Our review of Twitter dashboard - the new web app that will let you schedule Tweets and review analytics all in one place
Importance: [rating=4] (For Small Businesses)
Source: Twitter blog
This week Twitter announced the launch of its latest offering to help attract and retain small businesses yesterday. It's called Twitter dashboard and it's been designed to help smaller companies get more out of Twitter, by providing scheduling and analytics all in one package.
We hooked up our account took Twitter dashboard for a test drive so we could let you know if it was worth using for your business.
Our initial thoughts from evaluating it are:
It's cleanly designed and easy to use. Everything is intuitive and extremely simple, so it's perfect for those just starting out who haven't already mastered slightly more complex scheduling and analytics packages.
The analytics are well presented, but the…
Omnisearch will let Twitter 'provide search as a service'
Importance: [rating=2] (For Social Media Managers)
Recomended source: Twitter's blog
Twitter's dev team have been rather busy of late. They've refreshed the Home timeline to highlight the best Tweets first, introduced tailored content via Highlights for Android, and personalized the search results and trends pages. This, of course, is all in response to lackluster Follower growth and losing market share to competitors like Facebook and Instagram, which, unlike Twitter, sort their content via an algorithm which predicts what users will want to see.
Twitter is sticking with the reverse chronological feed because, after all, that's what makes Twitter Twitter. But because of the obvious popularity of algorithmically curated content, it is going to be showing more and more content based on relevancy to the user, rather than just what happened to be the last thing Tweeted.
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Twitter tweaks timeline to show most engaging Tweets top
Importance: [rating=3] (For Marketers using Twitter)
Recommended source: Twitter's blog
Twitter has been grappling with a series of problems of late. Falling share price, stagnating user growth and some high profile exits from some of the top brass. It's looking to re-invigorate itself, and has decided to do so by introducing a sprinkling of the magic that has made Facebook's newsfeed one of the most powerful forces in the world of digital marketing. I say magic, I mean algorithms.
This doesn't mean that Twitter is doing away with the chronological ordering of Tweets, that would be a big mistake given that it is what sets Twitter apart from other social networks such as Facebook. Instead it will use an algorithm to decide which Tweets you are most likely to care about (based on past interaction with the account there from). Then when you log into Twitter…
Twitter Advice for those just starting off with the platform
You'll know that Twitter is a platform worth taking seriously as these statistics show:
Twitter has 316m monthly active users. (Source: Venturebeat)
500m tweets are sent per day. (Source: Expand Ramblings Report)
80% users access Twitter on mobile. (Source: Statista)
Given these stats, it's no surprise that Twitter is being used by different types of businesses to promote their brand, connect with their target audiences and boost social conversions.
In fact, in a blog posted on Adweek.com, writer Shea Bennett reports that almost 67% Twitteratis buy from brands they follow on Twitter. So, what does it mean for startups and small business owners? This means that Twitter is not going away anytime soon and is going to establish a cobblestone bridge between businesses and potential buyers.
Businesses with all kind of…
Twitter suddenly becomes more important to marketers with the latest integration - now rolled out to desktop as well as mobile
Importance: [rating=5] For Digital Marketers, Social Media Marketers and SEO consultants
Recommended link: Google's original announcement of new Twitter Integration
So, they've made up! You may remember how Google used to partner with Twitter and take their firehose to display tweets in near real-time - I remember it was sub ten seconds. Then they fell out and this feature disappeared back in July 2011. Well a new form of the integration is back as has been previewed over the last few months. I've been taking a look to see how significant it will be for businesses. It looks like a great deal for Twitter to me and an acknowledgment by Google that Twitter, not Google+ is THE source for real-time updates as it had hoped.
What marketers need to know about Google's Twitter integration
1. The…
With objective-based campaigns, businesses can promote to directly prompt leads and sales
Importance: [rating=4]
Recommended link: Twitter announcement on objective-based campaigns
You may remember when Twitter started to monetise through offering ads to advertisers, the model was to use paid Promoted Tweets to encourage more followers, but it was lacking a way to directly prompt leads and sales. Then, in 2013 they launched Lead Generation cards that were particularly useful for business-to-business marketing.
Now, in a similar move to Facebook's new Call-to-action buttons, Twitter is making it easier to create ads that enable direct clickthrough to a website to meet objectives for leads and sales. The option is not entirely new since this was originally available in a US beta from August last year, but from 21 May 2015 all advertisers worldwide can use this new feature. For example, a retailer can now setup ads to encourage clickthrough to sale using this approach.
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Creative tips to plan Vine videos for marketing
If you’re a pro marketer, you must already know that the best advertisements are the shortest (usually 30 seconds long). For some reason, (and let’s not blame everything on technology yet) as time goes on and new generations are born, the attention spans seem to be reducing. So, if your customer loves smart phones, uses Netflix, and owns several different portable devices, his attention span may be shorter than you think.
Like any professional marketer, we could use these odd transformations in time to our advantage. How? Think: applications!
You’d want to market where the crowds are, and clearly that’s not the television anymore. Recently, many companies have been using Twitter’s video uploading application Vine to produce and share creative 6-second videos of their products. That’s right. You get only six seconds to make an impact. Used well, it could be the best shortest ad you’ve…
How to respond to your Twitter interactions to increase engagement
Twitter users have high expectations and if you have a Twitter presence, regardless of whether you are using it as a platform for customer service or brand awareness, then it's important to respond quickly and appropriately, or it could be damaging to your brand.
Did you know that only 15% of the FTSE 250 companies respond to tweets? this is worrying given that 17% of consumers are using this channel to ask questions to leading brands.
Like any social media channel, you should only post content if you have a strategy and the resources to interact in a two-way conversation to engage with your followers. Leadsift's research has drawn up a snappy visual to provide a toolkit for responding to your Tweeters to maximise engagement.
So how should…
Our round-up of examples of who is using Twitter's Periscope video streaming so far
Since Twitter launched the Periscope app in March, we've been discussing its potential and early use in this discussion on our LinkedIn group. We're still working it out, so were interested to hear members' views on how it could be used and ask if it's going to be a fad, perhaps like Twitter Vine - was that a fad?, or a more significant marketing tool.
I think it's fair to say there are mixed views; scepticism that it's not professional video streaming and will lead to clips of tea making and mundane tasks through to marketing opportunities for professional video service companies to step-in and show how it should be done! Others are excited about the benefits of live streaming for behind the scene stories with fashion brands and…
Free Twitter Analytics service and self-serve ad platform rolled out [@SmartInsights alert]
Importance: [rating=4]
Recommended link: Twitter SMB impact research
2014 has seen some great new opportunities for smaller businesses to use Twitter to expand their reach, generate leads and understand the effectiveness of Twitter.
We previously alerted readers to the rollout of the free Twitter dashboard/analytics and the self-serve ad platform. Both updates removed the need for big budgets (minimum $10000) or verified accounts. These updates were great if you were in the right countries, but were limited to the US, UK, Ireland, Canada and select other countries initially.
So this update is simply to share the news that access is now available to many more countries - so do share the word!
A big welcome to @TwitterAdsNord! Self-serve Twitter advertising is now available to businesses in Sweden, Norway, Finland and Denmark.
— Twitter Small Biz (@TwitterSmallBiz) November 5,…
