Tag: Twitter

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Twitter is For Us Big Kids!

This past week on August 6th, Twitter and Face weathered denial of service attacks. Although Facebook did not go down entirely, Twitter was hit hard. What I found out from this attack is just how much I depend on Twitter for news and information exchange.

Twitter is not just like an instant messaging program, although newbies when they first interact with Twitter  equate it with instant messaging. It is more like a hotline to news and topics much like the old pre-Internet water cooler routine. With Twitter you are tapped in automatically as news happens. You get to hear it online first instead of from a news media resource. The people who pass the news on Twitter are usually eye witnesses and/or participants. Take Michael Jackson’s death. It was on Twitter before it was even reported on TV or the radio.

Here’s another example, Ashton Kutcher film star and Twitter Poster Boy had an emergency plane landing on August 6th with fire trucks all around. Not only did he tweet about it, but then offered a special password to all Twitter followers to meet up with him at a specific New York City at a club and get half priced drinks on him to celebrate life. It was a close call that Twitterverse heard about as it happened.

Twitter has forever changed the way we interact with others, promote ourselves, get news and information, and share the same. Twitter is not the medium for kids as recent report stated that the majority of Twitter users are business professionals between the ages of 34 and 52, so don’t think this is another “My Space” thing. Twitter is for us “big kids”.

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Building Your Twitter Network Allows You to Go Viral

I have many clients ask me what does Twitter actually do for them and why should they consider using it. There are several important reasons for having a Twitter presence but the most important one is so you can “Go Viral”.

Let me expound on this a bit and then I’ll talk about the other reasons you should consider “doing” Twitter. First when you build your following to several hundred to a thousand followers, when you tweet a link, a special event, a new service, a new flash, you have the ability to tap into the power of viral marketing like never before.

When you tweet it to your followers, some of your followers will retweet your item to their followers, some will visit the link to view the service or other information and create their own unique tweets about it. Just think, if you have 400 followers and 50 followers retweet your note to their followers and if they each have a hundred followers that means your message has been sent to 5,400 live people. The magnitude can actually be much higher than this and you have the ability to reach thousands of people with your news.

Now this does not mean that every tweet you do will be “retweet-worthy” but if you have news, a special event, coupon, whitepaper the posibilites to tap in to a huge network by word of mouth without paying a cent is valuable in more ways than monetarily.

Now what are the some of the other reasons you should use Twitter? Well here’s a short list:

1. Bing is testing indexing tweets for some accounts. If this becomes big on Bing, the other search engines will follow. The link possibilities for SEO and viral marketing are huge and really very important to consider.

2. The interaction with prospects, clients, and others in your industry is incredibly valuable intel that can be used for strategically positioning your brand on the Web and fine tuning your online message. People like to connect and will use Twitter to connect with you, the voice of your firm, to interact.

3. Using Twitter you can drive traffic to a white paper, page link, or news story. Better yet is that if these items reside on your own website you drive your own free traffic. This is really like a viral component but also a first level traffic consideration.

4. Use Twitter because it is hot. If you are supposed to be a leader in your industry to not be on Twitter, embracing the hottest new technology on the Web, may put you at a disadvantage when a prospect compares you to your own competition. It’s all about perception isn’t it?

5. Use Twitter to create bridges with competitors and others in your industry. I have found that people I thought were tough competitors actually became colleagues and shared information freely on Twitter. Although typically it starts out that you follow all your competitors to spy on them. But it usually turns out that you can have a friendly exchange with them and some of these folks can be the very best when it comes to retweeting your own news due to a sympathetic connection that you build with @ replies and DM correspondence. There is real value in tapping into your own industry network. You just never know where a strategic partnership may be able to be built.

If you are ready to check out Twitter, consider our Twitter Implementation services, Twitter Executive, and Twitter Junior ghost writing services.

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Twitter Junior Ghost Tweeting Program

We now provide budget priced ghost tweeting services for clients. We’ve called the program Twitter Junior. Twitter Junior is for the client who already has Twitter in place and who has been tweeting but is getting tired of it or just does not know how to grow their audience.

Here’s a small case study that helps you to understand our potential value to you using our expertise on Twitter.

We have a client who did not have a Twitter account. We started him off with our Twitter Implementation program. Here, we set up many accounts, integrated Twitter everywhere we could on his blog and website, and started to build his Twitter following. We even posted on Twitter for five days after set up to get him going. This client then decided to try our Twitter Executive program to allow us to continue to effectively build his following. In less than two weeks with our tweeting, follower interaction, direct messages, and tweets that provides value, he has grown from just a few followers to over 132 followers with about five new followers being added each day.

He is a perfect candidate to them move to our Twitter Junior program in two more weeks to continue to build on what we have grown in just two weeks with two more weeks to go. We don’t want to tweet on your accounts for indefinite periods of time as tweeting at this level is very time consuming, but our services are great to give you a jump start to help you hit the ground running on Twitter. We’ll even train you to take over your account and help you learn how to tweet effectively when you are ready to take over.

If you are thinking about Twitter but simply do not know where to start, you may want to consider our Twitter Implementation and ghost Twitter programs to help you get going fast.

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The URL Shortener Contest

Which URL shortener are you using on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn? Do you even care? Well you should! URL shorteners are not all created equal. In fact one of my colleagues reamed me out for using www.TinyURL.com just the other day.

If you use any social networking platforms then you know you have a limited amount of space in which to say what you want to say. Well, what if you want to link to something on your website or online? Here’s where a URL shortener is necessary. You can take a big URL like:

http://searchengineland.com/analysis-which-url-shortening-service-should-you-use-17204

and turn it into a itty bitty URL like this:

http://bit.ly/ZuUw

Big difference right? In fact if you click either of the links above you will go to a nice article reviewing the different URL shorteners that are popular. Search Engine Land even lays it out graphically so you can see what you think is important in one glance. Personally I use www.Bit.ly as my shortener when I have a choice. Some social networking services do not give you a choice and some use www.TinyURL.com as their default, but there are some nice reasons why you should evaluate which one you use and then stick with it.