Category: Twitter

I’ve been using Twitter since it became available, but until just this last month, my kids were not interested in trying out Twitter. About three months ago my 22 year old son opened a Twitter account and then just this past week two of my teens opened accounts. What I find interesting is that Twitter is expanding its popularity into a wider demographic.

I asked my kids why Twitter? All three responded that they were tired of Facebook and tired of large follower bases. They wanted to connect with a smaller group of people who meant more to them. Interesting! I am not sure how long this trend will continue, but for kids on Twitter I recommend that parents make sure that they do not set their profiles up as public.

By default a Twitter profile will be open. That means that anyone can follow your child and that anything your kid tweets is public. Shutting down a public profile to a protected profile simply requires one click action, but many kids simply don’t think of this on set up.

If you’re not sure if your kid is tweeting, make sure to ask. In fact, my teens tell me that many of their friends are not allowed to be on Twitter or for that matter Facebook and most of these kids do have accounts, but under assumed names; hiding usage from parents. I prefer the opposite approach: allowing interaction on social networks but with private settings and my confirmation of such. For my teens, my other rule is that I have to be allowed to be a fan or follower. This allows me to monitor my teens activity and who follows and corresponds with them.

I routinely chat with my kids about not sharing school names and locations except to people they really know online. That means a student in their school, not just someone they met online or play a game with online. As a parent I feel that it is important to help my kids have fun online, but within secure limits. Why don’t you take a moment and let me know what you do with your teens online.

I have been using Twitter since the day it was made available and I have to say that I really like using it for my own personal business. I have developed over time a Twitter strategy that is really working for me both for follower growth, link sharing, and personal satisfaction.

I typically tweet on Monday through Friday and typically tweet five times a day. I cover 6:00 a.m., 9:00 a.m., noon, 3:00 p.m., and 6:00 p.m. There are some times when I may tweet more, but this is my typical schedule. I use HootSuite and schedule all my tweets for the day in the morning. In the morning I also respond to all direct messages, and review what my lists and followers are saying and interact back with them.

What I have found is that through regular interaction with certain people in my industry I have created a network where we will retweet and comment on each others updates. As I have over 2,473 followers on one account and 2,032 on the other, when I retweet someone to my own followers the exposure for that tweet is strong and link exposure excellent. I monitor who retweets me and know who has klout on the Web so that I can look to retweet them and know that they will retweet me. It is a win-win situation of power users in the same industry, who are not competitors, sharing the viral nature of our follower lists through retweets among ourselves.

The personal satisfaction that I receive from these interactions on Twitter is what fuels my additional activity. It is enjoyable and I learn things from others. Twitter for me is a vibrant community of similarly minded people. That does not mean that I am just tweeting to people I know. It means that I have many followers but the people I interact with the most are in my industry and my account followers get the benefit of these exchanges between power professionals.

I hear all the time from potential clients, “I don’t get social media.”,  “It seems like a big waste of my time.”, “Twitter is so far down on my list of want to do’s or things to implement.” Although they may not “get” social media, there are others just like me who get it and who are soaking up the viral community nature and new search engine benefits from strong effective interaction on Twitter.

If you don’t “get” Twitter but need someone who does to create your own Twitter strategy, I invite you to visit our Twitter services page to find out how inexpensive updates to Twitter may be for your business. They start at $170 for three tweets a day for a month to $560 for 10 tweets a day for a month including follower interaction.

Twitter is a great place to connect with prospects and customers, but is Twitter practical to use for local selling businesses versus national selling businesses? My answer is yes, Twitter is a great place for national and local selling firms.

It is very important to know that the user demographics are changing on Twitter. It used to be that Twitter users were typically in the field of marketing and were between the age of 30 to 55. Now, there is a much wider use of Twitter and use by a wider age range.

So how can a local selling business use Twitter successfully? Using location focused tweets with hashtags (# used in front of a single keyword or phrase without spaces) can help to build information on your category of business that can be used for Twitter searches. For example, if you are a Chinese restaurant located in Waldorf, Maryland, your tweets could mention #Waldorfchinese, #ChineseRestaurantWaldorf, or #chineseWaldorf within the tweet. By using your business category and location you can reach potential customers who may be using Twitter on their mobile phone while they are out and about.

Another interesting trend that I am seeing, if you are an online store, is when you tweet coupon codes you can boost website sales directly. We’ve recently done a holiday promotion for an online citrus seller and the sales generation with Twitter has been stronger than the sales generation using Facebook. Others in my industry have shared with me that they are also seeing an increase in lead generation with Twitter versus Facebook as well.

With the ability to use location hash tags, Twitter can be a great place for local selling businesses to connect and drive online and offline traffic.

It used to be that I felt that every business should have a Facebook page. With the changes that Facebook has made this past quarter, I am starting to rethink Facebook’s importance and consider that businesses may be better served by a strong presence on Twitter instead.

Although Facebook still owns the social marketplace and is the place that consumers spend a measurable amount of time, Facebook has made it very difficult for a business to establish a vibrant presence easily on their platform. I am finding that new business pages without additional marketing will simply not grow a “like” or fan base quickly or easily.

On Twitter, additional follower numbers can be grown fairly quickly with good updates AND follower interaction. I have seen that updates alone are not the key to growth on Twitter. It is the combination of the manual addition of new followers, creation of lists, and interaction with followers that helps an account to grow and for messages to go viral.

When a follower retweets your status update (that may potentially link back to your blog or your services), your link exposure and potential to reach new customers is tremendous. With regular interaction on Twitter you will find that there are certain people you can really connect with that you can use to reciprocally push out each other’s content. If these Tweeps (Twitter friends) have “klout” (measurable Twitter or social impact) or a larger follower base, the result of clicks in to your content can result in increased traffic and potentially a better SocialRank score.

Both Google and Bing are watching SocialRank and have stated that they will be using this metric in their organic search algorithm. To what degree is SocialRank important to organic placement, that we simply don’t know. What I do know is that with the changes on Facebook, it is by far easier to grow, connect with others, and funnel traffic to your website by Twitter than by Facebook.