic. That’s what we all want. If you are connecting with the right people, as you said earlier, they’re going to click and engage with your tweets.

Mark S A Smith: That engagement is the critical component of creating the relationship. You know, it’s a customer journey that we’re trying to take people on. We’re using Twitter to either grab people that we have a relationship with or those that we want to have a relationship with and move them along that trusted customer journey.

Mike Kawula: Definitely. Jumping in the conversation, I use a tool called Brand24.

Mark S A Smith: Brand24. Tell me about that.

Mike Kawula: Correct. Brand24 is an awesome tool. We have it listening to anytime somebody might mention our company’s name and even if they type it out incorrectly. it’s not just SocialQuant, one word, but we are listening for socialquant.com. We’re actually socialquant.net. If some guy is mentioning socialquant.com, we still want to jump in on that conversation. We’re listening for our competitors when they’re mentioned. Me personally, as the CEO of the company, I want to know when people are mentioning my name. What’s great is Brand24, it’s my favorite e-mail I get every morning other than, obviously, my own companies. I open this e-mail because it tells me everybody from an influenced standpoint that mentioned me or those keywords in our monitoring on social media. Then, it also sends me a list of, if I mentioned on podcasts, when I’m mentioned on YouTube, the way this software can actually crawl sites out there and pull out data. Now, the big part is now, what do you do with that information once you have it?

One of the first few things you’ll see that I do every morning when I’m on Twitter is I’m engaging with people  that over the last 12 hours have mentioned either me or one of my competitors. Obviously, if they mention, “Competitor,” I just jump in and talk to them in a different way but start building that relationship. I add them to what’s called Twitter list. If I think that somebody that I want to do business with that maybe they could write an article about us, interview us for a publication. Add them to that Twitter list, and then do up-to-date. When I do go on Twitter, I’m not looking at my 100,000 followers.

I’m looking at my Twitter list of maybe their 10 top PR folks or editors for magazines that I want to get into. I start engaging with them, and because I have a very large following, when I share their content and they look at, “Who is this guy that’s sharing my content? Wow, it’s 100,000 plus followers.” He gets major engagement. Now, they want to learn more about me. Then, when I reach out to them to get published in their magazine, it’s much easier that way.

Mark S A Smith: That’s absolutely brilliant, Mike. The idea of using Twitter for a target account strategy is extraordinary. Who do you want to do business with? Who do you want to have a conversation with? All right, start listening to them at Twitter. Then, look for reasons to engage with them that are a relevant engagement because the whole idea around selling disruption is you always have repetitive relevance over and over and over. After a while, they have to pay attention to you.

Mike Kawula: They do, and regardless of what size. If your average customer is spending five dollars with your or if they’re spending hundreds of thousands of dollars with you, you want to make sure that those folks are on Twitter. You know, even your customers. I see a lot of folks don’t do this. Any CEO out there, if you’ve got a sales force, teach your sales force to build a list of your existing customers. Now, you want to make that private. If you make it private, nobody else can view that Twitter list.

Mark S A Smith: Now, this is a really important point. Don’t make your customer list public, otherwise, your competitors can pick up your customer list.

Mike Kawula: Yes, definitely, and I’ve done it. You want to pat the least resistance to attract customers. It’s really important that if your sales force is actually engaging on a regular basis with your existing customers, that reduces turn because it’s much less likely to leave your service when they’ve got a relationship with you. Social is one of the best ways of doing it. What I love, love, love about Twitter is you can connect with anybody on it. It’s not like Facebook where you’ve got to send out a friend request. You could actively tweet to whomever you like. It’s the easiest way, in my opinion, to attract sales and retain business.

Mark S A Smith: What a brilliant idea. I don’t know how many sales people. I have probably very few that I know of that are using Twitter like this as a way of staying in contact with their customers in a non-invasive way. One of the interesting things about when people are on Twitter like they are with most other social media, they have zero resistance because they’re reading. They’re sucking in all that data, so they’re not reading it and thinking, “Ah, no. I don’t like this.” The stuff just flows right in their brain. If you can soft sell to them through Twitter using the lists, it’s an absolutely brilliant way of multiplying your engagement. I love it, Mike. That’s such a fantastic idea.

Mike Kawula: Then, engage. Engage with your existing customers. Share content with them. Mention them, because here’s the beauty. We all get hundreds of e-mails, right? Everybody doesn’t always read their e-mails. For me, I have somebody that goes through my e-mails. I’m not seeing it, and they’re eliminating 90% of the e-mails, but nobody’s going through my Twitter. If somebody wants to get in touch with me, @ mentioning me on Twitter, when I go to my notifications, it’s like, “Oh, bam.” Think about it this way. If you’re engaging with your existing customers or prospects and just saying, “Hey, so and so. I just so this article. I thought of you, thought you might like it. Check it out.” I mean that’s so personalized, and people will respond.

Again, it doesn’t matter who they are. I’ve had Chris Sacca, if you don’t know who he is, from Shark Tank and Big Venture Capitalists. You know, I’ve engaged with him with no resistance. It’s just amazing. Richard Branson, we just wrote a post about how Richard Branson hasn’t invested in so many companies. Just from conversations that he started on Twitter with folks.

Mark S A Smith: Wow, interesting.

Mike Kawula: It’s phenomenal. Then, you can get descent other growth hacking stuff that we’re working on right now that’s rolling that would really disrupt the market. We’re excited for that also.

Mark S A Smith: Tell me a little more about Social Quant, this magnificent tool that you generated. Yes, I use it to grow my Twitter followers — thank you very much, Mike — about the tool and how it works and how people can use it to find relevant followers. That’s a really important aspect. You don’t want junk followers that doesn’t do you any good, whatsoever.

Mike Kawula: Exactly. Relevancy is the key there, right? Folks, give us a list of keywords of the types of, again, conversations that they believe. You want these keywords to be actively mentioned on Twitter because the beauty of Twitter is that your business has 2,000 followers already on Twitter. You could follow up to 1,000 people a day on Twitter, theoretically. Now, you can’t do it all at once. You have to do it throughout different times of the day. You give us 10, 20 keywords, 30 keywords tops. You can give us as many as you want, but I recommend no more. If these keywords are actively being mentioned on Twitter, we go out and listen. Using Twitter advanced search, listen and say, here’s people having a conversation about the keyword entrepreneur start-up, maybe this hashtag, maybe this other Twitter handle. We run them through an advanced algorithm. That algorithm is going to look at the location that that person’s tweeting from. We’re going to look at other tweets of theirs to make sure that they’re not talking about inappropriate things that you might not want to associate with their brand.

Those that make it through which is around 10% because we filter out a lot of garbage, the 10% that make it through, we initiate a follow to see if they follow back. If they do, great. You’ve got a match. If they don’t, we unfollow them. That unfollow is like that last verification, because let’s say if somebody makes it through our loop and our algorithm, and it’s still somebody not appropriate. Well, if we follow them, they’re not going to follow you back anyway. You know, what ends up happening is our algorithm is going to unfollow them a few hours later. Doing this really rapidly, not only do you build the influence of your brand, if your company, but more importantly, folks are then going to want to start engaging with you. That’s why it’s so important that you share a lot of content.

When I say that we’ve analyzed over four billion tweet impressions, here’s a thing that we’ve learned. Those that tweet greater than 50 times a day compared to those that tweet just 10 times a day, they’re not getting five times more traffic because they’re tweeting five times more. They’re actually getting 40 exponential.

Mark S A Smith: Wow, that’s huge.

Mike Kawula: What I see is a lot of CEOs or brands, they say, “Well, we’ve read this blog post,” or “They head of my social media says,” because they want to justify their job that, “I should only tweet at these times during the day. These are four high peaks.” That’s bull. You need to tweet, and you need to tweet frequently. Me, personally, I tweet depending upon if I have a promotion going on. I’m  tweeting every 18 minutes, 24 hours a day. In non-promotion times, I’m tweeting every 30 minutes. You can do the math on that. 24 hours, I’m tweeting 48 times minimum a day, but then, I’m having a ton of other conversations with people throughout their day. That’s what our company does right now.

Coming out next month which is going to be phenomenal, we have two unique things. One is who are the people that are engaging with you? That’s a problem. Somebody like me, my name’s mentioned hundreds of times during the day, but who’s mentioned me just once? Who’s actively engaging and mentioning me all the time? What we’re going to do is take your most influenced. Those who are engaged most with you, put them into a dashboard, but then, also put them onto a Twitter list for you. You’ll define inside the dashboard what’s engaged.

Mark S A Smith: Very cool.

Mike Kawula: Meaning if you think somebody’s only tweeting for you twice, and you think that’s engagement, great. If you think for somebody like me, I want that somebody’s mentioning me at least seven times a month. That’s one. Number two is what do you do when somebody follows you, right, because Twitter’s so fast moving. We all see hundreds and hundreds of tweets a minute going through our stream. The other way to get in front of folks is at-mentioning somebody, not direct messaging because not everybody checks their direct messengers, but at-messaging them. What you’ll be able to do is go into our tool and say, “Let me create a sequence of 10, 30, 100 different at-mentions.”

Mark S A Smith: I love it.

Mike Kawula: Now, every time somebody follows me, let me send them a message. Message one would say, “Hey, I saw you followed me 24 hours ago. You’ve got a great profile. I’m happy to connect with you.” If they don’t respond to that, you could say, if this then, 36 hours or five minutes later, send them another message. Send them another message. It will continue to do it until they respond. When they respond, it will stop and then go into whatever your CRM is.

Mark S A Smith: Wow, very cool, so you’re creating some marketing automation with Twitter and using some intelligence behind it.

Mike Kawula: 100%, definitely.

Mark S A Smith: Now, that’s going to be disruptive, Mike. That’s going to be so much fun. Can’t want to play with that.

Mike Kawula: It will get you a ton of traffic because just think about all the messages and content. You put out a ton of great content, right?

Mark S A Smith: Thank you.

Mike Kawula: Now, how do you get that content in front of folks? Well, this is a great way to mention them. Remember how I told you earlier about creating Twitter lists?

Mark S A Smith: Yes.

Mike Kawula: What you’ll be able to do is, let’s say if you’re following somebody because of the word entrepreneur. You followed 1,000 people for the word entrepreneur, and 100 people followed you back. Well, now you know they’re interested in entrepreneurship. Wouldn’t you like to, if you just wrote a great blog post or interviewed somebody about entrepreneurship, messaged them about that.

Mark S A Smith: That would be far awesome.

Mike Kawula: Now, what we’re going to do is you can go to that list and say, “Here’s everybody that followed me for the word entrepreneur. Now, let me send an at-message to them sharing this great piece of content with them.”

Mark S A Smith: Now, the interesting thing about Twitter is when you send out messages, people don’t feel like they’re spammed like they do if you do the same thing within LinkedIn or even with Facebook.

Mike Kawula: Correct, as long as it’s original. Don’t send garbage like, “Thanks for following me. Come and follow me on this other site.” Nobody cares about that.

Mark S A Smith: Right.

Mike Kawula: If you send them something of value, and you know who they are through using some type of AI, yes, they’re going to love it and appreciate it.

Mark S A Smith: Yes, it’s always about relevance. If it’s not relevant, you’re killing yourself, so make sure that the people you’re reaching out to give a damn about what you’re talking about.

Mike Kawula: 100%.

Mark S A Smith: Mike, I think it’s really extraordinary because what you’re pointing out is that Twitter has some unique capabilities and unique opportunities in the world of social media that we don’t have other places.

Mike Kawula: Once you set this up, get somebody on your team to optimize your Twitter profile. Somebody that’s good. A graphic designer, a copy person, that would take them 20 to 30 minutes.

Mark S A Smith: That’s right.

Mike Kawula: Optimize your Twitter profile. Use either Social Quant or do it manually yourself. You don’t need to hire our service. Manually, you can go and do it yourself. Follow the right people. Now, if you have an optimized profile, a good profile that looks good and you’re following the right people, you’re getting eyeballs to that optimized profile. They’re going to engage, follow you back, click on your tweets. Then, the third thing you need to do is just use the system or tool up there. I use Post Planner. Use whatever you want, but share content, and share it continually. Now, you’ve optimized your profile. You’re getting new eyeballs who are following you. Now, you’re sharing content on a regular basis. Then, the fourth thing is if you use my tool, the new one coming out that will at-mention, you’ve got an automated system-

Mark S A Smith: Yes, it’s awesome.

Mike Kawula: That just continually sends you traffic, so you can focus on the important part which is now engaging with people who are engaging back with you.

Mark S A Smith: Right, and you can do this yourself. You don’t have to use a tool like Social Quant, but in my opinion, why wouldn’t you use a tool, because quite frankly, the monthly fee for Social Quant is very, very modest compared to the work that it does for you in the background.

Mike Kawula: Exactly.

Mark S A Smith: Take $50 or $100 a month out of your marketing budget and use Twitter correctly. Now, personally Mike, I believe that we need to be doing, instead of corporate type of accounts for most of us, we need to be doing personal accounts. CEOs, executives need to be tweeting on a regular basis and triggering tweets on a regular basis, because we’re the sharpest point to the spear that we have to connect with the best customers.

Mike Kawula: You will do your brand so much more benefit if you, as the CEO, are actually having your own profile and building it up, because you’re going to build your influence. I compare so many different things here internally with data analytics. When we look at a brand versus an individual account, if they did everything the same, the individual account will grow at 30% faster and get 30 to 40% more engagement compared to a brand. Why? People like to do business with people they know, like and trust. Their guard’s up when they see a logo of your company.

Mark S A Smith: That’s right.

Mike Kawula: Have your brand account out there. Listen, provide customer service on it, but on your account, you can do so much benefit for your business. Don’t just do it on yours. Use all your management. We work with a company called KiteDesk. They’re a fantastic data. They’re a CRM. They have not only all the executives and their corporate account, but they have all their sales people. They’re all in the Quant, obviously, so you know, we’re appreciative of that. They’re all sharing each other’s content and retweeting and what have you. They get massive, massive traffic. Here at Social Quant, we send 30,000 visitors to a website a month just from Twitter because our whole team is all actively using Twitter. If you engage your team the right way and teach them what to share and automate it for them, you’ve got a growth engine right inside your actual culture by using Twitter. No other social platform can do that for you.

Mark S A Smith: That’s amazing, to drive 30,000 people of traffic. You’re probably spending a few hundred dollars and tools to get that done.

Mike Kawula: Yes, I mean for us here at the Quant, we’re spending less than $250 doing that.

Mark S A Smith: Yes, that’s absolutely massive. I mean literally, you’re getting penny clicks. You’re getting sub-penny clicks. Now, of course people have to be providing content, but you have to do that no matter what you’re going to do. That’s huge.

Mike Kawula: Exactly, and repurpose your content. Repurpose it. If you have a blog post, get somebody to take that blog post and put them into two-minute summary videos. Upload those videos also now onto Twitter, because they’re going to get great engagement. Upload it to Instagram, LinkedIn. If you’re using all these tool types, you can automate all these. It’s real easy, you know? Any blog post we do, we turn it into content for SlideShare. We then make a video for YouTube. We’re repurposing the same piece of content. We make it into infographics. Now, it’s being shared everywhere. One piece of content is being redone five, six, seven different times. It’s just more content, and everybody likes to engage differently.

Mark S A Smith: That’s right.

Mike Kawula: Some people like video. Some like written content. Some just like a picture.

Mark S A Smith: Yes, that’s right. A mean type of picture. I’m finding that the video on Twitter is really getting a lot of engagement.

Mike Kawula: I’m really excited to see what they do. I mean Jack Dorsey, when I listened to his last earnings call when they came out, the future of Twitter TV is phenomenal, Twitter video, I think it’s going to put Twitter back in the top again. I’m a little excited about that.

Mark S A Smith: Yes, me too. It’s all short stuff. As you pointed out, two minutes, it’s a little bit longer than it’s like 140 seconds or something crazy like that. It really does work, and it auto-starts. If you do your video right with captions and lots of graphics and really clever with it, and for crying out loud, you’re only creating two minutes worth of video. Do it right. These stuff sells.

Mike Kawula: As the CEO, do it right. If you go to my profile, Mike Kawula and look at my pinned tweet, you’ll see that video has been watched thousands of times, but what’s more important is it’s gotten me over 6,000 clicks back to my website. Why? It’s just me talking real from my office. You know, I just bam, turned on the camera like what we’re doing right now with one another. I just spoke from my heart, and folks engage with that. They love it. It’s awesome.

Mark S A Smith: I love it. Mike, I can feel your passion for helping people to build their business with Twitter. It’s been a delight to having a conversation with you today. What suggestions, what offer do you have for our listener?

Mike Kawula: I know we ladled out a lot, so what I would say …

Mark S A Smith: That’s okay. There’s a transcription. You can go to the show page and get the transcription.

Mike Kawula: Great. Put a link there to socialquant.net/tmtschallenge. It’s Twitter Marketing That Sells challenge. What we do is for 14 days, we’ll send you a five-minute video each day on what to do, so either you do it or have somebody in your team. I really suggest you doing it, just so you really at least understand the first nine days, really get the meat and potatoes about everything that we did. Again, I mentioned Twitter cover. You don’t know how many people I see that just have their Twitter cover done wrong. Watch my five-minute video, because I really go through the psychology of what you should put in it and your profile picture. I go through all that. If your listeners go through at least the first nine days, I’ve got a free group that’s on Facebook. They can jump on there. We’ve got thousands of people on there. I jump in there each day and answer people’s questions. I’ll look at your profile, give you advice. It’s all free.

You can also try Social Quant for 14 days. There’s no credit card required. If you like it, great. If you don’t, at least you’ll walk away and know and see the power of Twitter and know now that you’ll have another way to send your business a tremendous amount of traffic for totally free.

Mark S A Smith: I did the two-week marketing challenge.

Mike Kawula: Awesome. What did you think?

Mark S A Smith: I thought your videos were awesome. You provide a lot of content and a lot of insight that I don’t get anywhere else, you’d have to pay a lot of money for. Folks, it’s worth it to listen to what Mike has to say. This guy has been studying it for a while. You really put a lot of thought into it. It’s intelligent. It’s cogent. It will make you money. I guarantee you, if your competitor’s on Twitter and you’re not, you’re at a disadvantage. If you are and they’re not, you’re going to disrupt your market. Thank you, Mike. Any closing comments or ideas for our listener?

Mike Kawula: Just jump in and try. One of my favorite quotes is, “Imperfect action beats perfect inaction.” I tell folks all the time, “It doesn’t matter. All experts started out once as a beginner.” Just jump in there. Have a conversation with me on Twitter and just say, “Hey, Mike. I listened to you on the show. What do you think about my profile?” I’ll come in, and I’ll do a two-minute review video just to you so you’ll only see it. Just jump in and get your feet wet. It can do wonders for your business.

Mark S A Smith: Friend, you got to do that. Just by tweeting Mike which is Mike, @MikeKawula. It’s M-I-K-E K-A-W-U-L-A. It will also be on the show page. He’s going to give you some insight just because you’re a guest today. Thank you, Mike, for that offer. It’s very generous of you. It’s a delight to have a conversation, and looking forward to way more as you develop your new tools.