Five top tips to ‘twitter’ more effectively
Social media marketing can be a difficult beast sometimes, but small and medium businesses who struggle with social networks can take comfort from the fact that even the big brands get it wrong too at times.
Effective use of social media is part art and part science – there are techniques and procedures that work, but creativity and flexibility are also an integral part of any successful campaign.
Here are five of the most common Twitter mistakes made by major brands who ought to be big enough to know better...
1. Only Tweeting during office hours
B&Q have made no secret of the fact it has invested heavily in its social media presence over the past couple of years, and made it a key part of its overall marketing strategy.
Below is a Xefer graph…
This new advice and tools for journalists could be useful for marketers and bloggers too
Value/Importance: [rating=3]
Recommended links:
Twitter for Newsrooms (Shows Grid Above)
Twitter for News
Twitter Media
Twitter announced new advice on the best approaches to communicate using Twitter on Friday.
The advice is intended for journalists, but we though we’d alert you to it, since some of the tools are relevant to companies or bloggers regularly communicating with their audience. After all, many companies effectively have their own journalists today as they compete with online newsrooms and publishers to engage their fans.
Some examples of the tools include greater interactivity on your site:
1. Embedded tweets - we're seeing more of these now - they're a good way to feature promotions or quotes within your site or landing page.
Here's an example -…
Leaked Email from Twitter reveal costs per follower
Value/Importance: [rating=3]
Recommended link: Original post on the Drum
These are the costs revealed in the leaked email from Twitter’s ad sales department:
Cost of $2.50 and $4 per follower
$0.75 to $2.50 for each click, favourite, retweet or reply.
Commitment to a minimum campaign spend of 3 months and $15,000
Since Twitter introduced it’s advertising through it’s Promoted Tweets we’ve had questions from marketers about costs and whether the service would become available to advertisers with smaller budgets as is possible through Adwords, Facebook and LinkedIn.
This leak gives an idea of the costs and suggests the programme isn’t likely to become available to small and medium businesses any time soon.
While most marketers will continue to use Twitter as a…
User features get serious enhancement
Value/Importance: [rating=5]
Recommended link: Twitter video
Twitter has unveiled a major redesign today which will be rolling out slowly. There are four key elements to the changes:
New homepage timeline
Better way to see anything related to you
Interface for easily finding context for hashtags
New user profile
Is this all in Twitter's attempt at trying to become more mainstream and accessible? A move away from the niche knowledge sharing tag it's gained? It looks good at first glance, this official video is useful to demonstrate the changes: http://fly.twitter.com/
Brands also get Brand Pages
There's a really big change for brands too, new brand pages, as Twitter looks to strengthen its relationship with marketers. Twitter's brand pages have been low key compared with the excitement around Google+ brand pages, which…
How NOT to use social media to communicate
It's confession time. At some stage or other I have probably committed most of these crimes while posting to social media. Some I still do on a nearly daily basis, although am trying to unlearn them. How do you score?
1. Using social media as a one-way broadcast communication medium. Not listening, engaging or responding.
2. Endlessly discussing what you had for breakfast and other minutiae. It gives social media a bad name.
3. Not having a profile pic. Signals newbie, spammer or Grandad.
4. Not thinking twice before you post/tweet. It's there forever. Ditto posting when drunk.
5. Jumping into conversations where you're unknown rather than listening first. Especially if your first contribution is to recommend your own product.
6. Blatant selling.
7. Emoticons. How old are you?
8. Posting a link with no explanatory text. Do you really want people to click on it or are you a spammer?
9.…
Using Tweetreach to find out your main influencers in Twitter
I’m writing this post to share a neat, free tool which as it says in its strapline answers the question How far did your tweet travel? I’m prompted to write this summary since I was recently asking this question after Chris Soames, one of our Smart Insights writers, wrote a popular post on finding the best harshtags in Twitter which was widely shared.
To answer the question of who is influential in sharing your tweets, Tweetreach provides a great simple, tool to help with this. If you enter the URL for the page your tweet links to, it will show you Retweets, new tweets not referencing the original and most usefully which Twitter users contributed the most "impressions":
You can see that this post was successful because it was shared by several…
Importance: [rating=4]
Recommended link: The Next Web
Last week Twitter quietly changed it’s method of linking from tweets through to sites. It didn’t post it to its main blog but it was reported by The Next Web - see link above - thanks Dan Barker for alerting me to this. However, the Next Web didn’t go into the details of how this could affect your analytics, which is what we’re alerting you to here.
What this means in practice is that if you are active in Twitter you will see a sharp increase in referrals from T.co domains which is what we’ve seen:
Note that the traffic using other shortened URLs such as bit.ly or Ow.ly, which is a big…
This is a great question to ask since it's easy to get lost in the accumulation of Likes and Follows. I'm not sure of how actionable this info-graphic is though it useful to ask the question.
A few observations:
10% less of the youngest demographic in Facebook
Facebook perceived to be the place to 'friend a brand' - this being an indicator of loyalty
Facebook influences buying decision
Yet isn't Twitter a more useful tool for knowledge sharing and so relationship building?
What are your experiences - which of these two networks provides a better means of connection to your audience?
…
Why do Twitter users follow brands?
Value: [rating=4]
Recommended link: Econsultancy Twitter Best Practice Guide
New research from Toluna and Econsultancy of 4,000 UK and US respondents has shown that over a quarter of consumers now have a Twitter account with 52% of these following brands and companies on Twitter, illustrating the potential of the channel for business.
What are Twitter users looking for when following a brand? This chart shows that many are on the lookout for deals, but it’s not just about the deals with other content also of interest. Some will simply follow to prove they are a fan of the brand.
The importance of Twitter as a feedback channel is also shown with around a quarter saying they will use Twitter for feedback:
Only a quarter (26%) of consumers have complained on Twitter, while over half…
Created by Jess3 and Brian Solis "the Twitterverse is a single graphic designed to inform brands, individuals and organizations about the thousands of Twitter applications available today", so reads the intro on Jess3's web site (I love Jess3!).
The idea of Twitter, like Facebook, as an industry in itself speaks volumes - and this graphic does a great job to map that out.
The Jess3 approach also reminded me about oneforty.com who write great material and publish rated lists of tools for Twitter specifically, like this one for brand tracking. Be sure to check it out.
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