The Twitter Marketing Blog

Twitter Analytics Options

2010-01-12T10:32:00.000-08:00

The great thing about Internet marketing is that it is very measurable – in most respects, much more so than traditional forms of advertising. Using Twitter to brand and promote your business is no different. There are many tools available for you to use to measure the reach and performance of your Twitter marketing. This post will discuss just a few of them.

TwitterAnalyzer.com

This is a full-fledged analytics application that provides a lot of information about your account. Initially, you supply it with your user name and it will show a graph with the number of updates to your account every day for the last month. Even more useful is another chart that will show the number of times your user name has been mentioned in others' updates. This is a real measure of your account's popularity. What you want to see if your user name being mentioned more and more often. This is a very useful tool that you should take advantage of to measure how effective your tweeting is.

TwitterStats.net

This is a keyword trend tool. It lets you type a single keyword, or up to three keywords, which will be displayed on a graph that shows the number of times the keyword or keywords were used every hour for the last 24 hours. It will also list a number of tweets that contain the keyword. Ideally, you could type in your own Twitter user name and see how many people had referenced your account, but you will probably not receive very accurate results because there will likely be a lot of data from keywords that contain your target keyword. But it's still an interesting and simple tool.

TweetBuzzer.com

This is a tool that counts the number of references to "brands." A brand can be any keyword, but obviously the point is to measure how many people are mentioning the name of your company or your product. To add your brand to the system, you just type it into a textbox and submit. You then have to wait for it to be approved. Brands are displayed in a live scrolling list of updates as they are mentioned in updates.

Tweetiator.com

This tool allows you to view who is tweeting links to your web site or blog content. It requires that you install a JavaScript script on every web page that you want to track. Another caveat is that it only tracks a link that has been clicked at least once. The service costs $4.95 per month, but it does offer a free trial.

Twitter can be an important part of your online branding and search engine marketing campaign. The more knowledge you have, the better you can fine tune that campaign. There are many options beyond those mentioned here, but these will give you a good start in learning how you are doing with your Twitter marketing efforts.

Happy New Year!

2009-12-30T13:48:00.001-08:00

One of my goals for the new year is to write at least 30 minutes every day, which should allow me enough time to do a much better job of updating this and our other search engine marketing blogs. In the meantime, I just want to say:

Happy New Year! 2010 here we come!

Button Up Your Web Site

2009-12-16T12:29:00.001-08:00

Twitter's Goodies section has a page that allows you to download a button to install on your web site that makes it very easy for anyone to follow you. There are a whole array of button sizes, from a tiny t in a box that looks to be about 20 pixels wide, to something more substantial that has a picture of the little blue Twitter bird.

I have noticing these things popping up all over the place and have even clicked on it a couple of times. We've talked before about streaming your Twitter updates to your web site (which is very easy using one of the Twitter gadgets), so it just makes sense to also give your visitors a very easy way to follow you.

The page is located here:

http://twitter.com/goodies/buttons

Clicking one of the buttons will open up a small textbox that contains the code that you use to place the button on your site. You don't have to worry about downloading a graphic because it is hosted on Twitter's servers. So all you have to do is copy the code it gives you and place it on your web pages wherever you want it to appear. I suggest placing on all the major pages of your site. If your site uses a template or include files this is simple because you will only have to paste it into a single file.

This is a subtle little piece of Twitter marketing that will not get you in trouble and will help build your follower list in an organic manner.

Intergrating Twitter and LinkedIn

2009-12-02T14:23:00.001-08:00

You can now update your Twitter account every time you update your LinkedIn account. If you aren't familiar with LinkedIn, it is the top social networking site for business professionals. It is similar in concept to Facebook...only instead of reading about people doing laundry or eating a sandwich, you can actually have intelligent business-oriented conversation with potential referral sources or clients.

Like any social networking web site, it is critical that you log into your LinkedIn account and update your status often. The more involvement you have with the site, the more effective it will be for you for generating business. Unlike Twitter, where the MAIN thing is posting your updates, which really doesn't require you to log into the Twitter web site, with LinkedIn, you actually need to log into the site to use it.

So if you're going to log into LinkedIn to update your status, you might as well update Twitter at the same time. Doing so is very simple. There is a little Twitter icon and button next to the status box that you click to integrate your account with Twitter. After adding Twitter, you can click a checkbox to turn Twitter on or off, in case there are some updates you don't want to appear in your Twitter account.

If you just use your Twitter account to talk about day-to-day stuff or nonsense, then none of this matters anyway. But if you are a business person looking to use Twitter for business (to generate leads or make connections), then start using LinkedIn, and use its Twitter integration feature.

Using Follow Friday Wisely

2009-11-24T12:39:00.000-08:00

I have an imaginary character I use for a Twitter account that is mostly updates from news feeds. But people absolutely love the guy. I do sometimes post commentary in his name as well. But I don't do a whole lot of social type stuff like retweeting or making reference to other users' names. Not because I'm an asshole, but because I just don't have much time to spend on this account.

One Friday just for kicks I did a follow friday post (#FF) with a few names of people who regularly retweet my news links in this account. And it caused an explosion of retweets and reFF's. It definitely reinforced what I discussed in an earlier blog post about how people love to see their names in others' tweets.

I really think making reference to other users is a critical part of using Twitter as a marketing strategy. Personally, I always thought the Follow Friday thing was a little goofy. But if you're gonna do this stuff, you've got to do what is effective. And one of the best ways to get your name spread around is to spread around the names of others.

I do, however, think this technique is more effective is you use it with users who are genuinely good people to follow or with whom you have had some kind of interaction. I know of at least one program that automatically does Follow Fridays for random names in your account. I'm not sure that is a good idea. You don't really want to be passing around names of people who are nothing but spammers or who contribute nothing to the Twitter universe. Use the power of the #FF to reward those whose names deserve to be spread around.

For the record, I am embarrassed by the lack of updates the last couple of months. Business at Work Media is quite good. Unfortunately, the better business does, the less time I have for the fun stuff...like writing about Twitter. I will try to do better.

Introducing Twitter Lists

2009-11-06T07:22:00.000-08:00

Twitter has unveiled its new "list" feature. This will come in very handy for those who have made it their goal to follow many other users as part of a Twitter follower building strategy. It lets you segment those you follow into lists. So if there is a core group of people you really like to read, but their updates are mixed in with updates from hundreds or thousands of other users you really don't care that much about, you can set them up in a list so that you have a way of just reading those updates.

To create a list, click on the Create a New List button. On the next screen, you give your list a name and add users to it. You can search for users using the search text box, but you are probably going to want to add existing users you follow to the list. To do that, you just have to visit those users' Twitter pages, then click the Lists button at the top. Your newly created list will appear as an option. Click on the list name to add that particular user to the list.

One interesting feature of lists is that you can follow someone else's list. So if there is another Twitter user you really like, and you think he is tied into a good group of users for what you are trying to accomplish, you can follow one or more of his lists to instantly follow many of the people he is following without having to go through the work of manually searching for those people.

If you have multiple Twitter accounts, it is also a good way to help explode those accounts' followers by putting all of your own accounts in a list. Anyone who follows your list will then be following all of your own accounts.

This is a great new feature by Twitter and one that you should definitely experiment with.

Discipline

2009-10-20T19:39:00.000-07:00

Jerry Work here. For people like me, properly using Twitter (i.e., actually logging into my account and posting updates) requires discipline. I am not a chatty person. Even in the online world. I'm just not naturally conversational, especially when I'm busy.

Business has been up and down this year, which means there have been times when I've had plenty of time for social media experiments. During those times, I would post to Twitter often. Then I would get busy, and I would pretty much let my account run itself with automation.

And that is fine to an extent. But you really do miss out on the human element...and ultimately that is the point. Putting messages on autopilot is fine if it is your intention to build up huge lists of followers to try and sell stuff to.

Lord knows there is a lot of that going on.

But if you're not just trying to sell stuff, but are looking instead to make connections, talk to interesting people, learn, and hopefully do some business...then you've got to check in. Work Media has been so dang busy the last few weeks that I have not checked in. And certainly I am costing myself many potentially interesting or prosperous interactions.

However...business is good, and it's nose to the grind to keep up. I can't complain. The problem for people like me is finding the balance. For people like me...

it just comes down to discipline.

The Power in Using Someone's Name

2009-10-15T15:00:00.000-07:00

So let's talk about the power of using someone's user name in a Twitter update. In the real-world, using a person's name creates the impression that you are interested in what he has to say and is a classic (and very effective) rapport building technique. Well, you know what? The same principle applies to the world of online social networks.

Making reference to other users is a big part of making successful use of Twitter. People love to see their names referenced in your tweets. I can speak for this personally because I love it myself. The funny thing is, doing what I do, I know full well that many references to my user name are software generated and do not really happen because I'm such an interesting person. But I still love to see it!

One of the best ways to use your Twitter accounts is to retweet interesting posts by other uses. The default Twitter syntax for this includes the user who originated the message preceded by an @ sign. Using this technique on a regular basis requires that you monitor your accounts and are aware when one of your friends says something interesting.

If you're like me, and if you are a regular Twitter user, you just don't have that much time for monitoring your account. So this is where a software based solution comes in handy. However, you should definitely try not to retweet or make reference to other users who could potentially tarnish your reputation.

Tweet Later Policy Changes

2009-10-12T17:36:00.000-07:00

I am losing some of my love for Tweet Later. Yes, I am a Tweet Later affiliate, but I just can't lie to you people. Here is my beef:

First, it changed its name to "Social Oomph." Say what? Lousy name, in my opinion. And too bad for the company's affiliates that spent so much time promoting the name "Tweet Later." Speaking of affiliates...

...I can't really tell that this company gives a damn about the people trying to sell its product. For what it's worth.

But now the company announces that Tweet Later will no longer allow its users to schedule recurring posts. This is at the request of Twitter itself. I suppose it's a survival mechanism, but it really does make the service less valuable.

To tell you the truth, I have become too dependent on automation to keep my own Twitter account updated. It's time to start doing it for real...until I decide on my next strategy for Twitter DOMINATION...

...actually, I've been so busy lately that the Twitter stuff has fallen to the wayside. But I do have fun looking for ways to do more with less in the Twitter world.

Twivert...Is it Worth the $5? Probably Not

2009-09-24T06:23:00.000-07:00

So...the last few weeks my Twitter account has pretty much been on auto-pilot because things have just been too dang hectic at the office for me to do much with it lately. And not just Twitter...blogs, LinkedIn updates, it's all fallen by the wayside. The ironic thing is one of the reasons I've been too busy to update Twitter is that I've been hard at work on my own Twitter management application. But anyway...

A few weeks ago I started trying out something called Twivert. It's a great concept. Basically, it's a platform that allows advertisers to advertise through Twitter users' accounts, and the Twitter users can earn money for showing those ads. It's a great, low risk way to make some money from your Twitter account...so it seems. After trying this out, here is what I've discovered:

1. You do get a $5 "bonus" in your account for signing up. Then as advertisers use your account, your balance grows. Well, after letting this thing post to my account for a couple of months now, I've earned an addition TWO CENTS. So...my account balance is now $5.02. You can only request a payout when your account balance reaches $30...At this rate, I will be 82 years old before I can get my money.

2. The only ads I have ever seen run through my account are the ads from Twivert itself advertising the fact that if you join up you get a $5 signup bonus...and so the cycle continues.

3. Really all this thing does is get you labeled a spammer. Thus, a recent reference to me from another Twitter user:

ASoldiersMother: @jwork could you just send me the $5 and forget the spam?

So...in the end, I've probably damaged my online reputation and annoyed the hell out of a lot of people, all for a fictitious $5 that I will never see.

If you have lots of followers, are determined to make money from Twitter any way you can, and don't mind being labeled a "spammer," then go right ahead. But for most people, I would say this is something to avoid.

Keeping Your Twitter Account Interesting With Automatic News Feeds

2009-08-27T13:03:00.000-07:00

This article will describe a very cool strategy for keeping your Twitter account updated automatically with interesting and useful content. It involves the use of two components (in addition to your Twitter account): a tool to systematically update your Twitter account with posts from an RSS feed; and a news source that is available as an RSS feed.

First, let's talk about where to get the news source. There are millions of RSS feeds you can tap into. Just look for the little orange RSS symbol and click it. The page that loads is the URL to feed into an RSS reader, or in this case, a Twitter feeder. News and sports web sites, in particular, are rich sources of news. And one technique I like is using Google Alerts to bring back custom keyword-based Google news items.

To use Google as your source, go to www.google.com/alerts. You will need a Google account. Once logged in, create a new feed with a keyword relevant to your industry, set the source as news or blogs, and set the delivery mechanism as feed, rather than email. Once this is done, Google will provide you with a URL for a custom search results page of news results based on your keywords.

Now let's talk about the other part: feeding that RSS source into a tool that will use it to update your Twitter account. One tool that I like for this purpose (that works very well) is TwitterFeeder. Visit the site and create an account. A single account can manage many feeds for multiple Twitter accounts. You might want to set up numerous news feeds as sources for your Twitter account. Follow the directions on the screen to add your news feed. I suggest you also click the Advanced Settings link, set it so that only the title is used in the tweet message (due to the severe character limitation on tweets), and that it check for new updates every hour.

If you combine this strategy with a recurring post strategy, such as facilitated by a tool like TweetLater, your account will stay constantly updated, fresh, and interesting. That is a good first step in running a successful Twitter account.

Three Valid Reasons for Buying Twitter Followers

2009-08-26T12:58:00.000-07:00

Buying Twitter followers seems unseemly at first. If the point of Twitter is to build relationships and communicate with friends or associates, then purchasing a bunch of strange followers just doesn't jive. However, in the world of marketing, things are not always what they seem. So here are three valid reasons to purchase followers for your Twitter account.

1. You are selling a variety of products to a broad market and need to get your brand or marketing message in front of as many people as possible. I'm not a huge fan and of this strategy, because I think the level of attention that your tweets will receive will be low. But if your marketing revolves around having extremely wide visibility (under the assumption that a small percentage will do business with you), then this might be a good strategy.

2. You have bumped into your maximum follower count and need more people following you so that you can follow more. Now this is a very valid reason, especially if you're trying to grow your Twitter account quickly.

You can manage your account and help it grow by maintaining around a 1:1 ratio of followers to people you follow. This will require you to follow other users in chunks, and then periodically divest from your account the ones who do not follow you back. So your follower and followee counts will go up and down over time, in a gradual upward trend. This is the cleanest way to grow your account because you'll have fairly tight control of over whom you follow. The downside is that this is a slow process. If building your follower count quickly is critical to your marketing strategy, then buying followers is an advantage because it lets you get on with the business of following other users.

3. Prestige. Twitter has a title for users with more than 10,000 followers. It calls them "whales." If part of your marketing/branding strategy is to appear huge by having tens of thousands of followers, then you can shortcut the process by simply buying followers.

In the long run, I think you need to spend time building a core Twitter follower base that is receptive to your message, or at least relevant to what you do. However, in certain instances such as those discussed above, purchasing followers is a valid marketing strategy.

Monetizing Your Blog with Twivert

2009-08-20T08:39:00.000-07:00

I came upon a pretty interesting web site today, twivert.com. Basically, it turns your Twitter account into an ad serving platform. You earn money in one of two ways: either for running the ads through your Twitter account (with your payout based on the number of followers you have) or on a cost-per-click basis (where you earn money whenever someone actually clicks on an ad link in your Twitter posts).

I have set up an account, but have not seen enough of what the system does yet to comment on how well it works. But I love the concept. It is an automated system, meaning you don't have to do a thing, although you can choose to specify the ads that run in your account.

After signing up and logging into your Twivert account, there are a number of options you can configure. These include the hours of the day that your account is available to post ads, the frequency of tweets, and whether or not to use auto-tweeting. Currently, I am only able to serve a single ad per day. I'm not sure yet if that is because of the number of followers that I have, or because of the newness of my account.

This is a very easy and automatic way to monetize your Twitter account. As long as you post regularly on legitimate subjects, then I don't think you're going to lose any followers by posting an occasional ad. I mean, if you collect many followers at all, you will notice that a good many of them just about do nothing but post affiliate links, anyway. So tweeting an ad is really not a big deal.

If you're on the other side of the fence and want to use other Twitter users' accounts for advertising your own products or services, click the following link to learn more about that process: http://www.twivert.com/o/pla

As I use the system, figure out how it works, and think of some ways to expand on the concept, I will report what I learn here.

A Modification to the TwitThis Blogger Code

2009-08-19T14:17:00.000-07:00

TwitThis is a very cool service that lets you place a button on your site so anyone who has a Twitter account can tweet a link to your web page. I recently read an excellent post on the blog Cranial Soup about modifying a Blogger template to use the Twit This button from www.twitthis.com:

http://cranialsoup.blogspot.com/2009/01/add-twitthis-button-to-your-blogger.html

I quickly implemented the code in this blog. However, I made a couple of adjustments that work better for me. The original blog said to paste the following code into your blog footer:

Currently, I have the code implemented without the following lines:

and

The difference is that the code will now display the button on your main blog page, and not just on pages for specific posts. Now, clicking the button on the main page will just submit your main blog title and link to Twitter, rather than a specific page title and URL. But I'm not sure how many people who read this blog click to a specific page, so I want to make sure that they have the option to submit the page to Twitter even if it is just the front page.

Another option that I am considering (but have not done yet) is to place the code at the TOP of the blog post, rather than in the footer. This would make the button more prominent. When I get around to doing that, I will post it here.

Using Refollow.com to Increase How Many People You Can Follow on Twitter

2009-08-18T14:10:00.000-07:00

Twitter is a runaway success, and as such it is subject to abuse. To prevent or throttle this abuse, Twitter limits the number of people you can follow to 2,000 or 110% of the number of people who follow you. This creates a problem for marketers because following others is the number one way to get new followers of your own. So business users have to figure out how to increase their followers without bumping against this limit on the number of users they can follow. One way to do this is to maintain a ratio of followers to followees of around 1:1.

I have started using a fantastic free online solution called Refollow.com to dismiss users from my Twitter account. The tool lets you view all of the Twitter users who you are following, those who are following you, as well as groups of users who match various other criteria. They are presented in a grid of user icons. Hovering over a user displays a hover box with much more information about that user.

Unless you are of a status where people are naturally following you without requiring a return follow, you are going to have to manage your following list. The first thing you are going to have to do is eliminate those users you follow who do not follow you back. This is probably the single most valuable function of Refollow.com because it makes that process so easy. Here is how it works:

1. After logging in, click the checkbox next to "Not Following Me" at the top of the screen. This will change the user grid to display only the users who are not following you back. On the right-hand side of the screen, in a box labeled "Show me," you may have to click the radio button next to "My followers and following" and then the "more" link directly beneath that.

2. Click the "Select Page" button to select those users.

3. Click "Unfollow."

That's all there is to it! If you repeat this process regularly, it will help you maintain close to a 1:1 ratio of followers to people you follow, which will help you avoid being locked from following any more users.

Four Ways to Increase the Number of People You Can Follow on Twitter

2009-08-13T19:52:00.000-07:00

If you are very aggressive using Twitter as a marketing platform, it won’t be long before you are maxed out on the number of people you are allowed to follow. Twitter caps the number of people you’re allowed to follow at the greater of 2000 or 110% of the number of people who are following you. So to get much past 2000, you will have to find ways to greatly increase the number of people who are following you. What follows are four ways to get that done.

One. Advertise. Your twitter profile page is a web page that can be advertised to drive traffic to it just like any other web page. So where can you advertise? Some Twitter management platforms, such as TweetLater, allow you to advertise to their other users, which often number in the many thousands. Since these are people most likely using Twitter for business purposes, you stand a high chance of picking up a lot of new followers if your profile looks interesting.

You can also just purchase traditional image advertising on any number of web pages, although it is highly recommended that you choose pages with an appropriate audience for the products or services that you sell.

Two. Maintain a 1:1 ratio of followers to followees. This will require you to periodically purge your account of people you follow who do not follow you back. You are certainly free to make exceptions for users you find that are particularly interesting, but if you do this too much your ratio will get out of whack and you’ll reach a point where you cannot follow anyone else.

Three. Purchase followers. In general, I do not think this is a great strategy, because you are likely to end up with a lot of followers who do not have that much interest in what you have to say. However, it will skew the ratio in your favor, thus greatly padding the number of people you are allowed to follow.

Four. Make yourself so famous that people want to follow you by default. If your name is Ashton Kutcher, no problem. For the rest of us, this is the level to aspire to.

So there you have it – four ways to increase the number of people Twitter will allow you to follow.

The Twitter SEO Effect: Using Twitter to Create Optimized Web Pages

2009-08-12T07:46:00.000-07:00

Another way to think about your Twitter marketing is that the process of tweeting creates a constantly-changing web page that is heavy in content. Twitter pages are very indexable, and are in fact the type of website that Google really likes – heavy on text content, light on everything else. But most people don't really look at it this way, instead simply using Twitter as a communication platform.

If you are a casual Twitter user who just uses it to communicate with friends, then this phenomenon is not really something you have to concern yourself with. However, if you are a business owner or manager wanting to use Twitter for marketing purposes, then the search engine optimization (SEO) effect is something that you should try to take advantage of.

In SEO, if you want a web page to appear in Google or any other search engine for a particular search phrase (keyword), then you need to use that keyword on the page. It is doubtful that most Twitter uses think about keywords when making posts. But they should. If you want your Twitter page to appear for keywords related to your industry or market, then you should use those keywords in some of your tweets.

One strategy is to create a short list of target keywords and use these keywords frequently in your tweets, so that even as your page gets updated and tweets get moved down the list, there is always a high probability that some of your keywords are on your Twitter page. To make this process easier and make sure that it gets done, I suggest you pre-program your account with a number of recurring tweets that make use of the keywords. That way, when you are making your casual daily posts, you don't have to think about keywords because that is already being taken care of automatically.

There are a number of tools on the market that can provide the functionality for automating your account as described above, and using such a tool is an excellent investment if you are serious about using Twitter for marketing purposes.

How Often Should You Tweet? A Mathematical Discussion of Twitter Frequency

2009-08-11T07:44:00.000-07:00

In this article I want to pound on one concept that is absolutely critical to being a successful Twitter user. And that concept is frequency. Much more so than in any other medium (online or off), frequency is critical. I follow a couple thousand people, and some people follow many more than that. So when I log in to Twitter, I see different names all the time…with a few exceptions. And those exceptions are the people who are keeping their name and marketing message in front of as many people as possible.

So how often is often enough? The answer to that question could probably be calculated with some certainty using a mathematical formula of that considered the number of users your followers each follow. Unfortunately, most Twitter users have many followers, which would make this a difficult and time consuming task.

The ideal situation would be to have a thousand Twitter followers who each follow only one person: you. In this situation, Tweeting once per day would be enough. A more realistic scenario is that you have one thousand followers, who each follow one thousand other people. Assuming that each of those people posts an average of five times per day, that is five thousand tweets per day floating drifting through each account. Let's say that there are twenty hours per day when active twittering is happening. Twenty hours times sixty minutes gives us twelve hundred minutes.

Dividing the total tweets by the total minutes:

5,000 tweets / 1,200 minutes = 4.2 tweets per minute.

Or:

Tweets per Minute = Total Tweets / Total Minutes

Assuming an equal distribution of tweets throughout the active twenty hour period, there are more than four new tweets every minute. The Twitter interface shows twenty or so tweets, so in five minutes, a tweet will be pushed completely off the page. You would want to tweet every five minutes to always be on your users' screens. In other words:

Tweet Exposure Time = Tweets on Page / Tweets per Minute

Or:

Tweet Exposure Time = Tweets on Page / (Total Tweets / Total Minutes)

You could probably take the time to actually calculate this, but it will be a pain. And I really don't know how accurate it is to assume five average tweets per day. It could be way higher than that; or lower, depending on your circumstances. You could audit a set of your followers and get an average.

The formula for the number of times you will need to tweet in a day is:

Number of Tweets = 20 X (60/(20/(Number of Users X 5)/1,200)))

NT = 20(60/(20/(5NU/1200)))

So if you plus your number of followers into the above formula, you will get an estimate of how many times you need to tweet to constantly keep your name in front of your followers. It is probably a big number. So after going through all this math, the final point is this: tweet a lot!

Using Twitter is Like Walking Down a Hallway with Lots of Doors

2009-08-10T07:40:00.000-07:00

There is a classic business metaphor that associates being in business with walking down a hallway with lots of doors. Just walking down the hallway (the state of conducting some kind of business) will reveal opportunities that you could not see until you walked down the hall. In other words, moving forward with some kind of business plan will cause you to meet people and come upon situations that may change the course of your business.

The concept of using Twitter to promote your business falls very nicely in line with this idea. Twitter will allow you to make a social (sort-of) connection with many people you would not have otherwise known. And that is where opportunities come from. The more involved you are with Twitter, the better your chance of using it as a tool for opportunity creation.

However, your chance of creating opportunity is better if you focus your follower generating activities on those with some type of connection to your industry or geographic market. For instance, a bankruptcy lawyer in Memphis would be well served to follow and be followed by residents and business owners in Memphis.

It is also necessary to keep your eyes open. If you operate your account in such a way as to get as many followers as you can but you never read what those followers have to say, you will not be aware when the possibility arrives to offer assistance or propose business alliances. Twitter is intended to be a two-way affair.

If the number of people you follow is small then you might be fine using the default Twitter interface. As your account grows, however, it can quickly become difficult to keep up with the people you follow. Therefore, it is highly advisable to use a software solution to help you manage your Twitter account. The one I like the best is Tweet Later, which you can try out for free (no credit card required) at http://trytweetlater.com.

AddATweet: A New Twitter Tool to Try Out

2009-08-07T07:04:00.000-07:00

I have been trying out something called AddATweet which is a Firefox plugin that allows you to post tweets that appear on any web page to other users who also have the plugin. This Is a great tool for having conversations with other Twitter users of particular web pages. I am by nature not a real chatty person, so tools like this are very useful for people like me because they create things to talk about.

Certainly, there is a limit to the number of people you can interact with since it is limited to the universe of people who: 1. use Firefox; 2. have the plugin installed; and 3. have it turned on. However, there is some value to using it anyway as a means to comment on interesting web pages and as the source of conversation.

To try it out, visit the AddATweet website, www.addatweet.com, and click the install button on the upper right hand side of the screen. While you're there, you can find some web pages that people have commented on using the plugin. They are listed on the right hand side of the page underneath a header that says "Popular AddATweet Pages" today. Since the installed user base is small (given the newness of the application), it makes sense to start out by going to web pages where people are already posting comments.

If you use this tool in conjunction with BigTweet, it will be pretty easy to come up with things to tweet about simply by talking about web pages you visit. Things get even easier if you combine manual tweeting using these tools with automated tweeting using a software solution such as TweetLater.

A word of caution: you should be careful giving your Twitter credentials to applications that do not already have a lot of people using them. I recently got burned doing that. However, given the wide publicity and quick acceptance given to AddATweet, I believe it is safe to use.

Twitter can be a powerful weapon for your business, or a complete waste of time. I make heavy use of TweetLater (http://trytweetlater.com) for marketing my own and my clients' businesses on Twitter.

Getting Started with Micro Video on Twitter

2009-08-06T05:32:00.000-07:00

There is another micro-trend that goes hand in hand with microblogging; and that is micro video. Using a service called 12seconds, you can record very short videos (12 seconds in length) that accumulate into an ongoing series of posts just like a microblog. So you can just create an account on 12seconds and start recording videos that build up as a video blog. That in itself is pretty cool. However...

...another very cool feature of 12seconds is that integrates into your Twitter and Facebook accounts. So every time you do a new video, it can show up as a post in your Twitter account, or an update in your Facebook account, with a link to the page on 12seconds that contains the video.

12seconds does exist as its own platform that allows you to follow other users, just like Twitter. The basic Twitter rule here applies: follow other 12seconds users and many of them will follow you back.

To use 12seconds, you start by signing up for an account. Use a keyword for your user name because this will be contained in the URL to your channel page on the site. Your URL will be something like 12seconds.tv/channel/yourkeyword. So right off the bat, just by signing up for an account you are creating a page that has a chance to rank highly (if you pick a good keyword for your username).

12seconds has its own video recording function that allows you to just click a button and start

recording from your computer's webcam. If your computer doesn't have a webcam, get an external one. It is a cheap investment that is well worth the money. After you make a recording, you have the option to cancel it and record again or publish it to your account.

There is also a search engine optimization benefit to using 12seconds. When you add a new video, you give it a title and keywords. Using many keywords places a listing to your video on multiple pages on the 12seconds site. You can also add a comment to the video page with a keyword link, which will appear on the keyword tag pages. So using keywords helps generate links to your video, to your main web site, and it increases your visibility throughout the 12seconds site.

Posting video on 12seconds is actually pretty fun. I suggest you give it a try, and see if it works for you as a component of your social media marketing campaign.

To check out the ultimate tool for managing your Twitter account (and my number one strategy), visit http://trytweetlater.com.

The Fundamental Flaw with Twitter Follower Building Applications

2009-08-03T07:29:00.000-07:00

One fundamental flaw in the way that most people approach Twitter marketing is that they use tools intended to get as many followers as they can, with the idea that if they have lots of followers they have lots of people to sell stuff to. The problem is there are lots of people all doing the same thing, so there is a disconnect between the selling and buying markets.

I just don’t have much confidence in tools that are intended to automatically build up large lists of followers. For instance, I looked at one yesterday that visited other Twitter users’ pages, based on a seed keyword, and automatically follows the people who those users follow. The advantage of this type of strategy is that it is exponential in nature. In other words, every time you follow someone new, you gain a whole new group of followees based on the users who that person is following. The disadvantage is that the further away you go from the people you originally followed, the less relevant your followees are going to be.

Let’s say, for example, that you are a business attorney in Houston wanting to use Twitter to promote your law firm. It would be a good idea to follow business owners or managers in the Houston area. You could start by following people based on the keyword “Houston.” If you then follow all of the people who those people follow, you’re going to be moving farther away from your core market in terms of relevance. Over time, if you keep doing this, you’re going to have a lot of followees and followers that do not have anything to do with your core target market.

In some instances, depending on your business objectives, this may be fine. A lot of people are adopting the mass marketing strategy of getting as many followers as they can so they can promote affiliate products to them. Maybe this strategy will work – I don’t really know. But for any business with a defined target market, you will be better off concentrating your efforts on a smaller group of Twitter users who are potential customers or referral sources.

One Twitter follower building application that I do like is the Friend Finder capability in TweetLater. It does not work by following anyone en masse. Instead, based on a group of keywords that you pre-configure, every day it looks for users who it believes are relevant. You have three days to approve or deny those users. After three days, the program will either discard those users or follow them, depending on how you have it configured. I like this approach much better. It is a slower approach, but will result in a much more relevant base of followers.

To check out TweetLater for yourself for free, visit http://trytweetlater.com.

Twitter Management Styles

2009-07-30T11:21:00.000-07:00

One thing I see way too much of is people doing nothing but blasting out links to affiliate programs with their Twitter account. In my opinion, this is an amateurish technique. I believe you have a better chance successfully marketing products or services on Twitter if you engage in conversation and make friends before trying to sell.

I think there are a couple of different ways to approach using twitter as a marketing platform. One is to take the mass volume approach and get as many twitter followers as you possibly can and do lots of promotion to your followers under the assumption that if only a very small percentage of them make purchases, it will still represent significant revenue. The other approach is to try to build a smaller group of followers who are either somehow related to your industry or are good prospects, and have deeper conversation with those followers.

Which is the best approach? It probably depends on your particular circumstances. I think most professional marketers would argue their time is better spent marketing to a more selective list of prospects. But perhaps if you’re selling something that does not have a defined target market, it makes more sense to get your advertising in front of as many people as you can.

Perhaps the ideal solution is a blended approach. Perhaps you should generate as many followers as you can while using grouping functions to have closer contact with a select group of followers. This likely requires some kind of software solution to give you better control over your account. For example, the grouping function in TweetDeck allows you to create groups of particular followers you like to keep up with.

Another tool that provides useful functionality for managing large groups of followers and followees is TweetLater. Its TweetCOCKPIT screen gives you a very nice overview of your overall twitter accounts. It makes it very easy to manage multiple accounts with different groups of users.

It may take some experimentation to find the right combination of strategy and tools to use with Twitter to promote your business.

Learning your way around the TweetLater Interface

2009-07-29T07:32:00.000-07:00

When you first start working with TweetLater, the interface can seem confusing. The main menu is divided into nine buttons: Main, Accounts, Tweets, DMs, Followers, Auctions, TweetCOCKPIT, Other Tools, and Logout.

The Main button gives you access to certain high level functions as well as tutorials. If you want to view all of your scheduled tweets for all of your twitter accounts, you can do that here. You can also view all references to any of your Twitter accounts from other Twitter users here.

The Accounts tab is where you can add your Twitter accounts to your TweetLater account. After clicking on the Accounts tab, click the Add Account button to add an account. If you have a Ping.fm account you can add that as well. This could allow you to automate both Twitter and Facebook. The Edit Automation button will allow you to manage the tweets you have set up for your Twitter account.

The Tweets tab is where the rubber meets the road. This is where the work gets done. Your options here are New Tweet, List All Tweets &DMs, Upload, and Delete. To start adding tweets, click the New Tweet button. When adding a new tweet, you will need to use article spinning syntax. Here's an example of what this looks like:

{this is my first tweet|this is my second tweet|this is my third tweet}

When TweetLater is scheduled to post this tweet, it will select one of the three options at random.

When setting up a tweet, you will also tell TweetLater when you want the tweet to first appear and how often it should be repeated. Recurrence is optional but highly recommend. You can set recurrence for as little as 2 hours, which is probably way too soon, or spread it out up to once per year. You can even have your tweets post to multiple counts. Be careful not to get too aggressive posting your tweets too often to too many accounts. Once your tweet is configured the way you want it, click Save.

You can even prepare all of your tweets in advance in a text file and upload them all to TweetLater at once. All of the tweets you have set up will appear on the List All Tweets & DMs page.

This has been a quick cursory discussion of some of the main buttons you'll need to use on the TweetLater interface. You will want to spend some time with TweetLater to get much more familiar with its different functions.

Click here to try the free TweetLater trial.

Easy Tweeting with Tweet Later

2009-07-28T13:06:00.000-07:00

TweetLater makes life much easier by allowing you to automate your Twitter account. The first step in using TweetLater is to set up your account. Once you have supplied your Twitter credentials, your account will appear on the accounts page. You can manage many Twitter accounts from your TweetLater account, which is a very handy ability if you want to have different Twitter accounts for different markets or niches.

But now onto see the good stuff. With TweetLater, you can pre-configure spinnable tweets that can also be set to post on a recurring basis. This lets you really mix up your tweets. For example, some of the information that I mix into my tweets are just little snippets of advice, while some of it consists of links to interesting web pages (many of which are my own).

It is important not to have the same tweets repeating many times. Tweet later will allow you to have a tweet that posts very often (even multiple times the same). However, a much better strategy is to spread the interval between recurrences to a wide span of time. This will require that you set up many spinnable tweets, but the result will be an account that seems much fresher and current.

TweetLater also provides several other important functions, the most important of which is the process of return following any one who follows you. If you do not follow back those who follow you, many of them will stop following you. Since one of your goals is probably to get as many followers as you can, this goes against your core strategy. But if TweetLater is managing your account, it is already taken care of.

If you're ready to take your tweeting to the next level, check out http://trytweetlater.com. If you just want to learn more about Internet marketing in general, check out our main web site, http://workmedia.net.