Rule #1: Planning Matters

One of the best metaphors for Twitter is that it’s a bar. Unlike Facebook where you know interact with ‘friends’, on Twitter you can engage with almost anyone. There are millions of simultaneous conversations happening on thousands of topics. It can be overwhelming. It can also be enlightening.

The open nature of Twitter is what makes it so compelling as a potential tool for business. However, businesses that think they can create an account and start marketing on Twitter (or: spewing sales pitches) are in for a rude awakening. Not only will that strategy fail, the Twitter community could turn on the company and create a public relations nightmare for the business.

Marketing isn’t about pushing products. It’s about understanding market needs, analyzing competition, identifying the positioning ‘sweet spot’, building awareness and credibility, developing and supporting a community of loyal customers and more. Twitter can be used for any or all of these marketing objectives. In fact, one of Twitter’s unique strengths is its ‘discovery’ capabilities.

What do you want to accomplish? What are your goals and how will you know that you’re successful or going the right direction? You can start Rule #2 before having these fully completed, but you need to have your Twitter objectives nailed down before you start tweeting.

Rule #2: Listen First

Remember how we said Twitter is like a bar? How would people react if you walked into a bar (or coffee shop or other public place for socializing) and you started shouting about whatever was on your mind? Best case they’d ignore you. More likely, you’d be thrown out – and maybe never allowed back.

The same applies on Twitter. Don’t spam. Relevance is essential. The Twitter community is judge and jury. It can be difficult to recover from a bad reputation so it’s best not to get one in the first place.

If you’re just getting started on Twitter, be sure to listen (read) for a while before you start posting or replying. There’s nothing wrong with being a voyeur. Even if you’re already on Twitter, take a step back and just listen once in a while. Do it on a fairly regular basis. Twitter is evolving quickly.

So what are you ‘listening’ for?

- What are the hot topics, most popular links from tweets, or most popular users?
- What are the types of tweets that get re-tweeted most?
- What are the users in your industry or target audience tweeting about?

Rule #3: Find Your Voice

When you were listening in the previous rule, you certainly noticed many different styles of tweets. If you didn’t, you should go back and listen harder.

While there is no right or wrong answer for what your Twitter style or voice should be, there are definitely considerations to make before you start tweeting. You need to make sure that your voice is appropriate for the objectives that you are trying to achieve and the image that you want to portray. You should document the characteristics of your chosen voice and why they are important – this is especially useful if you will have more than one person tweeting for your organization or if you plan to hire ghost writers.

So what are the characteristics that you need to consider? One way to think about the characteristics of your Twitter voice is to map out several vectors with different extremes on each end then decide where your ideal position would be on each vector. For example, do you want your Twitter stream to be fully automated or fully manual? Professional or casual? It’s unlikely that you’ll be at either extreme, but the vector will allow you to easily visualize your voice.

Rule #4: Look Alive

Creating an account on Twitter and leaving the default profile photo and background is a sure-fire way to show Twitter users that you’re not serious about Twitter or the Twitter community as a whole. There is no excuse for not investing in the small effort that it takes to create a rich profile page and profile photo.

Have a designer create something that integrates well with the Twitter profile page. The Whole Foods and Zappos examples below should give you some ideas. Look at your competitors and do something better! If you don’t have the skills in-house, there are plenty of freelance designers that can create something totally custom without spending much. Of course you’ll want to complete the profile information and include a URL – consider a specific landing page on your website.

There are several couple schools of thought on profile photos. For businesses, more and more logos are showing up. In our opinion, logos are not in the right spirit. Twitter provides a unique way for businesses to deliver a human touch. Our recommendation is to use a good quality, properly formatted photo if you can. There are many articles on the topic. Do a quick search to get more information and suggestions.

Now you’re ready to promote your presence on Twitter. Promote your Twitter user name on your website, in email signatures, direct mail pieces, business cards, etc. If you are tweeting regularly, consider displaying them on your website or blog. There are plenty of tools that make it easy.

Rule #5: Grow Your Flock

Several strategies exist to help grow your flock on Twitter. Some are a bit controversial. We’ll save those for later. Hopefully we don’t need to explain the benefits of having a lot of followers. The real question is, “Are you attracting the followers you need to get to your goals?”

Rule #4 covered the first step. Letting your existing customers and partners know how to find you on Twitter will get you some followers. The second strategy is to follow companies and individuals within your industry and/or region. Some will follow you in return. But there are other benefits.

Many tools look at the relationships between users (who’s following whom) and make recommendations based on that information. As a result, following users with certain characteristics can actually help you attract followers. Genuine engagement (Rule #6) is also key to gain followers and builds off of the users you follow. Another totally acceptable way to gain followers is to follow interesting people. If you find someone who tweets interesting things related to your business, see who she follows, and follow her.

Auto-following users based on them following you or using third-party tools (some listed below) is where you start to get into a gray area. Tools are already starting to show up that look at the ratio of followers to friends for ranking and other purposes. It’s probably not a good idea to get your ratio completely out of whack. “Follow many but don’t auto-follow everyone” is probably the best approach.

Rule #6: Engage Genuinely

Look before you leap when it comes to Twitter. You are embarking on a journey. It can’t be viewed as a one-time event. You have to nurture and support your efforts. If your initial level of activity begins to wane, your followers will notice and will feel a sense of abandonment. Start with a comfortable, sustainable level of engagement. Engagement on Twitter is like the inverse of product pricing – it’s easy to drop prices and easy to increase Twitter engagement, but doing the reverse is exponentially more difficult.

To get started, use search.twitter.com or another Twitter search method to see who is talking about you, your brand or a keyword related to your industry. Read up and then engage when you have something informative to say. If you are looking for your user name you can only see your replies in Twitter if someone starts a tweet with ‘@(your twitter name)’ but sometimes people will put @yourname in the middle of their tweet. By searching “to:yourname” it will find any tweets that included your user name.

Using common sense combined with Rules 1-5, you should be in pretty good shape. The more time you spend on Twitter, the more efficient and effective you’ll get. Below are some tips gathered from various Twitter users around the web on how to optimize your Twitter time and avoid potential Twitter landmines:

- Clients like Tweetdeck and Twhirl make it a lot easier to manage Twitter and make you more efficient.
- Understand and use direct messages (DM) (private), replies (public) and re-tweets (RT) correctly.
- You don’t have to read every tweet or reply to every DM, but don’t ignore them all either.
- Use URL shortening tools like TinyURL, tr.im and others for cleaner tweets and more characters for you.
- Comment on others’ tweets and re-tweet what others have posted to build your place in the community.

Rule #7: Track Your Results

Once you have everything in motion, you’ll want to keep an eye on things to track your progress and to determine whether it makes sense to spend more (or less) time on Twitter. You can easily go overboard with measurements. Here are our recommendations on the ‘must haves’ and the ‘nice to haves’.

In Rule #1 you set your Twitter objectives. What do you need to measure to make sure you’re headed in the right direction? These are your key performance indicators or KPIs. Once you know what your KPIs are, you’ll be able to figure out what tools you need.

For example, if your goal is to get visitors to your website and to sell a product, you’ll want to know how many visitors are coming to the site from Twitter, how many of those visitors buy your product and how your conversion rate compares to visitors from other sources. Web analytics tools from Yahoo, Google and others (see Resources below) can get this information for you. Obviously this is simplified. You’ll likely have multiple goals and more KPIs for each goal, but it’s important to understand what metrics you really need and why they are important – what do they tell you and how can you use that information? You’ll need to track your KPIs on a regular basis and use them to make adjustments to your strategy as needed.

Conclusion

Twitter is changing the way people communicate and search for information and it hasn’t even scratched the surface in terms of its potential reach and influence.

Twitter can be used for fast, effective and inexpensive research, customer support, public relations, lead generation and more – but your efforts will almost certainly backfire if you don’t follow the explicit and unspoken policies in this vibrant and rapidly growing community.

Whether you are self-employed, a small business owner, a multi-national corporation or a government agency – a high-tech company, a manufacturer or a coffee shop, Twitter provides huge opportunities and risks.

Tweamr provides the research and tools to help maximize the opportunities and minimize the risks. An expanded version of this article is available as a free download from Tweamr.com. The expanded version includes additional examples, links to tools and checklists for each rule that businesses can use to quickly and effectively implement a Twitter marketing strategy.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/2310078

This article is about making Twitter pay in your business or life. Twitter is very new in the bigger world of communicating. It is still in the adoption phase, and that makes Twitter a moving target with regard to how best to you use it. Personally, “tweeting” is fine, if my time is unlimited and my interests are diverse. However to many of us, we need to make our Twitter time pay off. Below I give you the 3 top uses of Twitter so that immediately you put it to its absolutely best use.

Twitter as the latest social web networking gizmo, is intended to allow others of your choice to know what you do all day. You may ask yourself, “why should I spend my time telling other people what I am doing?” That is a very good question. Twitter is designed to generate social and business value out of answering that question. On the face of it, Twitter looks like a monumental instant messaging system. And some people use it that way. But that is not what it is about. At least, that is not what where its true power resides.

What Is The Unique Value of Twitter

Here is the answer. In short, Twitter is immediate, it is searchable, and it allows you access to contacts that can be of further use to you. On top of this, everything about Twitter is free. If you believe in what you do, what you do all day will be in line with your interests and beliefs. So if I am reading a blog, writing an article or filming a video, then that stuff will be of interest to my followers. You might say that that is nobody’s business if you are from the old school. In the old days, your family or the people that live in your neighborhood and work in your office or place of work are the only people that need to know. Well, the neighborhood just got much bigger due to the web. Your community is defined across geography and the people that you see everyday. And more and more, the way that you make yourself known to others that share a mutual interest, is through the web. Use Twitter to find, communicate with and promote to them.

The best way to utilize this article is to bring to mind now the things that are important to you:
1) your market niche,
2) a personal interest or hobby
3) a cause that you are committed to.

When you read this brief article, use your interest to put this information to work immediately by trying it out. Here are the three ways to use Twitter:

1. The Twitter Search

There are at least three ways of searching Twitter to find out things of importance to you. Here are the ones that I find most useful:

• What is the most popular URL of interest to you being discussed now on Twitter? Remember content is on websites, not usually on 2.0 sites. Therefore, in order to answer this question, you should go to Twitter(url)y. Twitter(url)y provides a sort of voting system based on the number of times that a URL is used (either in TinyURL, Snipurl (snurl) or full URL) by people using Twitter. URL’s are ranked from top 100 highest voted URL’s based on this voting system.
• Most popular topic of interest to you . Use http://search.twitter.com to find specific term(s) that is(are) of interest to you. Are you interested in bee farming….type it in the search bar, and find out what’s buzzing. And seriously, bee farming does have results in this search.
• Others in your geographical area with similar interests on Twitter. Use http://www.twitterlocal.net/. Are your interests local? Now you can connect with people in your area that Twitter in areas of interest to you. TwitterLocal allows you to receive tweets specifically from people of specified distances from a zip code of your choice. This is great if you have social interests (schools, organizations, government) that you want to be updated about. It also provides the top 40 worldwide locations with the highest Twitter activity if you want to connect with the hottest geographies. If you are opening a hot dog stand in your area, this would be a good way to get the word out for free.

2. Contacts – New and Existing Twitter is about finding out what is being discussed. But more importantly, Twitter is about who is discussing it. How do you find out about high impact people now? In the virtual world, probably you search on Google and read and comment on their blogs or you get involved in on-line communities. In the real world, you have real communities or maybe Meet-Up groups.

After you find out Twitter people that are talking about the things that are important to you via one of the methods above, follow them by clicking on their link. In the beginning, you may be tempted to follow everybody. Resist the temptation. Choose carefully who you follow. I find a good way to decide who I will follow, is to look at some of the content that they have created (not just re-tweeted) and find out if they appear to be opinion leaders and not just re-distributing other peoples’ material all of the time. The opinion leaders are important because they will give you access to quality material and they can in turn be useful for getting behind your opinions.

When you create quality material, you will quickly become known for that and people will begin to follow you very quickly.

3. Promoting Content

Most likely, you will have some content that you have or will create that merits some distribution to a deserving audience. Your content could be anything – a grand opening of a physical store, a website or blog, or a YouTube video (or Facebook Page or Linked-In page). You name it. Twitter gives you 140 characters per tweet to get your word out. Additionally for long URL’s, it will automatically provide a shortened version (TinyURL). You need to think very compact and creative to get your word out in 140 characters. Twhirl is a user interface that can be downloaded for free and can reside on the desktop of your computer for ongoing access to Twitter.

When promoting anything, remember that you are doing people a favor in communicating to them via Twitter. In so doing, ensure that you include followers that are open and willing participants in mutual interests. Make your content relevant to your followers. Also if you have found something of interest, re-tweet that content that would be of mutual interest to your followers. Influencing other people to your way of thinking is also a good use of your time on Twitter. After all, if you believe in what you do, it will be reflected in what you do all day. So, when you are tweeting something that you are doing presently it should be something that is at least, expectantly entertaining, or at the least content-rich. Be respectful of others’ eye-time.

In Summary

Twitter has its focused use. If you are looking for the latest, searchable news and who is in on “the conversation”, this is the medium for you. I heard a quote that says “the community defines the channel, the channel does not define the community.” Twitter is the channel, the community is yours. The Twitter channel is a fast-paced one that provides vital signs to some conversations that are or will be important to you. It is not the answer to every communication need, but it is valuable. Use the information right now to put this to work for you.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/1784266
 

However these days, Twitter can also be an avenue to market your business online. To truly tap the potential of Twitter marketing as a great marketing tool, you must embrace the essential nature that Twitter provides.

You might only have a couple of followers, let’s say about a hundred but when these followers have 100 followers each then that will be the beginning of a massive campaign. But wait, how do you deal with certain trust issues? How do you bridge the huge trust chasm that divides you from the plethora of minions that loyally follow your followers?

Retweeting your message to the followers of your followers answers this pressing dilemma. Provide a certain avenue on your website to retweet your message like a contest for example. You can give a prize or a discount to people who promise to retweet your message. Both parties will benefit greatly in the end because you are able to market your product and services while your potential client gets a prize.

A carefully crafted Twitter marketing strategy may be a key tool in flourishing small businesses from around the world.

To improve networking with both your current customers and your potential clients is the primary goal for implementing a Twitter marketing strategy. Subscribers can connect with others of the same interests and goals through different search engines present in Twitter.

Twitter is the perfect avenue to promote not only yourself but also your product as well without losing loads in your bank account. The 140 character post can cut through the chase without the unnecessary sugar coating that comes with traditional marketing strategies.

Twitter marketing can reach an endless array of potential customers. Not only that but also your potential customers can reach out to you to fulfill a certain marketing need.

Using an efficient Twitter marketing strategy is a vital tool in a world where immediate information is at its peak potential. Tweets are posted instantly and subsequently received by followers on an ongoing discussion in real time. With just the right construction, your 140 character tweet can be optimized to its full marketing potential.

A highly effective Twitter marketing strategy utilizes Twittter’s method of following subscribers and vice versa. Following establishes better rapport with your customers and other potential clients as well.

Subscribers are able to access and customize their Twitter marketing strategy by logging on to search.twitter.com. There are two ways to utilize the Twitter search: the basic search and the advanced search. Basic search allows you to enter your search item and ll the results that meets your criteria will pop up. Advanced searches utilizes keywords to narrow down your searches.

If you already have an existing online business blog then you can feed your content via your tweet stream via your Twitter feed. It can redirect your followers to your blog to provide them with additional information regarding your business. This is another form of efficient Twitter marketing strategy.

With the numerous strategies in mind, you can springboard your business with the use of your Twitter account. Twitter has definitely revolutionized doing business via the world wide web. Small business owners can level up the playing field through the effective use of Twitter marketing.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/3872578