Guide to Twitter as a Tool for Marketing and PR
November 3, 2009 by King-Tweet
Filed under Business
In a previous post on MyBlogLog tips, I had mentioned a series of social media marketing posts Online Marketing Blog will be publishing where many of the tips will actually come from the community they’re about. Our next post in that series is about micro blogging phenomenon, Twitter.
At first I balked at the idea of Twittering like many others but eventually signed up (leeodden) and have been tuned in ever since. Like blogging, there are many mis perceptions about the productivity potential for Twitter. Those unfamiliar will often say, What’s up with: “My flight is leaving”. “We landed”. “Getting in cab. Etc?”. Trust me, there is a method to the MicroMedia madness as both an individual and a commercial communications tool.
There’s both a social/play and a social/communicate aspect to Twitter that makes it productive as a promotional tool for pointing to interesting things you’ve found on the web as well as a tool for building credibility and influence. On their own, such updates can be blasé and uninteresting. However, followed over time, you can gain insight into people you may end up hiring, getting hired by, working for, partnering with or simply socializing with.
It’s true that some people do use Twitter as if they’re trying to copy the most boring blog on the web. However, many others are sharing links to timely resources or things they’ve found on the web that they’d like to share/promote immediately as well as tidbits of personal/business information.
A variety of commercial applications for Twitter have begun popping up including political candidates posting updates from the road as has happened with Barack Obama & John Edwards. Other commercial and marketing use examples of Twitter include JetBlue promoting special offers, the BBC posting news items, Apple posts it’s own news (bypassing the media – hmmm) and online retailer Woot posting deals throughout the day.
From a personal brand building and networking standpoint, the key is not to look at microblogging as individual posts, but think of the overall impressions and value that can be created over time. Each 140 character or less entry serves as a seed of an idea for an overall objective. It’s tempting to post something to get it off your chest as I did when a bike was stolen outside my office window and I pulled it out of the truck as the thieves drove away – all during a conference call. I felt I had to tell someone and I certainly couldn’t interrupt the guys from Intel, Ogilvy and iProspect I was on the call with.
Rather, consider an overall objective and keep that in mind as decisions are made about what kinds of personal info, links to useful resources and promotional items are posted. Over time, you’ll build a footprint and identify within the Twitter community. Building that footprint will be far more effective if you keep overall objectives in mind, rather than random information. Unless of course, your objective is to build an identity as a scatterbox.
Now for the Twitter tips.
Biz Stone via the Twitter Email Newsletter:
Jott, has created a way to send a Twitter update by speaking into your phone–your voice gets converted to text and sent out to all your followers. This is a
much safer solution for people who insist on updating Twitter when their attention is required elsewhere–like driving!
Twitter by Voice and more Twitter Apps.
“Rhea” – Skim for links. They are often only used for passing news, as an action alert or resource grabber. It’s worth 5 seconds. Rhea Drysdale
“andybeal” – I tweeted that I was looking to hire a new blogger and found Janet – so I guess Twitter followers are a good job pool Andy Beal
“TDefren” – Mix it up: share news, pontifications, reaction, blog posts. Aid in others’ discovery & contribute to the conversation. Todd Defren
“SebastianX“ – Often Twitter sends folks to new stuff way faster than RSS, and it’s a persistent link, valuable despite the tinyurl/nofollow crap, as long as you promote your profile a little. Sebastian
“graywolf” – Use the twittertools plugin to automagically post new blog entries to Twitter. Michael Gray
“trishussey” – Connecting your blog feed to Twitter and posting events and breaking news. Twitter is a great way to announced time-sensitive events like radio shows, etc. Combine with Twitterbar for Firefox and you can post right from your address bar. Tris Hussey
“bhartzer” – Like a lot of other services, it’s important to add or follow other people first and then most likely they will reciprocate. Find your favorite twitter profile and view who they’re following…and follow them. Follow people and they’ll (hopefully) follow you. Also, when editing your profile on twitter, you can add more than one link in your profile. Turns out that http: link URLs are treated as links. Bill Hartzer
“PeterHimler” – Fun to follow thought-leaders and journalists who often tweet their forthcoming thoughts on the site. Peter Himler
Additional resources on using Twitter as a networking, PR and communications tool can be found at:
•Rafe Needleman: Newbies Guide to Twitter
•Caroline Middlebrook: The Big Juicy Twitter Guide
•Jeremiah Owyang – What The Web Strategist Should Know About Twitter
•B.L. Ochman’s What’s Next Blog: How to Write Kickass Twitter Posts
•PR Squared: Using Twitter To Create & Inform Communities
•WebProNews: Microblogging What’s it Good For?
•University of Maryland, Baltimore County: Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities
•Red66 – Using Twitter as a Marketing Tool
•Eleven Marketing- Add Twitter to Your Internet Marketing Toolbox
Tools to make your “twittering” more productive:
•Twitter Groups – Allows you to tag your followers into different groups. Then you can send a message to those groups without needing to send the message to each person one at a time.
•TweetVolume – A frequency search tool to see how often a unique name (person, brand, etc) is mentioned on Twitter.
•Twitter Tools – A huge collection of Twitter tools by platform as well as plugins, web services and widgets.
•All Twitter Tools and Mashups in One Place – Maybe not all, but a very large list of desktop clients, mobile apps, mashups, plugins, tools and widgets.
•Twittown Unofficial Twitter Community which includes Twitter Forge, a listing of Twitter plugins, Ttools, mashups and services.
Thank you to everyone that contributed! BTW, you can get our BIGLIST updates of SEO blog reviews on Twitter every Friday.
Do you have a great Twitter use or marketing tip to share? Please share in the comments.
5 Ways to Make Money From Twitter
November 3, 2009 by King-Tweet
Filed under Business
Despite the tempest in the teapot brewing over what Twitter itself may or may not be making according to stolen internal documents that were leaked to various blogs last week, there are a handful of companies that have already found ways to make a buck from using the micro-blogging service.
As with two of our previous posts on Twitter, this one leans on the experience of our social media producer, Andrew Nystrom (@latimesnystrom). (You can read the earlier post about how to get followers on Twitter here, and one on finding engaging people to follow here.)
Without further delay, here are five quick examples of businesses that have made money using Twitter, beyond the usual driving traffic and building brand, whatever that means:
1. The Kogi Korean BBQ taco truck: Hundreds of people line up to get food from this L.A.-based truck, sometimes even before the truck shows up. How do they know where to go? Twitter. The family-owned company Tweets its schedule on a daily basis to more than 36,770 followers of @KogiBBQ. Of course, just because you Tweet your whereabouts doesn’t mean people will show up. You also have to have the goods — and Kogi’s tacos seem to do the trick.
2. Threadless Twitter T-shirts: Threadless, an online T-Shirt store operated by skinnyCorp, has contests in which people can submit a T-shirt slogan (140 characters or less, please). The submissions are voted on by the site’s visitors. Winners get to have a shirt designed around their slogan, along with a spot of cash ($500). A few of our favorite slogans: “You autocomplete me.” and “Sadly, my day requires pants.”
3. woot.com’s Deal of the Day: The Dallas company — whose motto is “One day. One deal” — sends out its daily specials via Twitter. Who cares? More than 995,000 people apparently do, subscribing to @woot for notices of a pastiche of products that go on sale, including $12 kitchen choppers, $300 queen-sized memory foam mattresses and $15 power adapters. Much of the merchandise, however, consists of gizmos that fit well with Twitter’s techie audience.
4. United Airlines Twitter-only deals: United, along with JetBlue and Virgin America, get rid of empty seats on their planes by offering last-minute deals that are available only via @UnitedAirlines. “These fares fly off the shelves,” Nystrom said. (You think he intended that pun?) United calls these Twitter-only airfares “Twares,” but it also uses Twitter to broadcast other messages as a way to polish its brand and build connections to its customers.
5. Dell’s Outlet on Twitter: Dell raised eyebrows in June when the Texas computer maker said it tallied $3 million in sales of its desktops, laptops and monitors from Twitter since starting its @DellOutlet account in June 2007. Of course, that’s a drop in the bucket for Dell, which took in more than $61 billion in sales last fiscal year alone. Still, it’s proven to be a good way to move refurbished items or excess inventory, which appears to be the theme of our last three examples.
“Twitter is a good environment for promoting these impulsive, last-minute purchases,” Nystrom said.
– Alex Pham
Monetize Twitter
November 3, 2009 by King-Tweet
Filed under Business
Over the many months we’ve been covering Twitter, talking about Twitter and using Twitter, one of the most common themes we keep coming back to is whether or not they’re ever going to decide to monetize the service, and how.
Interestingly enough, the idea has come back around, it would appear, and is being attempted by a European company called Magpie. The idea is simple: they’ll pay you for access to your Twitter(
) account, and advertisers will pay them for tweets they send out in your name. Depending on your preferences, you can allow them to tweet as much as every other tweet or as little as once in twenty tweets.
I allowed the system to take a look at my Twitter account, and give me an estimate of exactly what it thinks I might make in a given month’s worth of Tweets. I’m a light Twitter user, having probably three or four conversational exchanges a day, and about four or so automated posts (announcing blog posts, mostly) that go out every day. I do have an above average number of followers, but given that I’m not a heavy user, I was surprised to learn that it estimated my monthly earnings at around $200 (USD).
The concept is similar to an experiment we described back in June, where one Twitter user was auctioning off their background image on eBay:
Blogger(
) and Twitter fan Ian Schafer has decided to see what the market will bear in terms of renting out portions of his Twitter page. Instead of going the route of selling tweets, as Robert Scoble gauged the market for with his Seagate experiment, he’s selling off the graphical portions of his Twitter page: the background image and the profile thumbnail.
It’s a clever idea, and avoids a lot of the issues that caused very vocal protests when the Scobleizer played at selling off his individual tweets. He’s put an auction up on eBay, and the bidding on the virtual real estate is at present up to $545. What do you get for your advertising dollar?
I find this new method of Twitter monetization to be just as interesting, and based on the routes that the Magpie folks are taking, I think that it’ll do pretty well, assuming they’re able to keep a lid on those that would try to game the system and run them into bankruptcy.
They aren’t simply allowing just anyone to throw ads in willy-nilly, instead trying to encourage advertisers to target their ads to keywords that get indexed from the user’s Twitter stream.
Additionally, all tweets that originate from Magpie are prefaced with the hashtag #magpie, so that there’s clear disclosure within the system that this is a sponsored tweet.
I think that a lot of folks will likely complain about the concept, much as they did when Andrew Baron almost sold his Twitter account on eBay. The fact that just about anyone can make some serious money from doing almost nothing, though, might overshadow the righteous indignation many may feel about this. No one will get rich from this, but quite a few folks might enjoy having an extra $50-$200 in their pocket at the end of the month.
Will you sign up to Magpie? More importantly, will you be turned off and unfollow your friends when they inevitably sign up for Magpie?
