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Now this is one neat tool for anyone wanting to monitor certain terms on Twitter. Tweetbeep markets itself as Google alerts for Twitter, and it sure seems to be!
You may want to keep an eye open for mentions of your Twitter name (although Tweetdeck and similar software also provide this functionality) or look for potential new clients searching for information on a product or service you provide. You may want to follow certain people and be emailed when they have asked a question. You can look for tweets that are deemed to have come from certain places or locations, or include a certain hashtag, or reference a certain person. There are plenty of options for customising your alerts to include specific search terms and keywords, and Tweetbeep can also endeavour to discover mentions of your URL even when hidden behind a URL shortening service.
There is a limit on the free account of 10 alerts, but upgrades are available for a mere $3-20/month so the premium accounts are worth investigating if you want to make the most of this software.
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There seems to be a commonly recurring theme in the blog posts recently about how important it is to talk to and listen to your customers. It really is not all about SEO if you want to win business, market share and higher search engine rankings – it is about adopting a holistic policy to marketing online that hits all of your potential customers and audience’s buttons.
Do they want to talk on the phone or do they prefer email? Do you actually know what your customers prefer? Do they want to see a live person and ask questions or do they want to peruse your FAQ, manuals, How to guides etc online at their leisure? Do you offer all the potential choices so that each customer can interact with you and your company how they choose to, rather than a limited set of choices that may not be to that potential customer’s taste?
Years before Facebook etc, I fell over Cyworld – (this is the link to the US version as the original Korean site is too hard for the average non-Korean speaker to work out!). You can basically create your own virtual existence, there is a fantastic monetization method for Cyworld to generate real world cash from virtual world spending, and bearing in mind that Cyworld is now 10 years old, it was waaaaay ahead of its time.
What fascinated me was the involvement of certain savvy businesses. The site was the world’s first social network, it looks totally bizarre to our eyes – too fanciful and cartoony, and yet here were businesses playing the game. They had got in there, created mini-hompies (mini homepages) and were engaging their potential customers in live chat, video conferencing, competitions, give aways, discussions about products, you name it. (You need to remember that Korea has one of the best networks in the world so bandwidth for them is not an issue and they take things like video conferencing as a given and have done for years.)
The point is though that most Western businesses just haven’t got this yet. Still. A decade later.
You need real-time interaction with your customers. Most business websites still have an olde worlde contact number on their site. Very few have yet added Live person text chat, let alone webcams etc so customers can see who they are talking to.
So, today’s task is to investigate TinyChat. The potential of this free tool for ANY business is enormous. If you don’t get it immediately for your business, consider these options:
* Run a once a week webinar or chat where consumers can talk to a techie, a sales rep, the CEO of the company, a real live person. Let them voice their concerns, ask their questions, give you feedback on your products, service, website etc. Make it a two way conversation.
* Let existing customers persuade potential ones of the benefits of your product. Tie it in to your affiliate program so your virtual sales reps can earn money from their involvement.
* Struggling to get a focus group together to review a product? Do it online through TinyChat. Who needs to rent a room in a hotel or conference venue when they can all sit in the comfort of their own homes and talk to each other online?
* Hold a conference for your sales reps or affiliates dotted around the country so they can share what they have learnt about selling your product, the competition, difficulties with marketing collateral, strategies that work etc.
* Do you sell information products? Hold a brain storming session and find out what people actually want to know and where this overlaps with your experience. Then get writing!
I could come up with ideas of how to use Tinychat for ever, for any business. And it’s free.Set up a room, tweet to your followers that you will be holding a session on xyz that you know will be of interest, plan it so it is interesting and engaging, and have a pile of links/white papers/coupons/money off offers etc ready to share with them that meet your core goals, and away you go.
If this doesn’t create a buzz amongst your customers and differentiate you from your competition, read the blog tomorrow for another idea for any business! There are hundreds of high tech opportunities for online marketing available to play with ……..
Why spend hours going through the Google rankings looking for your position, or that of your competitors, when you can automate the process and receive the results by email?
RankReport is a great free tool that will let you monitor your rankings weekly or daily if you are obsessed by the SERPs, and will then email the results. Saves you a job!
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Hyperactive on the Net as always. Here are the tabs I currently have open. I thought I would share them as a useful resource for anyone looking to which marketing techniques you should be considering in 2009, as well as who is out there talking about interesting marketing ploys, methods, tools and so on. Where possibel I have included a link to their Twitter profile. If you aren’t using Twitter to promote your business, your blog, your brand, your products, you should make it a priority for 2009.
The Social Media Guru Curve by David Armano
MyBlogLog – a useful tool for following the blogs you post to or read and seeing how they may all fit together
Jim Marketing Blog by Jim Connolly (Top 10 marketing tips for SMEs)
Top 20 Twitter Posts of 2008 by Dev Basu
Top 10 brand management tools for your business by Dan Schawbel
Marketing Bully – an interesting take on how to generate money from multiple income streams
Twitter – the brand new Clickthrough Marketing Twitter feed
Gmail
27 Blogging secrets to power your community by Chris Brogan
How to use Twitter as a Twool by Guy Kawasaki
TinyUrl.com – one of the many URL shortening tools around
Ovylord – another useful blogpost about the many things you can do with Twitter by ovylord
Best practice for Twitter thank you notes – note: read the comments as there are some very useful suggestions in there about twitiquette etc. By Dewald Pretorius. Also, take a long hard look at Get Satisfaction and see if your business should be using it for customer support.
The 10 types of users you will meet on Twitter by Ryan Deal
30 Lessons learned by a newbie blogger by EazyCheezy
16 Examples of huge brands using Twitter on SearchEngineJournal by Ann Smarty
Techcrunch UK govt and internet monitoring article by Mike Butcher
BBC News Fibre To The Home story because we all need more bandwidth
Andy Burnham story about website rankings by Steve Bowbrick(BBC Blogger)
So, hopefully, that will help to inspire your marketing plan for 2009! It is weighted towards Twitter research because Twitter is going to become an important tool for any sized business in 2009.
Should you Twitter for business purposes? Twitter has been referred to as a micro blogging tool, mainly because of the limitation on characters for each Tweet, (140), but many are beginning to argue that it is more than just an option for blogging – it is in addition to blogging, and should become part of your marketing and networking toolkit.
However, as more people adopt it, it becomes difficult to decide what strategy to take – one way or interactive? Twitter for business has to mean interacting with your followers/customers, but for a company this can become time-consuming and difficult. It also means that the true interaction ie following others within your industry or with authority, is left aside. However, this may well prove to be the most important business aspect of twittering – the networking side of it.
This last few days has seen a flurry of discussion about how to search for and decide who to follow, and whether there should be some sort of ranking of twitterers. Loic Le Meur posted about a search on Twitter by authority, where authority was somewhat simplistically designated by number of followers. Jeff Jarvis gave a pretty reasoned response over at Buzzmachine. Meanwhile, no sooner did Loic ask for a way of searching by authority, than Jon Wheatley produced Twitority which does allow you to search by the number of followers on Twitter.
Meanwhile, the discussion goes on about Twitter, business and search!
Google have today anounced the launch of a tool to help you produce display ads without needing a designer.
All you need do is click on to the ad builder tool, choose a template, name your ad, add a headline, description, logo and link and hey presto, you’re off! You then choose your daily budget for the ad -either CPC or CPM – and your ad will then be displayed.
This is a great add-on to text adwords, and definitely bears investigation before your competitors notice it!
