Author : Janet DriscollHere I thought I knew a thing or two about Twitter, and then I came to this session!! The session was given by Jon Henshaw of Raven Internet Marketing Tools, Dan Zarrella, a social and viral media consultant, Lee Odden of TopRank, and David Snyder of Search & Social The session covered many great tools to use with Twitter and strategy and tactics around using Twitter for business
Jon Henshaw
Jon gave pointers on how to get started with Twitter He mentioned the tool Twitority to find friends You can also follow RSS feeds from Twitter Search to find people who tweet about your subject
He does not recommend “pimping” yourself or your company right off the bat Develop relationships first Don’t overfollow too quickly! He suggested Twimailer which gives you more information when someone follows you, like their number of followers, their interests, etc so you can decide off the bat if you want to follow them back
Some interesting facts:
Twitter users are most active on Wednesdays
Monday and Wednesday are the best day of the week to get retweets
The best time to tweet to get retweets is between 5am-4pm
Twitter users are most engaged during 8am-4pm
Use keywords and hashtags in your twitter posts and keep most tweets non-promotional No one wants to follow you if you only promote yourself
He highly recommended TweetDeck for following tweets He also recommended Friend or Follow, a tool that lets you put in your username to see who is following you back SocialToo also gives some valuable info HootSuite allows you to SCHEDULE tweets Splitweet keeps track of tweets TweetStalk allows you to follow someone without technically following them in Twitter
Lee Odden
Lee started off by sharing some stats about Twitter- it has grown by over 964 5% in a year It is starting to encroach on traditional search tools, like Google Blog Search Lee covered the many benefits of using Twitter, many of which are related to public relations and brand
Lee discussed a social media roadmap, looking at audience, objectives, strategy, tactics and measurement in determining a social media plan He showed that Twitter outdrives traffic directed to their blog at TopRank over other tactics, like StumbleUpon and other methods It’s also helped with getting covered by reporters
Some tools Lee endorsed:
Twhirl and TweetDeck
TwitterFon for iPhone
search twitter com
Twitturly com (track retweets) and backtweets com/top-links
Cli gs and bit ly for URL shortening and analytics
twellow com and twibs com -Twitter directories
twitter pbwiki com - a wiki of applications for Twitter
Dan Zarrella
Rules to get Retweets:
Leave room for people to put in RT to retweet you
Don’t put the @ as the first symbol
Give credit
Try to keep the original tweet as much the same as possible
70% of all retweets contain a link- it’s a great way to promote content! More followers = more retweets, but it’s not as strong of a correlation as you might expect The most retweeted words include: you (how YOU can do something), post, blog, new blog post, please retweet, etc Asking for a retweet does work, but don’t do it every time
How tos and instructional content, news, warnings, freebies, etc When you ask for a retweet with using the word “please,” you’re more likely to get a retweet The more something is retweeted, the more likely it will be retweeted again
Also be sure to display tweet-it buttons so that readers of content can easily Tweet the blog post or content
David Snyder
Last up was Dave Snyder who told us how to “pimp Twitter for money” -what we all want to know! Dave coverd a case study about The Book Bank Foundation, where they increased brand awareness and generated leads Don’t use followers as your core metric - that’s not true measurement It’s about viral communication They raised $20,000 in two months via Twitter use
How did he do it? First they seeded with power users on subjects that were relative, like homelessness He stressed solid content creation Defintely monitor and measure Dave uses TweetLater, which is a Twitter management service Dave says you should definitely track retweets
Dave’s main rules:
Have a game plan
You get what you give
Be consistentJanet Driscoll Miller is the CEO and Lead Search Strategist of Search Mojo a full service search engine marketing firm. Her company offers both Search Engine Optimization (SEO) services and Pay Per Click (PPC) Management services to help clients improve search engine rankings.
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