Nick Sal's HubSpot Inbound Marketing and Consulting Blog

This 2nd "monthly" update on my life and times as the new leader of Hubspot Agency Partner, Innovative Marketing Resources is a special "combined issue" covering both months 2+3.  Why?  Because I was out the 2nd half of December and half of January.  WHY?! Because I write this post as a new father!  That's right. My wife Victoria and I had our first child on Dec 20th. That's the biggest update for me in the days since my last post - and it brings new meaning and motivation to my work.

A month ago I came up with a simple checklist that takes about 10 minutes of time, twice a day. Today I am writing a blog article about how that simple checklist is getting our Inbound Marketing twitter account (@imrcorp) 20 followers a day. Keep in mind that as simple as this daily checklist is, the key is consistency.

Think of it like brushing your teeth: Do it for 5 minutes in the morning and 5 minutes at lunch (NOT night), over time it will become a painless habit with great reward.

Before you continue, here is the proof that this works even for corporate twitter accounts, with little to no activity and a painfully small number of followers. In this case we went from 190 followers to 380 in about 20 days with no paid advertising, just basic inbound marketing tactics I realize that doesn’t come out to 20 a day but give me a break, it was a catchy title (always important!).

Once at breakfast and once at lunch…

When: 7am-9am EST and again 12pm-2pm EST.

You want to do your twitter checklist when fellow professionals are browsing twitter. This happens when they get up in the morning before work, during lunch and again at the end of the workday. (If you are tweeting into late night hours you should invest in a pet or a new hobby). Twitter checklist at 7am - 9am EST will catch East Coast traffic when they wake up and European traffic at lunch time. 

• Twitter checklist at 7am - 9am EST will catch East Coast traffic when they wake up and European traffic at lunch time.

• Twitter checklist at 12pm – 2pm EST catches the West Coast when they are waking up, East Coast at lunch time and Europe at the end of the work day (I didn’t make that up I just forgot where I read that).

The Checklist

#1: Follow 10 new people

Don’t follow your family or your friends… this isn’t Facebook. Look for people that have similar interests to yours or your client buyer personas. For our company, we want to follow people who are interested in Inbound Marketing (seo, social media, content marketing) Here are a couple of tools on twitter you can use to find the right people:

• “Similar to you”
• “Who to follow”
• “similar to (someone following you)”
• Search for hashtags individually (this takes longer)

#2: Retweet at least 2 tweets.

Go to your home twitter feed and retweet two tweets that:

• Are VERY recent (within the last couple of minutes
• Contain links to keyword rich articles
• Contain the same hashtags that you use (#seo, #socialmedia for example)

#3: Tweet 3 articles that are recent:

Use google reader or some other RSS feed to syndicate your favorite blogs:

• Seomoz
• Hubspot
• Mashable
• Venturebeat
• Techcrunch

#4: Use at least one hashtag (#) for every tweet.

For articles about inbound marketing I usually use:

• #seo  (@seotweets will start listing and retweeting you if you use this)
• #smm
• #smo
• #ppc
• #marketing

That’s it! Simple right…

Let me know if this checklist is as successful for you or your company twitter as it was for me. I am still surprised it works so well!

Follow me at @maxtraylor or LinkedIn if you want to chat about inbound marketing or social media strategies. 

As a business owner today, it is important to recognize and identify trends. Equally important is the ability to filter long-lasting trends verses a flash in the pan.