Are Proxies for Twitter Really Necessary?

It’s often neglected as a source for marketers.  However anyone who has something to sell or offer would be well advised to investigate Twitter. It’s especially useful if you have a business or service which appeals to a younger demographic.

Now I’m not sure exactly what the latest number of users is, but it’s around 300 million active users and approximately 500 million Tweets a day.   The social platform tends to be used by younger people and it’s thought to be more popular among professionals too.  That’s a very attractive catchment for many businesses and what’s more by it’s design it is a very direct site.

There is a problem though and that’s the fact that ‘officially’ you can only use one Twitter account at any time which really limits the potential of the site.   Any marketer knows that one account will rarely last long especially if you’re pushing the boundaries a little to reach your target market.  Most social platforms have strict and sometimes rather unintelligible rules and regulations, if you’ve never fallen foul of one of these then you’re simply not trying hard enough.

Commercial activity is allowed obviously, indeed there’s an advertising system which you can use too.  However if you decide to use Twitter for marketing your business or services, to do it properly you’re going to need lots of accounts.  The most successful Twitter marketers have literally hundreds of accounts which they slowly build up audiences to sell to.

This is one of the fundamental problems with social network marketing, you have to build up audiences and followers.  However  a marketer has to be pro-active in order to succeed and will need to push the boundaries somewhat.  Also you have to carefully manage and cultivate these accounts, they will be more successful if they’re linked in a specific niche.  For example, create a photo related account to sell photographic goods and services – don’t promote other offers and keep your account focused on that topic. 

Here’s one of the reasons it’s essential that you create multiple accounts.  You slowly create a photo based Twitter account, you post comments, pictures and all sorts of related photography stuff.  Your account will grow and you can keep expanding and eventually it’s worth Tweeting our a few related offers or services.  It’s slow and you always have to be aware that your account could be deleted or removed at any time, you have virtually no rights over the account even if you spend years developing it!  Diversify these accounts, be aggressive in some and more cautious in others.  Test what works and what doesn’t and expand into related niches to try out other markets too.  Again all impossible and extremely risky if you only have a single account.

Create Multiple Accounts – Buy Twitter Proxies

Believe me any successful Twitter marketing strategy relies on creating multiple accounts.  So how do you bypass the limits that Twitter imposes?  Well you have to hide your identity and more specifically your IP address.   This is done by using proxies which hide your real address and allow you to hide behind the proxy address.

Although the rules change over time, it’s normally advisable to use one proxy IP address per Twitter account.  So if you buy twenty proxies you can happily run twenty Twitter accounts in relative safety. You still have to be sensible, don’t spam these accounts with the same information or matching Tweets.  Grow them independently and make them all look and act differently.

 Although Twitter aren’t as aggressive at blocking IP addresses as some platforms, they still do it.   You certainly shouldn’t use any form of shared proxies because if someone else is using them for a similar activity and they get banned,  it will affect you too.  Best case scenario is the proxies simply stop working but the worst (and possibly more likely scenario) is your accounts get banned or deleted too.   

Twitter proxies should be dedicated proxies, which means that only you are using their IP addresses at any given time.  This ensures you’re not going to be impacted by other users, only your actions will affect your Twitter accounts.    A couple of companies specialize in proxies for Twitter which work best, our favorite is the guys at Storm Proxies

Growing Multiple Twitter Accounts

Creating lots of accounts and growing them is without doubt the most effective Twitter marketing strategy but it’s important you do it right.  As long as you have a good supplier of Twitter proxies to use then you won;t have to worry about being detected by IP address, but there are other footprints to be careful of.

If you create a dozen Twitter accounts and point them all the same web pages then this is going to throw out a huge warning to Twitter that multiple accounts are being managed.  Create separate landing pages for each of your Twitter accounts preferably on different domains. Make sure they’re unique and keep the all completely separate, it’s not expensive to do particularly if you have a few websites to distribute the pages across.

They don’t generally need to be too complicated, indeed using a CMS like WordPress is completely fine and you can normally set these up in a few minutes.  A simple page with a form to capture leads is all  you really need,  link them to an autoresponder and you have the start of a valuable business!    Don’t spam these pages in your Tweets, add the URLs to your accounts and people will visit them as you grow.

Most Marketers – Automate

 Using Twitter proxies opens up another method which can grow your accounts much more quickly – automation.   There are loads of options for Twitter marketing software which can make managing and promoting multiple Twitter accounts much more manageable.  One of the crucial factors that brings success in Twitter is consistency,  keep both quality and frequency of your Tweets high and your accounts should grow organically. 

Of course, to keep sending out Tweets all day takes an incredible amount of time.   Yet the best Twitter automation tools will make this relatively easy, some of them allow you to load up the software with 30 days worth or more of posts, and schedule them to be posted slowly.    Most experts suggest around 20 Tweets a day however this might vary depending on what sector you’re promoting in.

These Tweets don’t all have to be original remember, you can use a technique called curation to build up your content, or simply retweet great stuff from elsewhere.  

Try these metrics to get started –

• 40% of your Tweets should be completely original
• 40% of your Tweets can be curated content from your niche.
• 20% can be ReTweets from other authoritative sources either directly or related to your niche.

 All this of course can be done manually, but even with a single account it’s very time consuming.    If  you’re using proxies to hide your IP address and plan to promote using multiple Twitter accounts then you should look at some automation tools.  There are quite a few for Twitter, but overall I prefer to minimize the number of tools I use and prefer something that covers multiple platforms.   My personal choice is called Jarvee – here’s a screenshot from the profile management page.

Jarvee covers most popular Social media platforms and can automate most aspects of them.   It works great for Twitter simply add your accounts in the destinations tab and create campaigns to promote them.   You can add content quite easily, for instance one option allows you to set up a simple Template to use your Blog content.  You can extract in a variety of ways including using RSS import feature. Jarvee will create short posts from them and post them on Twitter for you when scheduled.   Indeed you can schedule them weeks in advance and just leave the software to publish them.

 

Keeping Your Accounts Safe

As well as using proxies there’s some other aspects that you need to be careful when managing multiple accounts on Twitter.   Remember Twitter only wants you to have a single account and also to manage the account completely manually.  As we’ve heard it’s very difficult to make money like this, so using proxies and automated promotional software should ideally be used but cautiously.

When you fire up something like Jarvee it’s tempting to get carried away, one of the common mistakes people make is by adding followers too quickly to a new account.  The problem is  that it looks like spam, you should add followers slowly certainly no more than 100 a day at the beginning.  Obviously as your account gains traction you can increase this significantly but it’s important to grow them naturally.

One of the other tactics you’ll find at your disposal using most Twitter promotion software is that of using @mentions. There’s no doubt that this is a powerful marketing tool, however you need to be careful.  If you start throwing about @Mentions without receiving them in return frankly start to look like Spam and you’ll risk your accounts being flagged, Use them sparingly and not just as desperate tool to sell or grab a few new followers.

At the end of the day, Twitter like all social networks is about communication and sharing interesting content.  That also means unique content, so it’s vitally important you don’t start duplicating Tweets from your various accounts.  The proxies will keep your accounts separate on a network level, so make sure you keep the content different too.  Posting duplicate content from your account will get your accounts suspended and maybe deleted.  Mind you there’s nothing to stop you reusing that content on another site, many often target Twitter and Instagram for example.

Careful with Those Hashtags

If you read a Twitter marketing guide from a few years ago then the advice would be to use Hashtags a lot !!  Many advised stuffing your Tweets full of them to widen your audience as much as possible.  Those days are gone unfortunately as it really did week.  Nowadays if you stuff your Tweets full of these tags only one thing is going to happen, you’ll get the account flagged and possibly removed.  Use them sparingly,  and more importantly choose the tags carefully they need to be relevant.

Engage, Teach Don’t Promote

For a certain demographics Twitter is an everyday part of life. Most of the longer term users, value engagement more than anything.  The danger with using automated software is you start preaching, promoting through endless Tweets with no follow up or responses.  Using Twitter to send lots of product plugs or affiliate links won’t work.  To make sales you need to back away from direct promotional tactics as they simply are ineffective. 

Methods that do work are ‘soft marketing methods’ – try using polls to increase engagement.  They can actually be used for market research very effectively.  Try using them to ask potential customers what they want.  Don’t make them all boring and business like, if you do then nobody will respond – make them fun and interesting. You can also use things like contests to inform and promote products.

If you want to market on Twitter it’s incredibly tempting to keep sending out links that could make you money, but in reality that’s exactly what won’t happen.  People don’t buy or even read these links if they’re from an endless source of sales Tweets, just like Spam emails they wont get read and your account will be ignored or removed.  You’ll get more success from sending out 90% of your Tweets as interesting, informational content.  Every 10% can add something a little more commercial, it works don’t oversell, don’t over promote.

Use Proxies to Create Multiple Digital Identities

The premise of this post is that you need multiple accounts and identities to succeed in marketing on Twitter and different social platforms.  There is little doubt that this is the case as most marketers and online entrepreneurs would agree.   Of course, it’s tempting to say I’m going to 100% follow all the rules and market my business within the guidelines – therefore I only need one account.

The problem with this tactic is that firstly it’s incredibly difficult to grow and manage a large account completely manually.  Secondly, there is always a danger of accounts losing traction or falling foul of some rule or guideline.  If you look at forums with active marketers, many accept losing accounts regularly even those with thousands of followers.  It simply doesn’t  make sense to rely solely on a single marketing account of which you ultimately have no control or ownership.  If any social networking site decides it doesn’t like your account, then it will delete it without warning.

Using proxies to manage multiple accounts makes business and commercial sense.  Sure there’s a cost involved, yet it’s actually not that much harder to grow 20 accounts concurrently as it is to grow one. Tools like Jarvee can allow you to leverage you content across multiple accounts and they can even use your proxies automatically to manage them.