[This post is part of the ongoing series The Complete How To Guide for Twitter Marketing] The book How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie was one of the first self-help books ever published. It is also one of the bestselling, have you read it? For many salesmen and marketers, this book has been required reading for generations. But, the principals outlined don’t only work in the board-room. They also work online. If fact, Socialnomics author Erik Qualman has said that todays successful companies need to act more like Dale Carnegie and less like Mad Man, which [...]
[This post is part of the ongoing series The Complete How To Guide for Twitter Marketing] Often times, the simplest sounding questions come with the most complicated answers. Trying to figure out what the best time of the day to tweet is precisely one of the questions. The “what time” debate has raged on for years already, and it will only continue. I mean, we honestly still haven’t figured out what the best time for email marketing is, how on earth are we suppose to understand Twitter already? There are several theories out there that attempt to answer this question. [...]
Yesterday I wrote two blog posts, but I didn’t get to publish either of them. It wasn’t that they weren’t done – they were. It wasn’t that they weren’t good enough – they were. It just wasn’t the right time. Yesterday was one of those days when everything was changing by the hour. This has not been uncommon this spring as our state continues to be inundated with massive amounts of water and flooding. So, with everything changing, what was appropriate to post on the blog was changing as well. Yesterday’s blog posts will be published eventually. They are just [...]
[This post is part of the ongoing series The Complete How To Guide for Twitter Marketing] As an internet marketing blogger, there is an endless supply of topics for me to cover. The market is changing quickly, and blogs like mine are only trying to keep up. Facebook and Twitter have dominated the social media discussion for awhile, but there are always newcomers like Foursquare and Quora. The one thing we rarely talk about, though, is what will happen when these services go away. What will we talk about when Twitter closes it’s doors? Now, don’t get me wrong, this [...]
[This post is part of the ongoing series The Complete How To Guide for Twitter Marketing] Today I want to add three audio podcasts to the The Complete How To Guide for Twitter Marketing series that I started several weeks ago. These recordings are part of the the Social Media Huddle podcast that we record weekly with our buddy Scott Wild. In these shows, we cover a wide variety of topics on Twitter. We start with why you should be using Twitter and go as far as engagement and tracking. We really cover the gamut and I think these shows [...]
[This post is part of the ongoing series The Complete How To Guide for Twitter Marketing] On Twitter’s recently updated homepage design, they make the promise that with Twitter you can receive ‘instant updates from your friends, industry experts, favorite celebrities, and what’s happening around the world.’ Following your interests is exactly what Twitter does best. One of the keys to enjoying Twitter is to be following an engaged group of people around a common interest. Believe it or not, but finding new people to follow used to be much more difficult than it is today. As part of Twitter’s [...]
[This post is part of the ongoing series The Complete How To Guide for Twitter Marketing] Well, you win some and you lose some, right? It was less than two weeks ago that I did a post lamenting the problems with online measurement and metrics. You can read my rant here, but today I am actually going to cover some of those very metrics. You see, it’s a double edged sword. While the problems with metrics still exist, we need them to measure how effective our efforts in social media are. Ignoring available data would be wrong. We just need [...]
[This post is part of the ongoing series The Complete How To Guide for Twitter Marketing] Everybody knows what an automated DM is, right? You don’t need to be using Twitter for long to understand this type of messaging, and why it is so disliked amongst Twitter users. Automated DMs are direct messages sent to your Twitter account once you have followed someone on Twitter. The idea is that you can use these to thank someone for following you, which is always a nice thing. The problem with them is that some brilliant marketer along the way decided that these [...]
I have always been amazed by the moments that define us as a country and a society. Last night was one of those moments. Where Were You When You Heard the News? There is a common question that follows on the heals of world changing events – ‘where were you when you heard the news?’ I remember exactly where I was when O.J. Simpson’s verdict was read, I remember seeing the first images of the tsunamis in Indonesia, I remember when the first missiles were fired on Iraq, and I remember the entire morning surrounding 9/11. The news of Osama [...]
[This post is part of the ongoing series The Complete How To Guide for Twitter Marketing] Well, we have been moving along nicely with the Twitter Marketing series here on the blog. It has been fun to write, and I am constantly amazed at how much there is to say about such a relatively simple service. Today, I want to add in impromptu lesson to the course outline because of it’s significant importance to Twitter Marketing. 18 Days Late and a Tweet Short The idea for this post comes from a real-life scenario. Justin, my business partner here at Todaymade, [...]
[This post is part of the ongoing series The Complete How To Guide for Twitter Marketing] Lists were introduced by Twitter a couple of years ago as a way for you to group and organize similar Twitter users together. Each user is allowed to create a list, and add other Twitter users to it as a way of grouping them into common categories. For example, you often see lists surrounding location (ie. North Dakota Tweeters) or a profession (ie. Social Media). Reasons For Using Lists The primary benefit to creating your own lists is that you become the curator for [...]
[This post is part of the ongoing series The Complete How To Guide for Twitter Marketing] Retweeting has become a popular pastime for Twitter users, and a badge of honor for content creators. It is naturally assumed that the more Retweets you have, the better you are Tweeting. It is definitely the 2011 version of word of mouth advertising. But, this article really isn’t only about Twitter. The ideas can be applied anywhere because they are about giving your followers the content that they want to consume, and hopefully, want to share with their friends. The New Word of Mouth [...]
[This post is part of the ongoing series The Complete How To Guide for Twitter Marketing] It’s no secret that Twitter is limited to 140 characters per tweet, and it’s also the case that many website addresses (URLs) didn’t get the memo. As the web continues to become more dynamic, website URLs are getting even longer and this can make including them in a tweet difficult. Sharing links to your blog, website, or other resources that you find helpful is vitally important, and it won’t work very well if the majority of your tweet is taken up with a really [...]
[This post is part of the ongoing series The Complete How To Guide for Twitter Marketing] This topic is the cause of ongoing confusion for many marketing professionals – should I tweet as myself or as the brand I work for? Or, maybe, both? Of course, the answer here is – it depends. I have seen this debated again, and again, but it always comes back to what works best for each situation. In most cases, employers and employees will desire different accounts, and this is usually the best policy. With this split, however, it is important to understand the [...]
[This post is part of the ongoing series The Complete How To Guide for Twitter Marketing] I have been meaning to write a post for weeks about why social media metrics are overrated, and while I will probably still write that post in the future, there are a few metrics that I want to discuss today. If used properly, these can be very beneficial to your online marketing efforts. Within the sphere of social media metrics, I think there are three different categories that users generally fall into. The first group is obsessed with the numbers. They are constantly going [...]
[This post is part of the ongoing series The Complete How To Guide for Twitter Marketing] This is a common, and simple, question that I get asked all the time. To answer it, I think it is important to keep in mind what it is like to read on Twitter. It moves fast, so you simply can’t read it all. Your best chance is to just absorb a few bits of it every here and there. Your own tweet frequency will play off of this same idea. Your followers will not be reading everything that you Tweet, in fact, they [...]
[This post is part of the ongoing series The Complete How To Guide for Twitter Marketing] Deciding how many people to follow on Twitter is definitely a 2011 problem, and a personal question. Your own ‘follow policy’ will vary depending on how you are using Twitter. While there are a wide variety of opinions on this topic, here is an outline of our approach. Following for Personal Accounts Twitter is first and foremost a communications platform, which means that it is used best when connecting people to people. This means that the goal of your Twitter activity should be to [...]
[This post is part of the ongoing series The Complete How To Guide for Twitter Marketing] In 2010 Twitter reached 50 million tweets per day, which is definitely nothing to sneeze at. No matter what you think about Twitter, there had to be at least one useful tweet in there somewhere, right? Twitter has become the true heartbeat of the Internet. It is constantly transforming itself to reflect the current trends and events that are taking place in the world around us. We have seen disasters strike, revolutions begin, and celebrities crumble right before our eyes. It is an engaging tool that [...]
[This post is part of the ongoing series The Complete How To Guide for Twitter Marketing] We’ve talked about Twitter several times before, but up to this point, we haven’t spent much time on how you can make it a powerhouse for marketing. Well, today we are going to change that, and give you everything that you need to make your Twitter profile rock. Why customize? There is nothing more lonely than a Twitter profile that hasn’t been customized. The dead giveaway is always the colorful Twitter egg icon. I am sure you have seen it before: This icon is [...]