How I Built my Social Media Network with 1M/1M

By guest author and 1M/1M ambassador Javier Hernández

After almost three months collaborating with the One Million by One Million initiative, I can proudly say that reaching entrepreneurs and economic development organizations has been both exciting and promising. Not only because many of them were interested in joining our program or becoming our local partners, but because to they all together have significantly improved my personal network of contacts within the entrepreneurship ecosystem in my country (Spain) and globally.

Today I passed 1,000 new contacts, most of them entrepreneurs and/or influencers who either follow my Twitter account, are one of my LinkedIn connections or are my Facebook friends. How did I do it? Well, it wasn’t that difficult. 1M/1M came up with great resources and tips to make it happen. I will try to share with you all the steps I followed to reach such an astonishing number of new contacts.

I want to start explaining why and how my Twitter follower counter went up from zero to nearly 800 followers at the speed of light, with minimum effort. Actually, comparing it to yesterday’s, the number of followers increased by 100 – that is accelerating! But you can beat that yourself. First, take a look at @Sramana and @1Mby1M. Every day they are producing a comprehensive number of inspiring tweets that are undoubtedly valuable for the entrepreneurship community, sharing tons of useful resources and well-thought-through information. Why not retweet them? Some might say, You mean to manually retweet every single post? Well, no, because you can do it automatically. But, some might argue, Twitter doesn’t allow that! Well, I had to use my brain a little bit to sort that out … and it worked.

There are several tools out there on the Internet that claim to help you automatically retweet from Twitter accounts to other social media, but officially none of them will retweet to Twitter because this goes against Twitter’s rules. I have used almost all of them, and right now my only 100% tested solution is called TwitterFeed. We need to register, which is free, and define an RSS feed from which this tool will automatically post to our desired networks, including Twitter. Therefore, we need to create an RSS feed out from @Sramana or @1Mby1M which is not evidently an URL coming from twitter.com.  We need to use Yahoo Pipes to mask the feed. I did the work for you all. Just use this:

https://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=8ba3c997354966e790e2307d52f8175a&_render=rss

Retweeting from @1Mby1M has definitely been the key reason to get so many followers, but not the only one. I add myself a lot of followers every day, looking for hash tags related to our initiative and users who publish them. Many of them will follow me in return, which also made me realize that I should make sure to follow all my followers, too. Another great strategy was to follow popular institutions and organizations that are actively publishing and have a bunch of followers, and then follow their followers. This way Twitter’s artificial intelligence will suggest my profile to users with similar interests on their profiles for them to follow me. Try it, and you will see the results.

I linked my Twitter account to LinkedIn and Facebook, so all my retweets from @1Mby1M would get as well posted on these social networks. This is not enough here to increase your connections, but will present you on your network as an active communicator and thus help you engage with your contacts. When it comes to increase your connections, this was a very useful tip: connect first to the big fish, and the smaller ones will connect to you. This means, that it is a great idea to get connected to professionals on a distinguished position, as others who are below will think, “Wow, this guy is friend of president of A, CEO of B and consultant C? I’d better be connected to him.”

Sometimes it works the other way round. You will need to have a bunch of intermediate managers as your connections in order to reach the big fish. LinkedIn and Facebook usually have groups and pages related to companies and EDOs, where you can identify fellow colleagues inside them. To get connected to them, my suggestion is to make your LinkedIn and Facebook profiles look professional and attractive; and carefully select and join groups which these people belong to. Try to be active: post interesting stuff like links to 1M/1M’s roundtables and EJ success stories. Many CEOs and high-profile professionals and influencers will accept connection requests from what they identify as young, promising talented people who are active in shared groups. Getting connected to you help them think they are still young and well linked to the next generation of world-changing leaders.

I hope that these tips help you increase your number and quality of connections. Remember, you are who you know. 1M/1M can help you and I will be pleased to go through any questions that you may have. Please contact me at jhernanper at gmail.com.

Keep up the good work,

Javier Hernández

1M/1M Ambassador Spain