If I’ve heard it once I’ve heard it the proverbial “million times”—clients telling me, “I just don’t GET Twitter.” To integrate Twitter into your social media marketing efforts, you cannot just plunge in without knowing what you are doing. You cannot just gather up followers, willy nilly. You cannot just tweet about anything that passes through your brain. And you most certainly should not tweet about what you had last night for dinner, unless you were having it at the White House with President Obama.
To successfully and productively use Twitter, you need to GET what Twitter is all about—CONVERSATION. Think of Twitter as the world’s biggest chat session…
Chapter 8 of my new internet marketing how-to book, Thumbonomics: The Essential Business Roadmap for Social Media & Mobile Marketing tells you everything you need to know to really “GET” Twitter, from how to set up an account, how to attract followers, how to use hash tags, and great ideas to help you find things to tweet about. How about quotes, industry facts and news buzz, new tools (people love new tools, don’t they?)
Here’s an excerpt:
“Use a series of tweets to make an impact. We recommend that you create different groupings of tweets.
Pick one keyword phrase for each series of tweets, and use it consistently in each one. I usually put the keyword at the front of the tweet. For instance, “Findability tip” would be my keyword. Then I put a colon, then the tip, and then the shortened URL at the end of the tweet.
Set up a tweeting plan covering the next 30 days. I sat down with my team and put together a strategy for writing all the tweets for the coming month. If you do it this way, you can be very methodical about what you include in your tweets and what keywords you’ll use with each grouping of tweets. It will be a cohesive, cleverly directed approach, instead of a hodgepodge of tweets off the top of someone’s head.
No surprise—I want you to always include a keyword phrase in each tweet.”
There are some really great tools now for using Twitter in an organized and trackable way. After all, if you are going to put the time into it, you want to be able to track what is happening with it.
The first I recommend is Tweet Deck which is actually a part of Twitter. TweetDeck call themselves “your personal browser for staying in touch with what’s happening now, connecting you with your contacts across Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and more.”
With TweetDeck, anyone can tweet like a pro. See what people are saying about you and join the conversation by tweeting, sharing photos, videos or links directly from TweetDeck. This tool is the ideal choice when you have a huge Twitter community, or you anticipate building a huge Twitter community.
SocialOomph.com is another fantastic tool for managing a social media program. What I like about it is the feature that allows you to automatically follow people who follow you, if you choose. This saves you a lot of time and your “Friends list” builds itself. Every time someone new follows you, SocialOomph automatically sends them a nice, customizable thank you note.
Another great feature of SocialOomph.com is its “tweet alerts.” You can enter keyword phrases, and get a roundup at the end of every day showing who used them. I can find out everyone who tweeted about my name, my company’s name, or my book. Using my book as an example, I’ll then re-tweet people’s comments about the book, or people’s comments about presentations we give, so everyone who follows me on Twitter will see them.
The key to doing social media efficiently is automation. Check out either of these free tools, and see which one will better suit your tweeting goals and objectives. And check outThumbonomics for an easy to follow road-map for tweeting success. Pre-order your copy of Thumbonomics today!