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Wednesday, February 1st, 2012
Many businesses, when conducting social media marketing campaigns spread across various social channels, use a Twitter client – which allows them to post once for all channels, rather than individually for each.
Neal Schaffer, writing for Business 2 Community, has, with the help of Cibo, highlighted the top 20 Twitter clients being used in 2012.
Unsurprisingly HootSuite is the most popular; web-based, HootSuite makes it possible for users to publish multiple posts on platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn – there are also plans to support Google+ in the pipeline.
Importantly HootSuite also offers data that can be used by businesses to improve their brand awareness, demographic data and follower growth.
Twitter ranked second and is still considered to be a simple way to tweet your message if your business is operating just one account; however, if you operate more than one account, Schaffer recommends using something else.
Tweetdeck, which was purchased by Twitter, rounds out the top three and is still considered a good option, particularly with mobile devices – such as those operating Android, as well as iPhones and iPads.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – a best practice Internet Marketing Agency.
Tags: Business 2 Community, Cibo, hootsuite, Neal Schaffer, TweetDeck, twitter
Posted in Social Media Marketing
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Wednesday, August 10th, 2011
Already a major power in the world of social media marketing, Twitter has announced its acquisition of fellow social networking site, Bagcheck, according to a report published by Computer Weekly.
Purchased for an undisclosed fee, Bagcheck is a site on which members converse about items in their bags or other items they have an interest in.
Bagcheck is the latest of a number of companies to be purchased by the micro blogging service, following the purchase of Tweetdeck in May – for a fee thought to be around £25m – AdGrok and BackType.
For now, Bagcheck will remain under its existing URL, the company announced in a blog post – with one current member of Bagcheck staff moving across to join the team at Twitter.
The move has been described as creating a new platform with the potential to increase the interaction between brands and users a like, while offering the same kind of user experience currently found on Twitter.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – a best practice Internet Marketing Agency.
Tags: Bagcheck, TweetDeck, twitter
Posted in Social Media Marketing
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Saturday, July 2nd, 2011
The big announcement this week has of course been Google+ and the limited field trial. Not so limited that people still aren’t managing to sneak in through various back doors! The general consensus from those within the field trial is positive, although obviously the entire reason for the trial is to find bugs and gather feedback so there are plenty of critiques, complaints and suggestions doing the rounds. And Google are responding in double quick time and making changes faster than users can find things to be critical of!
However, overwhelmingly it seems that the vast majority of the (lucky) early adopters want to see Google succeed; if only, to stop the behemoth that is Facebook, which 6 years in, does seem to be suffering a middle-age crisis for many.
There does seem to be a need for an integrator i.e. a one stop shop for everyone’s multiple so-me activities to be easily found, and perhaps Google + is attempting to be this. Add-ons, plug ins and apps will obviously need to be developed, and probably outside Google, just as Tweetdeck was developed for Twitter. It seems that few twitter addicts are likely to give up Twitter for G+, any more than many of us will stop using email, the phone or a letter when these are clearly the right tool for the job.
It would seem that Facebook are going to make an exciting announcement on July 6th, and the money at present is on a video chat with Skype built into FB profiles. There are other possibilities, but this is about the only announcement that will right now derail the buzz about Google’s Hangouts, which seem to be catching on at a rate of knots.
Facebook has made a few other changes this week too, such as adding the possibility of Klout for brands on Facebook. The vast majority of the non-so-me world have probably never have heard of Klout unless their Twitterstream mentions it, so this measure of influence has just taken a big step from the business world to the land of consumers. Klout’s announcement about Facebook integration means that brands can customise the user experience to any brand page according to their Klout score. One has to admit this is a clever move for Klout, extending their reach to consumers, whilst giving brands even more reason to take note of Klout.
This is a nice win-win for the social media world and pushes Klout, which many have been derogoratory about recently, back towards the forefront of activity in the so-me world. Not just for businesses, who should be at least monitoring their Klout score for an idea of how effective their social media activities are, but also for consumers who may well begin to see brands differently once Klout is introduced into the social networking experience.
Whilst many have to date seen Facebook as a purely social experience, the fact that most TV ads now have “Follow us on Facebook” shows that businesses, whilst relatively slow on the uptake, have finally realised that FB is a route to wallets, sales and “brand love”. What businesses need to do far more quickly than they did with Facebook is get into Google+ as soon as possible. Because Google + is not about social networking per se, and this is only one of the many changes coming from Google over the coming hours, days, week and months.
If your company has been relying on SEO, then you need to know that even Google is no longer relying on that. Read the next post!
Tags: business, facebook, Google, hangouts, klout, SEO, skype, Social Networking, social networks, TweetDeck, twitter, video chat, video conferencing
Posted in Blog, Google, SEM Industry, Social Media
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Thursday, May 5th, 2011
Tools
The first tools you should use are those which are available on Twitter to personalise or brand your Twitter profile – logo, bio, website link, background etc. When people look at your profile and timeline, they should be able to learn all about your brand, business, products, USP etc from that profile.
There are people who will argue that personalising your profile is pointless when so many use the tools we recommend below – Tweetdeck etc, which generally do not show the actual Twitter profile design, but it is an undeniable fact that there are now many people sharing visually attractive profiles, as well as others making money from creating them.
If you are team posting from within your company, you should brand each Twitter user in a similar fashion to give a corporate look/feel to the accounts.
The next most important is a tool which allows you to keep track of all that is going on in your own Twitterverse – the website is too clunky to do this easily. You need to be able to easily follow:
- specific events (usually denominated by a hashtag)
- individual accounts (e.g. your competitors or loyal customers)
- conversations so that you can see how a conversation developed (this is particularly useful for helpdesks where different team members can see what has gone on previously)
Also, most tools offer stats, trends and search facilities, as well as lists so that you can keep track of what is working as well as what isn’t, what is trending, and group users into different departments or lists. You can check Twitter trends by region too, as well as trends in London, Birmingham, Manchester and Glasgow on Twitter itself, so if your audience is local, you can keep an eye on what is trending right now near you.
Essential for all of this are either Tweetdeck (acquired by Twitter this week), Hootsuite or Seesmic.
These tools help you to both aggregate the tweets from those you follow, your followers, hashtags, search terms etc, and separate them out into columns to make life much easier.
Try all three to find which one best suits your modus operandi – there are plenty of how tos, videos, FAQs and tutorials across the Net to make the most of their features. It may take an hour or two to investigate but will pay enormous dividends if you have the right tool for the job. All also offer mobile solutions which will give you more chance to follow and post to Twitter on the move.
Automate your tweets
You will send tweets for one of two reasons: a) to communicate/respond or b) to promote. The vast majority of companies are using Twitter only for the latter, which can be fully automated from your blog, website, RSS feed, or for tweets written ahead of schedule e.g for upcoming press releases.
There are so many tools to do this job that you just need to assess what you are attempting to conjoin with Twitter eg wordpress blog, Facebook or Linkedin status update, RSS feed, press releases etc and choose the right tool(s) for the task. These requirements will be unique to each company and based on the existing resources that you have for marketing both on and offline.
For example, Socialoomph (previously known as TweetLater) offers you a wide variety of tools to automate many of the tasks that you may find you need to carry out to harness the power of Twitter for your business. This not only includes automated tweets, but autofollow, welcome messages, stats, linking multiple social accounts and blogs, monitoring follows/unfollows and so on.
Personalised Engagement
The area that you cannot automate at all, if you value your reputation, is the personal side of Twitter – responding to a technical support tweet, answering questions, expressing opinions, conversing etc.
This is the most important part of a social media strategy, so you need to assess the human resource needs for this. You can start small and bring in further resources as you find you need them, and as they begin to generate results.
If you don’t engage on Twitter, or use Twitter to promote a route for human engagement eg a forum on your site, blog comments, a phone line or online chat, webinar or real world seminar etc, then you are not being social, you are broadcasting.
Decide what tone or personality your company wishes to adopt on Twitter – this is really important and needs to be upheld reasonably consistently. Customers want to feel that companies are far more approachable than in the past, especially large corporates, and it is easy to develop a personable, friendly style, even in a technical help centre format. Instead of Business to Business, or Business to Consumer, think Person to Person.
Then, decide who is going to be responsible for monitoring and maintaining your tweetstream, Build in redundancy so that you have at least two people responsible, even if not both full-time, and each knows what the other one has done, conversations that have been held and so on.
Tomorrow, we will continue to look at how to use these tools and strategies and your Twitter account to maximise your business strengths and create social signals to help improve your search engine optimisation and internet marketing.
Tags: hootsuite, seesmic, tools, trends, TweetDeck, twitter
Posted in Blog, Small Business Resources, Social Media, Uncategorised
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Wednesday, May 4th, 2011
We’ve looked at why you need a co-ordinated marketing strategy, we’ve got you using Twitter (if you weren’t already), and now we are going to look at the next step, which is getting on and doing it.
Step 2 – JFDI!
Once you understand the basics, you need to understand how you can harness Twitter for your success.
1) Find loyal followers – these are the people who will evangelise your messages, promote you, buy from you, talk to you, and support you. Without loyal followers, Twitter is simply a time sink that becomes useful for research but little else.
2) Think out of the box to customise Twitter to your own ends
3) Don’t get stuck with one strategy. Be flexible, agile and ready to change. Be reactive as well as proactive.
4) Work with other people to cross promote and retweet.
Let’s take each point in turn.
1) Find loyal followers.
When Twitter first became popular, there were many tweets along the lines of “How to find 1 Million new followers in a month” as many people perceived fame and fortune in numbers. However, we all know it is quality not quantity which matters.
There is also a limit to the number of people who you can follow EFFECTIVELY. If you wish to build relationships with those you need to, you must communicate with them where possible on a 1 to 1 basis, rather than 1 to many.
The purpose of Twitter, for many people who are likely to be those who buy from you, talk about you in a positive light etc, is to communicate. Therefore, it is simply not sufficient to follow everyone you possibly can. You need to a) be choosy b) notice people – an auto welcome tweet when they follow you may seem easy but it’s not good form – be personal and personable and c) nurture your followers by getting to know them.
2) Think Out of the Box
Everyone can click “Follow” (as was discovered by the poor chap who unknowingly tweeted Osama Bin Laden’s death). You need to make your followers glad they are following you, because you are different. And be aware of the pains of 15 mins of fame – you should aim for long term strategies, not just quick wins. (Although we will be posting about getting this balance right next week).
Large corporates need to get personal, small companies need to think bigger, bloggers need to share other blogs as much as promote their own, sales and marketing teams need to get under the skin of their customers to see what makes them tick.
Standard rules may or may not apply on Twitter and in online marketing, but the truth is that you need to stand out from the crowd.
Very standard out of the box thinking would include: Offer prizes to the person who RTs you most in a month, but only offer it on your website, so that serial RTers don’t just win by reading Twitter but by knowing your site. Run Treasure Hunts, photo competitions, Twitter focus groups. Offer extraordinary or out of the ordinary special offers. Create really useful lists for your followers based on their feedback. Add that little extra to their day that helps them to use Twitter more effectively. Find the product(s) they are looking for – even if not yours. Answer questions, offer advice, be helpful.
(For more advice, speak to an online agency who specialise in social media marketing and watch for our Guerrilla Twitter Tips – coming soon).
3) It’s not set in stone.
You may start on Twitter using it as a broadcast mechanism, e.g. promoting your fresh content to your followers, and you may find that this justifies the time spent setting it up. But is it enough? And is it working? (Are you checking your stats to make sure that enough people are coming from Twitter to your site? And are those people higher value than visitors from other sources? Who converts?)
With social media, you can trial multiple strategies in a fairly short time scale, without spending a fortune. If you have a team tweeting, try expanding (or reducing) the team to see if it makes a difference. If you see a trend developing that you can add in to with your product, a white paper, commentary, a blog post, etc, then give it a go. If you have an idea, run it by your followers first. If it works, roll it out!
4) Cross-promote, co-operate
It’s a tough world. Working together with others makes life, and business, a little easier. Find others who tweet similar information to you, agree to RT (retweet) their tweets and you will RT theirs. Create and share Twitter lists.
Think complementary not competitive. Find others who are tweeting about your region and ask them to tweet about you, follow you and RT you. Get on board with others in the same industry and help each other out getting each other’s information to your group of followers. Follow the media who represent your area, industry, community of interest and feed them stories from your world, not just about you.
Use the mention feature as often as possible to promote your most staunch allies. This is simply the addition of a . in front of the @twittername of that business or individual. It will then reach everyone who follows that person and not just your own followers. It is a rarely used, but very useful feature of Twitter for marketers.
So “I love .@clickthroughsem and the latest series of blog posts about Twitter http://bit.ly/kEEFp4 ” could be your next tweet.
Thank you!
Part 4 tomorrow will cover some of the uses of Twitter that far too many business uses seem unaware of.
Tags: business, guerrilla, hootsuite, lists, Marketing strategy, seesmic, success, tools, TweetDeck, twitter, twitter tips
Posted in Blog, Social Media
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Tuesday, June 30th, 2009
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.
Tags: google alerts, monitor, Social Media, software, tools, TweetBeep, TweetDeck, twitter
Posted in Keywords, SEO, Small Business Resources, Social Media
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