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Posts Tagged ‘twitter’

10 tips when using Twitter for your Business

Thursday, December 17th, 2009

Twitter represents a huge opportunity for any business to have a one-many conversation with their current and potential customers. Despite this only a minority of businesses have made the leap onto Twitter. Those that have are often unsure what to do when they start.

With that in mind, we’ve written a basic guide on how to use Twitter for your business.

Choosing a Full Name and Username.

Your details will be displayed in the page title (and therefore in the SERPs) as:

Fullname1 + Fullname2 (username) on Twitter

Therefore the full name and username will influence the keywords for which your Twitter profile will appear in the SERPs.

Either Choose:

Full Name1: Keyword1
Full Name2: Keyword2
Username: Company Name

Or

Full Name1: CompanyName
Full Name2: Blank
Username: Keyword

Following people

1.    To start off, just follow those people you are genuinely interested in. This might be your industry leader, your industry magazine, a national paper, or a commentator in your market.
2.     Follow your customers. Show that you’re taking an interest in your customers  by following them. Doing so encourages them to follow you back, and opens up  Twitter as a channel of communicate with them.
3.    Don’t follow people just because they follow you, unless they are your customer. If someone follows you and you don’t know who they are, and aren’t interested in what they’ve got to say, don’t follow them. A classic way to build your followerbase is by following people who follow you. But at the end of the day you end up receiving lots of irrelevant Tweets in your timeline, which makes it hard to discern those you are genuinely interested in.
4.    Try to avoid following people who have a high number of followers and follows. These will probably be using auto-follow tools to build their follower base. Lots are US based.

Tweet your News

1.    When you you add a new post onto your blog, Tweet it with a headline and a link.
2.    When you change your prices, have an offer, or have other news that you wouldn’t otherwise have on the blog, Tweet it
3.    If you have a problem, some downtime or delivery issues, make your followers aware by Tweeting that. Your natural tendency might be to hide bad news, but Twitterers will appreciate your openness. And far better that they find out about downtime from you, rather than finding out through some other means. You need to control that sort of news. And it might save your support team a few calls too.

Tweeting other people’s news and blog posts

1.    If you follow news from several websites and blogs, set up an feed reader that includes all your data sources.
2.    When you read something that you find interesting, Tweet a link to it and a summary, or your take. If its interesting your users will appreciate being notified of it, and may ‘respect’ your opinion a bit more.

Commenting on other people’s Tweets

1.    Try to read the Tweets of the people you follow. If you’re interested in what they’re saying, reply @them
2.    When people send you an @message, make sure you respond to it in a timely manner. Nothing stamps a conversation out as quickly as a gap of a few hours between Tweets.

ReTweeting (RT)

1.    When someone gives you, your website or your company a compliment then ReTweet it. To do this,  copy their Tweet into your own post and preface it with RT @them: This will create a positive glow to your profile, and demonstrates how good you are to your other followers.
2.    When you see somthing of interest that you want to attribute to the original person then RT their Tweet in the same way.
3.    Bond with your customers by occasionally retweeting their messages to your audience

Direct Messages

1.    If you want to keep it private, then direct message people (DM)
2.    Wehn someone Retweets your messages thank them privately with a DM
3.    If you’re asking someone to share potentially sensitive information then publicly ask them to DM you with the details.

Editorial Guidance for Tweets

1.    Include a mix of Tweets. Send links to your site, some to others, and occasionally have no links at all – just a statement. Use all types of Tweets, @Tweets and ReTweets.
2.    Tweet any comments you get on your blog comments and include a link to those comments. This shows your followers that there is a conversation going on, encourages people to get back to your website. Try to get a debate going
3.    Asking questions generate interest, interaction, conversation and answers
4.    Remember: a lot more people read your tweets than respond to them. If you’re using Twitter for customer service then its an opportunity to showcase your finest work!

Tools to save time

1.    Ping.fm: Useful for distributing your posts to multiple microblogging platforms
2.    Shorten URL Mozilla Add on. Lets you drag a URL shortner shortcut into your  browser toolbar, makes for quick URL shortening
3.    TweetDeck. A great desktop application that lets you monitor for mentions, searches and direct messages across multiple Twitter accounts.
4.    Tweetpic. Allows you to link images to your posts.

Tracking

Twitter traffic is hard to track with analytcs platforms it usually comes from redirects. These can help

1.    Bit.ly: This URL shortner can give you click data about the traffic that your shortened URLs are generate
2.    Gooogle Analytics / DC-Storm. More long winded. Manually add a tracking URL onto your website address before you shorten it.

This isn’t an A-Z of Twitter but is a good and easy guide to help your business start using this social media platform. Get it right and Twitter can become a powerful way to interact with your current and future customers.

If you need any help with your Social Media Marketing then please get in touch.

Tags: twitter
Posted in Social Media | 5 Comments »

‘Twitter Premium’ for paying Tweeters

Thursday, September 24th, 2009

The business community has a real love hate relationship with Twitter.

Business users are aware that it holds the potential to really connect with current and future customers. But there are enough Twitter blunders out there (think Habitat’s use of Hashtags) for businesses to be wary of this exciting new channel. And as Twitter is such a difficult thing to measure, many businesses are not sure whether it’s really worth the time investment.

Twitter themselves are very keen to be embraced by businesses. They’ve launched their very own guide that shows businesses how to get to grips with the microblogging platform.

The other thread to this is that Twitter themselves need to start making money at some point. They’ve got around $40m from investors in the bank, but keeping a free service going that is used by up to 45m people doesn’t come cheap.

In an interview with VentureBeat, Twitter’s co-founder Biz Stone indicated that this circle may start to be closed. He said that Twitter was developing commercial accounts that business users would have to pay for. But these commercial accounts would include premium services that would make it much more worthwhile for business.

As to what those ‘premium services’ would actually be, Stone was playing his cards close to his chest. One thing he did say is that they would include detailed analytics so premium account users could determine how and when people were interacting with their profile. Understanding these interactions could be key in determining how to best use Twitter as a communications channel.

Stone also said that they were constructing several Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) allowing third party developers integrate ‘business oriented applications’ for premium account holders. These APIs could add a ‘commercial layer’ on top of the micro-blogging platform.

Stone said “…we’ve identified a selection of things that businesses say are helping to make them more profit.”

Twitter is also expanding their “verified accounts” program, which prove to followers that the account holder is the official one for the business.

Stone wouldn’t be tied down to any official launch timeframe.

With or without these Premium accounts, Twitter already holds huge potential for almost any brand. Euston Digital has already helped several businesses engage with their current and future customers using this open communication channel. For advice on how to use Twitter to help your business, just get in touch.

Tags: twitter
Posted in Social Media | 1 Comment »

Is Real Time where search goes next?

Tuesday, August 11th, 2009

Two of the three big search engines have made announcements this month about new developments in ‘real time’ search.

Real time search has been seen as the next big thing for search engines. Much as it sounds, ‘real time’ search means getting up to the minute results pages – even for articles and posts that have only just been made – rather than a traditional ‘index’ of the web which has been compiled over the last 3 months.

It has been ushered in due to Twitter’s search function which allows you to see what people are Tweeting about right now.

To prevent themselves been left behind in a potentially lucrative market, both Google and Microsoft have developed ‘real time’ additions to their products,

In a previous newsletter we showed how Google allows you to see if any new instances of a search query have been added in the last 24 hours. Google has also updated its Blog Search, which includes the opportunity to see the latest posts from popular blogs.

And Microsoft’s new search engine ‘Bing’ has just announced a trial that means that the latest Tweets from a few high profile users will be instantly displayed in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

But how useful is real time search to us consumers? Do we really care if someone has just Tweeted about the subject that we’re searching for – will that really make any difference to us?

It probably depends on the sorts of things that you’re searching for. If you want to know the latest developments in Michael Jackson saga, then  its pretty important to have instantly available results. But if you’re researching a place to go on holiday, then it’s not going to be quite as necessary.

One problem with real time search is its inaccuracy. Web pages with true and accurate information are often linked to by other web pages. These links – amoung other things – ensure that those pages rank well in the results pages. As a consequence, more people see these accurate pages. It’s a positive feedback loop.

Whereas a 140 character Tweet is at the other end of the scale. Apart from being unverified, it might be a joke, a rumour re-tweeted. If other people then search for and find that Tweet in the SERPs, and then subsequently find it to be untrue, then those people will loose faith in that search engine’s ability to return accurate results.

So maybe Google has got the balance right with this one. Bing has no way of knowing how accurate the Tweets in their SERPs are. Whereas blogs – which by their very nature are a bit more accurate and more thought out that Tweets – might be a good way to capture that ‘real time’ essence without compromising accuracy.

What do you think? Would real time SERPs help you promote your website? Do you as a user want to see Tweets in the SERPs? Leave us a comment below.

Tags: google, twitter
Posted in Search Engines | No Comments »