Social Media

The book I read to research this post was Social Media Shortcuts #1 Your Twitter Road To The 1,000,000th Follower by Jonathan Gebauer which is a very good book that I downloaded for free from kindle. This book is part of a series on different aspects of social media. Each book covers a different topic.  This book looks at how you develop the number of followers you have on Twitter. It suggests only following interesting twitterers. If you follow too many it seems spammy. You should only tweet once a day and shouldn’t repeatedly send out the same tweet. You can though retweet a few tweets from others. If does also look at a list Forbes magazine compiled of the most influential people on social media. The one who came top had 700,000 followers. Obviously getting to a million is probably a tall order. You should also only send out interesting tweets after all when people follow you they will base it on that not on you following back. You should also watch when someone says they are a social media expert visit their pages on sites like Twitter and see how many followers they have and read their tweets etc. Many people claiming to be experts aren’t. This is only a short book around 20 pages. I did enjoy reading it and do recommend it.

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You are now close to the end of this book and I know it is possible you are either reading this on my blog or are reading the e-book having been published on kindle. I will follow this book shortly with an e-book called The 30 Page Guide To The Dark Side Of the Internet. This book incidently will be called The 30 Page Guide To Twitter Marketing in case you want to get it on kindle. I would appreciate it especially if you enjoy the book if you put a review on Amazon about it. This book will be a free download. I would like to do a whole series of books called The 30 Page Guides. They will all be on computing subjects and if you want to see the latest pages I write in the books they will be available at my computing blog at http://scratbag.me. I do have some other blogs which I will list.
http://scratbag.me – Computing Blog.
http;//scratbagroberts.com – Technology Blog.
http://scratbagdave.com – Current Affairs and History Blog.
http://oldscratbag.com – Bestsellers Fiction Novels in particular science fiction, fantasy and thrillers.
http://oldescratbag.me – Health and Alternative Therapies Blog.
I also do posts on some blogs belonging to friends at
http://claireabella29.com DIY, Arts and Crafts Blog.
httpmelissaball86.com Business books Blog.
I set those 2 sites up for my 2 friends and they never used them so when I when I want to branch out into doing blogs on those subjects rather than setting up a blog from scratch it was agreed I’d make use of those. In a way they are essentially my blogs although they retain ownership.

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If you go to http://www.google.com/reader and http://my.yahoo.com they are online RSS feeds and news aggregators where you can customize what sites or blogs are used to display news. Some airlines use Twitter to do customer service in particular @JetBlue and @HawaiiAir and the latter has a website where you can find the progress of flights. Remember if you use Twitter you must resolve customer complaints effectively. Angry customers can do you a lot of damage not just on Twitter but online in general. There’s a website at http://blogsearch.google.com that offers a free or paid service that monitors the reputation of your website or brand. You simply enter your company name or keywords. There is also a free service at http://www.tweetscan.com which is similar. Some businesses may stage an event to promote their brand. The best website for managing this and things like ticket sales is http://eventbrite.com. They can also manage things like ticket sales. You may need to watch what people are tweeting about it and have someone who can respond to these in a professional manner. Journalists can use http://www.mediaontwitter.com which is a service that follows what stories are trending on Twitter. Don’t go promoting your business on this site as it is only news they are interested in and you are liable to be blocked.

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Connecting a stat package into your social media page, blog or website is normally a matter of copying and pasting a bit of code into the right place in the page. A wide variety of statistical packages the most common being Google Analytics allow this. If you work for a big company and major features to the stat package I suggest http://radian6.com. There is a website at http://useqwitter.com that you can sign up to and then it e-mails you each time someone unfollows you. Bear in mind it is no use having followers if you don’t regularly tweet. One website I suggest just for content you can retweet is http://internet.com. It is a news website that reports on the computing and technology industries. It tends to be updated at least once a day. There is a search engine specifically for searching with in Twitter at http://www.tweepz.com. A website called http://www.twtvite.com tells you of any meet ups or tweet ups as they are called. It can also be used as can Tweepz for checking if you live in a big city whether any restaurants or bars have any special offers or promotions on. A website called http://www.retweetist.com specifically tracks retweets and things like who and what has been retweeted. You can shorten URL’s at http://tinyurl.com although Twitter does this by default when you tweet a domain name. If you have a blog http://www.ping.fm sends out a tweet automatically each time you do a post once it is set up. There is also a website at http://hashtags.org that tells you what is trending on Twitter and some sites like this can tell you why they are trending.

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There are Twitter specific statistical packages like Clicky and Twitalyzer. These give information specific to that platform and many work with other social media networks. Twitalyzer is at http://www.twitalyzer.com and Clicky is at http://clicky.com. Twitalyzer has packages starting at $4.99. The kind of information they give you is things like who retweets you the most and the general location of people who mention you or your brand. If you get a lot of spam on Twitter there is a Twitter Spam account you can follow @spam. You follow it and it checks your incoming tweets for spam. In addition you can also send dm’s or direct messages to this account if you have any concerns. It then gets reported back to Twitter. There is a website at http://www.howsociable.com you can search for something like your name or brand and it checks over 30 social media sites including Twitter and reports back how many and where you were mentioned. In going on social media one thing you should be aiming to do is check for people reporting problems in your field and offering solutions. This isn’t just people having trouble with your brand. In this way your business gains credibility. This may result in more orders as people trust you more and more. Websites like Linkedin have taken this a step further where people can post a question and have it answered by an expert. These experts are just other users on Linkedin. Twitoria at http://www.twitoria.com lets you see the ratio of who a user follows and how many follow them back. If not many follow back it could be a spam account. This is useful info to have in deciding whether or not to follow.

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There is a whole plethora of Twitter terms mostly based around the word Twitter. An example is users are called tweeple. When you set up a twitter account set up a disposable e-mail account specifically for it with an account like gmail or yahoo for example. You will get a lot of updates from Twitter which you don’t want clogging up your usual e-mail account. Also usually you display your e-mail address on Twitter which can attract spam and hackers. Twitter has got a website for searching with in Twitter it is http://search.twitter.com. You can also search on things like hashtags on your Twitter page. There are some other social media management tools at http://twirrl.com and http://spaz.com. The latter has specific versions for different mobile devices. Something I will say about marketing on Twitter is Dell Computers at @delloutlet has exclusive offers specifically for their Twitter followers. They perhaps surprisingly don’t do offers every day. If you phone them or visit their website you can’t ask for these offers. Also the amount they make from these offers only accounts for $6.5 million of their profits last year, only a small percentage of total profits. How they make this small profit is very cost effective with literally someone just tweeting it and more or less free advertising. They also tweet answering peoples queries etc. Looking at statistics for your Twitter page apart from Google Analytics there is StatCounter which has a basic free version and also various paid versions starting at $9 per month. Also if you are a larger business you can try Yahoo’s statistic service which is very specialized and only comes in a paid version.

 

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Partcularly if you are selling something, you need to be honest on Twitter. If you are online only or don’t have phone support for the product you need to say so. The primary use of your Twitter account will normally be to drive people to your website or blog. Things like contact information need to be easy to find. You can always advertise blogs on Twitter more than once but don’t over do it. Especially with your blog or website the best statistical tool is Google Analytics which you can get at http://google.com/analytics/.
Tweetdeck one of the services that lets you manage your Twitter account comes in several mobile versions. You can manage multiple accounts from one screen. One drawback is if you work as a team whilst logged in you can’t other tweets other members are scheduling. There is a twitter app at Twuffer.com that lets you do this. You just both need the log in information for that account. An app at http://tweepi.com lets you bulk follow and unfollow members. You simply have to tick or untick a box next to the member. There is a flush unfollowers feature as well that lets you get rid of people who don’t follow you back. You can tweet Youtube videos with in Twitter where people can view them with in the site without having to visit Youtube. Videos tend to be the medium that go viral most often.

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In this part I’m going to look at some of the tools that make marketing on Twitter easier. Twittonary.com is a dictionary of Twitter. Be warned if you use some of the more obscure it’s doubtful anyone will understand. Quantcast.com provides statistics like visitor numbers along with a profile for just about any website. Surveymonkey.com lets you set up a questionnaire on your website and you can have upto 10 questions for free. You can integrate it with Twitter. Seesmic.com is similar to services like Hootsuite and lets you manage updates and tweets from your Twitter account. Knowem.com is a service that lets you check if anyone else on a wide variety of social media sites has a particular user name. Useful if you are trying to choose a user name for selling stuff. Tweetpages.com do free and paid backgrounds for your profile page with in Twitter. Tweetdeck.com has a directory of Twitter users lists. Lists are when a user groups of followers under a particular category. It can be things like a subject matter or locality. Twellow.com lets you find Twitter users in your locality. Friendfeed.com gives updates to your followers of your activities. This can be things like favoriting a tweet. Tweetgrader.com compares your Twitter account to other users and ranks it. They use a complicated algorithm for this.

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In this part I’m going to look at marketing in a general way and some of your other options. Marketing is about getting your product out there where people can see it. The principles behind marketing anything are essentially the same. You should study your competition and how they do and what they charge. Your product should have a USP or unique selling point. It doesn’t necessarily have to be ie it be quality service. Competing on something other than price is good because you can still thrive when other competitors are under cutting each other. You should also follow emerging technologies especially in your line of business and whether can make your product redundant. You can conduct surveys which can guide you to finding a USP. You can do facebook ads and if you do use Quwaya or Power Editor not the default program as these give more control over the adverts design. Google Remarketing and Facebook Exchange are quite good because they put a cookie on the users computer and when the visits an affiliated site they are reminded of your advert. There is also Linkedin Ads and Twitter Ads that advertise on those sites. You should do an initial draft of an advert to check it looks right. If possible come up with several options and choose the best one. If you are a new start up or even if it is a new line try and get newspapers and radio interested. It’s free advertising and you could even offer to pay for an ad if they interview you. Another idea is to team up with a larger company because they will have experience of what works and be able to guide you. Often it is possible to get fixed up with a mentor via your local chamber of commerce or bank. Yet another idea is look at what your competitors are doing and don’t copy outright but adapt it. Obviously you don’t want to get sued.

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In this part i am going to look at some of the ways you can save time with Twitter. Tweetdeck which is a service that lets you automate tweets and send them out at a set time also lets you manage your multiple accounts. You might wonder why people would want multiple accounts apart from maybe having a personal and business account. Another reason that is quite popular among businesses is sometimes you have an account for your geographical position of your company and another for more general tweets still connected to the business but that people in any location can follow. You can apply geolocation information to your tweets. One service in the USA is http://geocoder.us and one in Britain is http://freegeocoder.co.uk. Both of these are free and apply detailed lattitude and longitude info to your tweets. Bufferapp at http://bufferapp.com lets you time batches of tweets to go out at certain times on your Twitter account. One reason you might do this is you might want to target the UK with one lot of tweets and have another lot aimed at the USA. This is quite common with businesses. Twitter is getting more visual and often it is better to tweet a photo than text. Probably the quickest way to get followers is to follow lots of people then check to see if they have followed back. It is a very time consuming process and often people will follow you and then a short time later unfollow you. A lot of people do this on purpose just to get you to follow them. If you do get followers this way you have to check periodically they are still following.