twitter and tweets

12 Ways to Use Twitter for Social Media Marketing By Ron Knight

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 13:27:00 +0000

12 Ways to Use Twitter for Social Media Marketing
By Ron Knight (c) 2009

Twitter is a wildly popular microblogging service. It involves
writing Tweets, which are short updates of a maximum of 140
characters that tell your followers what you are up to. Although
your Tweets are technically supposed to answer the question,
"What are you doing?" Twitter has moved far beyond that. Tweets
are used to share stories, link to photos, promote content,
break news, and a whole lot more. Twitter has also become an
incredibly important tool for social media marketing
(http://www.empoweredseo.com/) professionals. Here are 12 ways
in which Twitter can be used in your social media marketing
campaign.

Copyright � 2009 Jayde Online, Inc. All Rights Reserved

1. Sharing Links to Items of Interest

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 13:27:00 +0000

As soon as you read something online that you think is
interesting, it is easy to share it on Twitter with all of your
followers. Twitter is highly effective in this manner because it
is such a quick way to be able to reach a large group of people.
You can also get a lot of great ideas for blog posts from
Twitter since many new ideas and stories are floating around
that haven�t even made it to the blogosphere and definitely not
to mainstream media.

2. Building Your Network

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 13:26:00 +0000

Using Twitter is a great way to build your network because it
allows you to find and follow people with similar interests. You
can use Steeple to find people who live in your geographical
area. You can also use other tools that help you find new people
to follow based upon who your Twitter friends follow.

3. Build Relationships within Your Current Network

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 13:26:00 +0000

People in different networks often use Twitter to connect with
their contacts instantly rather than using instant messaging for
that purpose. Furthermore, many people use Twitter to connect
with their network during events like conferences.

4. Re-Distributing Content from Your Blog or Website

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 13:25:00 +0000

Twitter can be used to redistribute content from your blog or
website. However, you should take care to do this thoughtfully
since many of your Twitter followers may already read your blog.
For that reason, you may want to avoid using a blog plug-in that
automatically Tweets your posts. Your best bet is to Tweet your
content manually and customize each Tweet so it doesn't get
old.

5. Get Involved in Live Tweeting Events

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 13:25:00 +0000

Twitter launched at SXSW last year, catapulting microblogging
conferences to fame. Live Tweeting events are great because they
are a form of citizen journalism that allow you to connect with
several new people in your niche while making active and
valuable contributions to current discussions in your
community.

6. Pitching Stories to Journalists on Twitter

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 13:24:00 +0000

You can send a direct message to a journalist who is following
you on Twitter to pitch a story idea.

7. Communicating with Your Team

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 13:24:00 +0000

You can use Twitter as a company intranet that connects all of
your employees. Twitter can be particularly useful in this
regard if you have a virtual business with employees in
different geographical locations. You can set your updates to
private for security reasons. Anytime you are working on group
projects, you can stay in touch with your team members using
Twitter.

8. Brand Monitoring

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 13:23:00 +0000

Stay up to date with any mentions of your business on Twitter.
If there is anything negative, you will be able to counter it
quickly. You can also use Twitter as a way to receive feedback
from your customers and improve your business. Just ask your
followers to give their opinion on something. For example, if
you designed a new website, ask your followers what they think
about it and get their constructive criticisms so you can make
your site design even better.

9. Acquire More Votes on Social Media Websites

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 13:23:00 +0000

If you have submitted a story to Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, or
any other social voting website, tweet a link to that submission
to try to score more votes from your followers. If your
followers like what they see, they are sure to vote for your
content.

10. Hiring People

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 13:23:00 +0000

Looking for a programmer, designer, or writer? Whatever type of
professional you seek, try finding them on Twitter. Simply send
your followers a tweet telling them you are looking for someone
for a job. They can either recommend someone to you or offer
themselves for the job. Using Twitter in this way is ideal for
finding qualified freelancers. It is much more convenient than
putting out a classified ad.

11. Build Your Personal Brand

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 13:22:00 +0000

When you use Twitter to talk about things as mundane as what you
ate for breakfast or how you are going to sleep early tonight,
you make your followers feel like you are casual and
approachable. Even those running a company that has a cold,
corporate brand image could create more appeal and build a
unique personal brand using Twitter.

12. Streamline Electronic Communications

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 13:21:00 +0000

When you use Twitter, you�re likely to find yourself using IM,
email, and other electronic communication methods less. Twitter
not only provides public chatting through Tweets, it also allows
you to send direct messages. Twitter will help you streamline
your electronic communications, allowing you to scale back
online.

Twitter free source for business marketing

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 19:08:00 +0000

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author's profile page and delivered to the author's subscribers who are known as followers. Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends or, by default, allow open access. Users can send and receive tweets via the Twitter website, Short Message Service (SMS) or external applications. While the service costs nothing to use, accessing it through SMS may incur phone service provider fees

Sign up for Twitter account

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 19:07:00 +0000

Twitter isn’t just a cute way for keeping in instant touch with friends on mobile phones anymore. It has ramped up quickly to be the search engine of choice for some with its human driven results.
Applications galore allow you to find friends all over the world with similar interests and keep up with them in real time.
Businesses can form instant direct relationships with their customer bases simply by signing up and using the service regularly, and according to the models Twitter is trying out, they will soon be able to advertise to the Twitter community as well. It has grown into a behemoth that is hard to get your hands around, which is why we’ve put this article together for you.
We’ve compiled an alphabetized glossary here for you so that you can just scan down the list and find the term that you are looking for, as well as a list of popular Twitter applications and instructions for incorporating Twitter into your website and blogs.

Twitter Basics

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 19:07:00 +0000

If you had no idea what Twitter was walking into this article, we’re going to start you off at the very beginning. To sign up for Twitter, go to twitter.com and click on “Get Started – Join!”. Fill out the information and voila – you have your own Twitter account. I set up two accounts; one on my personal name, and one for my business. It’s important to grab your names before someone else does, even if you don’t plan on using the account for a while.

How to get more followers

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 19:06:00 +0000

The first quest of a new Twitter user is to add followers who are interested in the same topics as they are. Once you’ve exhausted your personal and professional contacts, where do you go from there? The way most people take is the one described above, where you search Twitter for your interests and add people based on those interests.
There has been a lot written about this topic and we’ve included links to some more high-profile articles by Darren Rowse at ProBlogger. Here are some tips from the pros:

Give Your Followers Value

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 19:06:00 +0000

Answer questions that your followers have if you know the answer. Share helpful tips for your industry that don’t have to do with your followers buying your product. Tell a joke. Always give your followers something that they can take away from the conversation and use. They will recommend you to your friends and you will generate tweets that will encourage new people to follow you.

Tweet in Peak Times

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 19:05:00 +0000

Peak times are basically during the day throughout the work week. If you want to account for time differences in North America, aim for morning to early afternoon.

Tweet Regularly

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 19:05:00 +0000

Tweet often, but only if you have something of value to say. You should aim for a few tweets a day. Do not install a bot program to Tweet for you – your followers will figure it out and unfollow you. If you are taking off for a few days use a service like TweetLater to schedule your tweets.

Create a Custom Profile Page Background

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 19:04:00 +0000

This tells your potential followers that you care about your Twitter presence and will probably be a good person to follow.

Remember that Twitter is Public

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 19:03:00 +0000

The first rule of Twitter is that it is more permanent than the internet. When you post something, at least one person is going to read it and have a memory of that event. Unless you lock your profile, all of your tweets are public record and searchable, forever. While Twitter is all about honesty and just being yourself, you have to act like you are writing something that your parents will eventually read.

DON’T KNOCK IT TILL YOU’VE TRIED IT

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 11:05:00 +0000

Of course, this advice goes for anything in life. But listen: even my own masterful prose can’t capture what you’ll feel when you try Twitter. So try it.

If you don’t get any value from it, close the window and never come back; that’s fine. Despite all the press, Twitter is still largely a geek and early-adopter phenomenon at this point.

Twitter? It’s What You Make It

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 11:03:00 +0000

riting can be solitary work, but not when you write a tech column. Feedback pours in so quickly — by e-mail, on blogs, in online comments — that it’s almost real-time performance art.
For the longest time, my readers kept nagging me to check out this thing called Twitter. I’d been avoiding it, because it sounded like yet another one of those trendy Internet time drains. E-mail, blogs, chat, RSS, Facebook. ... Who has time to tune in to yet another stream of Internet chatter?

True, there’s nothing quite like Twitter. It’s a Web site where you can broadcast very short messages — 140 characters, max — to anyone who’s signed up to receive them. It’s like a cross between a blog and a chat room. Your “followers” might include six friends from high school, or, if you’re Barack Obama, 254,484 of your most tech-savvy fans. (Incidentally, he hasn’t sent out a single Twitter message since taking office. Where are his priorities?)
Meanwhile, you sign up to receive the utterances of other people. Eventually, your screen fills with a scrolling display of their quips — jokes, recommended links, thoughts for the day, and a lot of “what I’m doing right now” stuff.

Even so, I was turned off by the whole ego thing. Your profile displays how many followers you have, as if it’s some kind of worthiness tally. (See also: Facebook friend counter.)

Then one day, I saw Twitter in action.

I was serving on a grant proposal committee, and I watched as a fellow judge asked his Twitter followers if a certain project had been tried before. In 15 seconds, his followers replied with Web links to the information he needed. No e-mail message, phone call or Web site could have achieved the same effect. (It’s only a matter of time before some “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” contestant uses Twitter as one of his lifelines.)

So I signed up for a free account name (pogue) and stepped in.

It’s not easy to figure out what’s going on. Most people are supportive and happy to help you out. There is, however, such a thing as Twitter snobbery.

One guy took me to task for asking “dopey questions.” Others criticized me for various infractions, like not following enough other people, writing too much about nontech topics or sending too many or too few messages.

Determined to get the hang of it, I searched Google for “Twitter for beginners.” There were 927,000 search results.

(Of course, you get a staggering number of results when you search for anything on Google, which is why it’s such a lame trick when journalists use Google tallies to prove their points. But I digress.)

Most of these articles are lists of rules. One says to use Twitter to market your business; another says never to use Twitter to market your business. One recommends writing about what you’re doing right now (after all, the typing box is labeled, “What are you doing?”); another says not to.

One of these rule sheets even says, “Add value. Build relationships. Think LONG term.” Are we talking about Twitter, or running for Congress?

My confusion continued until, at a conference, I met Evan Williams, chief executive and co-founder of Twitter. I told him about all the rules, all the advice, all the “you’re not doing it right” gripers. I told him that the technology was exciting, but that all the naysayers and rule-makers were dampening my enthusiasm.

He shook his head apologetically — clearly, he’s heard all this before — and told me the truth about Twitter: that they’re all wrong.

Or, put another way, that they’re all right.

Twitter, in other words, is precisely what you want it to be. It can be a business tool, a teenage time-killer, a research assistant, a news source — whatever. There are no rules, or at least none that apply equally well to everyone.

In fact, Mr. Williams said that a huge chunk of Twitter lore, etiquette and even terminology has sprouted up from Twitter users without any input from the company. For example, the people came up with the term “tweets” (what everyone calls the messages). The crowd began referring to fellow Twitterers by name like this: @pogue. Soon, that notation became a standard shorthand that the Twitter software now recognizes. The masses also came up with conventions like “RT,” meaning re-tweet — you’re passing along what someone else said on Twitter.

If you asked me to write my own “Rules for Twitter” document — No. 927,001 on Google — it would look something like this:

How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 11:00:00 +0000

(Evan Williams and Biz Stone of Twitter)
The one thing you can say for certain about Twitter is that it makes a terrible first impression. You hear about this new service that lets you send 140-character updates to your "followers," and you think, Why does the world need this, exactly? It's not as if we were all sitting around four years ago scratching our heads and saying, "If only there were a technology that would allow me to send a message to my 50 friends, alerting them in real time about my choice of breakfast cereal."
I, too, was skeptical at first. I had met Evan Williams, Twitter's co-creator, a couple of times in the dotcom '90s when he was launching Blogger.com. Back then, what people worried about was the threat that blogging posed to our attention span, with telegraphic, two-paragraph blog posts replacing long-format articles and books. With Twitter, Williams was launching a communications platform that limited you to a couple of sentences at most. What was next? Software that let you send a single punctuation mark to describe your mood? (See the top 10 ways Twitter will change American business.)

And yet as millions of devotees have discovered, Twitter turns out to have unsuspected depth. In part this is because hearing about what your friends had for breakfast is actually more interesting than it sounds. The technology writer Clive Thompson calls this "ambient awareness": by following these quick, abbreviated status reports from members of your extended social network, you get a strangely satisfying glimpse of their daily routines. We don't think it at all moronic to start a phone call with a friend by asking how her day is going. Twitter gives you the same information without your even having to ask.

The social warmth of all those stray details shouldn't be taken lightly. But I think there is something even more profound in what has happened to Twitter over the past two years, something that says more about the culture that has embraced and expanded Twitter at such extraordinary speed. Yes, the breakfast-status updates turned out to be more interesting than we thought. But the key development with Twitter is how we've jury-rigged the system to do things that its creators never dreamed of.

In short, the most fascinating thing about Twitter is not what it's doing to us. It's what we're doing to it.

The Open Conversation
Earlier this year I attended a daylong conference in Manhattan devoted to education reform. Called Hacking Education, it was a small, private affair: 40-odd educators, entrepreneurs, scholars, philanthropists and venture capitalists, all engaged in a sprawling six-hour conversation about the future of schools. Twenty years ago, the ideas exchanged in that conversation would have been confined to the minds of the participants. Ten years ago, a transcript might have been published weeks or months later on the Web. Five years ago, a handful of participants might have blogged about their experiences after the fact. (See the top 10 celebrity Twitter feeds.)

But this event was happening in 2009, so trailing behind the real-time, real-world conversation was an equally real-time conversation on Twitter. At the outset of the conference, our hosts announced that anyone who wanted to post live commentary about the event via Twitter should include the word #hackedu in his 140 characters. In the room, a large display screen showed a running feed of tweets. Then we all started talking, and as we did, a shadow conversation unfolded on the screen: summaries of someone's argument, the occasional joke, suggested links for further reading. At one point, a brief argument flared up between two participants in the room — a tense back-and-forth that transpired silently on the screen as the rest of us conversed in friendly tones.

At first, all these tweets came from inside the room and were created exclusively by conference participants tapping away on their laptops or BlackBerrys. But within half an hour or so, word began to seep out into the Twittersphere that an interesting conversation about the future of schools was happening at #hackedu. A few tweets appeared on the screen from strangers announcing that they were following the #hackedu thread. Then others joined the conversation, adding their observations or proposing topics for further exploration. A few experts grumbled publicly about how they hadn't been invited to the conference. Back in the room, we pulled interesting ideas and questions from the screen and integrated them into our face-to-face conversation.

When the conference wrapped up at the end of the day, there was a public record of hundreds of tweets documenting the conversation. And the conversation continued — if you search Twitter for #hackedu, you'll find dozens of new comments posted over the past few weeks, even though the conference happened in early March.

Injecting Twitter into that conversation fundamentally changed the rules of engagement. It added a second layer of discussion and brought a wider audience into what would have been a private exchange. And it gave the event an afterlife on the Web. Yes, it was built entirely out of 140-character messages, but the sum total of those tweets added up to something truly substantive, like a suspension bridge made of pebbles.