Which marketers running the show do you find useful?
I love Twitter as a way of learning about new developments and approaches in a social way. But if you're looking to learn from others on Twitter, as well as socialise, you need to know who to follow.
To help find good people to learn from, a couple of years ago, I wrote this guide to what I thought were the best marketers to follow on twitter.
What about client marketers?
My post was popular at the time, and I've learned loads from these guys around the world, but its weakness is that almost everyone on there is a consultant or works for an agency. Nothing wrong with that! But where are the client-side marketers?!
I have identified a handful of marketers I follow who are different - they are client-side marketers actually walking the talk and running the show.
I find following their tweets really…
Is Twitter the canary in the coal mine of customer relations?
Despite the buzz surrounding it, Twitter is not the fastest growing customer service option out there. It"€™s understandable if people have that impression but the numbers don"€™t appear to back it up.
According to a recent post by Diane Clarkson of Forrester data show the number of online consumers to use Twitter for customer support to be under 1%. (Source: North American Technographics Customer Experience Online Survey, Q4 2009 and US Online Omnibus Q4 2010.)
(more…)…
Twitter is more likely to help induce advocacy and future purchases
Value: [rating=4]
Our commentary: This short piece on emarketer.com gives a review of some new research revealing that Twitter followers who "follow" a brand are more valuable at the business level than Facebook fans, who "like".
For example, daily Twitter users who followed a brand were more than twice as likely as daily Facebook users to say that they felt more likely to purchase from the brand after becoming a social media follower. That pattern is similar when users where asked if the would recommend a brand.
Marketing implications: Although it's not really a Twitter or Facebook question, we know that marketing and social media success is about more than one channel, or one social network, it does raise the importance of understanding the implications and being alert to these differences in your business, and specifically to your audience.
…
By
June 30, 2010
I created this presentation for a workshop I ran recently for around 20 different UK brands that were looking to use Twitter as part of their marketing mix.
Most of the companies had done very little in the way of marketing on Twitter and they were looking for guidance on how best to approach something that many just didn"€™t see the value in. It's called Twitter Marketing Basics and looks at lots of examples of how companies are using Twitter with practical tips on how to setup or improve your existing Twitter account. It covers:
What Twitter is
Jargon buster
Setting up your profiles
The roles that Twitter can play
How to write the perfect Tweet
The Twitter ecosystem
Managing and monitoring
Who to follow
I hope you find something useful in this presentation. Drop me a line if you would like to know more or add any questions below. Thanks.
…
Twitter has reached 100 million accounts yet only 20 million are active. How do you keep your Twitter account active and relevant to your customers and partners when you also have a day job? How do you get others involved? And what do you talk about?
In this article I'll show 7 ways Twitter users can better manage and make more of this social media tool.
1 Delegate and share!
There are several tools that help you to manage twitter accounts, after all if people are talking about your brand or speaking to you via Twitter, you need to know what they"€™re saying.
Tweetdeck works at one level. It"€™s free, easy to use but the downside is you need the user name and password for the account. That"€™s ok if you have a company account "€“ it seems to work ok with several people having the same account open…
Twitter is about answering the question "€˜what are you doing"€™ in less than 140 characters. That"€™s about 12 words. In this article I suggest 10 quick wins to get you started in Twitter or to review your current approach. I hope these wins work for you whether you're a business or personal tweeter or both.
Before we get to my 10 quick wins, here's a quick refresher of some of the Twitter commands since I find that many small and medium businesses are still picking up on Twitter.
Twitter jargon buster
Tweet "€“ a post, message or update on Twitter
@username + message "€“ an open tweet that can be seen by your followers and by @username"€™s followers
DM username "€“ a private tweet that can only be seen by username
#hashtag - a Twitter keyword. Adding # makes the word searchable.
RT "€“ repeating a Tweet, known as a ReTweet
Ten Quick Wins to create a…
Compilation of Twitter lists
Update 6th November 2009
Well it didn't take long for a service compiling the most popular Twitter lists by category. Thanks Listorius! Here are a selection:
Marketing Twitter Lists
SEO Twitter Lists
Social Media Twitter Lists
Email Marketing Twitter Lists
My original post explaining benefits of Twitter Lists
Twitter introduced Lists, a major new feature, End October 2009, which should help all Twitter aficionados manage the Twitter firehose better since if offers categorisation / grouping of Tweets from related sources by interest - however you define interest! It's your choice. You can also follow lists compiled by others to save time. A good example from Robert Scoble is shown below. This should also be an improvement on ad-hoc lists like this popular post I created on the Best marketers to follow on Twitter for learning about digital marketing - I have now converted these lists into Twitter lists…
One of the most interesting aspects of digital marketing currently is watching and advising companies developing strategies for how Twitter can support their business. I did a roundup in Feb 2009 on different approaches businesses are taking in their Twitter strategy.
So, I was pleased to receive a review copy of the Twitter book by @timoreilly who is best known for first defining the Web 2.0 concept and has over 600,000 followers (not bad for a business bod) and @SarahM who is a Twitter specialist who describes herself in her bio as the 21st user of Twitter.
This post gives a brief review of the book and highlights, what for me, were the 10 most useful practical tips for companies developing their Twitter business strategy. Since I like to be useful, I'll also summarise some of the tools I found useful in the book which I wasn't aware of.
…
Update, June 2009 - see my review of O'Reilly Book on developing Twitter business strategy.
Everyone is familiar with the rapid growth in followers of celebrities such as @stephenfry and @britneyspears on Twitter. As the chart from Twitter Counter shows there has been an acceleration in adoption in 2009 has celebs have used offline media to drive their followers.
You may also have seen my post on the top digital marketers (consultants, publishers and agencies) to follow on Twitter - this shows how many digital marketers are learning from each other through Twitter.
But how are businesses using Twitter? And is Twitter worthwhile for all types of business? In this post I will review some examples of how companies from the UK and US are using Twitter in different categories of benefits.
How Dell use Twitter for different business applications
Before…
Why the list?
Many marketers on Twitter are still relatively new to it, and like me have the challenge of needing to keep up-to-date across the whole of digital marketing.
So, I wrote this post at the start of 2009 to show who I think is really worthwhile following, i.e. there is a good signal to noise ratio focusing on insights which help me learn about the latest developments or best practice. I've updated it in 2010 to include others I now regularly follow.
My recommendations on who to follow are categorised across all the the different areas of online marketing shown in the diagram below based on who I have found useful to follow to keep me up-to-date, advance my knowledge. Generally I have just included real people rather than publishers or information sites that just push updates and don't interact.
I hope you find my tweets useful too! - I try to act…
