I just finished reading a great article by Dan Zarella (click here). He talks about creating “Tweetable Moments” during a presentation. It provides some great strategies that a speaker can use to get his or her audience to tweet about something said in the presentation.

Who Is Your Audience?

Dan’s article focuses on presenters that are operating in front of a large group of people. I do this on occasion when I do my Internet seminars. Many people in business will have such opportunities, but not very often. But, remember, if you are in marketing to any extent, then you probably have daily audiences in various groups of one, two or three people. And there are opportunities in those situations to create “Tweetable moments.”

Keep It Short And Sweet

The tweet your audience is going to send out can only be 140 characters. Then you hope they mention your name to their followers. That way their followers many become your followers. Your audience  may also want to add their own short comment. So if I am going to get these benefits it will require a statement like “Here’s a neat item Huck Huckabee just told me about …” That takes up 51 characters. And remember they may want to leave a longer comment than that. So lets increase this number by 50% and say that we need our “Tweetable quote” to be under 60 characters. So that’s 75 characters for your senders adders and 60 characters for the quote. That is done in five characters under the limit.

Find Tweetable Content

Next, find a Tweetable statement related to you, your business or your industry. In this case I an looking up something on Twitter statistics. On Techcrunch.com there is a headline in a June 8th article that reads: “Costolo: Twitter Now Has 190 Million Users Tweeting 65 Million Times A Day.”

Create The Tweetable Quote

So, let’s create a ” Tweetable quote” from this information. This statement is made in 77 characters. Take “Costolo:” out and we’re down to 68. Edit the statement to “Twitter has 190 million users tweeting 65 million times a day” and you are under the 60 characters mentioned above. And now you have a Tweetable quote that you can share with your contacts during the day that some may repeat for you on Twitter.

Now, lets look at this situation again. The statement above has two very interesting items. This creates an opportunity for two Tweetable quotes and that will leave even more space for your audience to add their desired content.

So if your in the building supply business and you get that information about new housing starts jumping 40% next month, you’ll be able to create your Tweetable quote that your clients can share with their followers.

How do you create Tweetable moments?

Using SMS With Twitter

Twitter now allows you to follow someone on SMS if you don’t have a Twitter account. The tool is called “Fast Follow.” If you text “follow (username)” to Twitter’s shortcut of 40404, then you’ll receive that users updates in your text messaging.

When you are not signed in to Twitter, you can’t Tweet yourself. But some people may just want to receive messages from selected sources. And it may be a good way to send massages to customers and employees quickly and efficiently.

Do you think you will use Fast Follow? If so, how?

Huck

Twitter is implementing a tool that will suggest people for your to follow. The suggestions will be based on people you are following and who they are following. You can find it by going to the “Find People” link in the Twitter header and then click on the “Suggestions For You” tab. There you will find your list of suggestions.

Would You Pay Twitter To Suggest You?

A lot of businesses and individuals would like to get followers. I’m sure some are willing to pay for them. Is this a chance for Twitter to make some money?

A business that sells ballroom dance shoes would like ballroom dancers to receive their tweets. Twitter has the capability to scan tweets and see who tweets about dancing. This is the person that the shoe store would be interested in as having a follower.

Things are not working like this yet, but the opportunity is now close to presenting itself. Sounds like a win for the follower and the followee to me. What do you think?

Here’s what my suggestion screen looks like.

Twitter dangled a piece of cheese in front of some social media professionals recently with a setting called “Tweet Media.” It involves tools that will allow users to embed photos and videos into there Twitter messages.

On some accounts on July 26th, there were account settings options for the user to click that enabled Tweet Media.

Here’s what it looked like:

As of the writing of this article Twitter has removed the options from several of the accounts that temporarily had it. When Mashable Media asked Twitter about the option, they replied:

We’re constantly exploring features and settings. What you saw was a small test of a potential consumption setting for inline media. We show inline media on our own iPhone and Android apps.

Keep an eye out for some significant changes in Twitter’s presentation methods.

Twitter keeps growing and they are adding another service. Today they begin rolling out Twitter Location. Users will be given the option to give some information on their location. How specific will be the call of the Twitterer.

This service is expected to be worked in over the next week. Users in 65 countries will start to see the “Add your location” link below the Tweet box.

For those of you using Foursquare and Gowalla, Twitter has worked with both services to incorporate the location features with those services. And application programmers will be able to integrate the service into their applications. So be on the lookout for some neat apps that will soon be available.

During a recent thunderstorm, many Duke Energy customers reported their power outages via Twitter. In January of 2009 Duke Energy set up a Twitter account, @DukeEnergyStorm, to keep their customers up to date on power outage problems. Their primary mission was to broadcast outage information. Then last fall they hired Lisa Hoffmann to help manage their social media. She and other staffers do the tweeting during major storms. And they are monitoring the tweets people are sending to them.

Twitter postings are not hindered by power outages if the users are using smart phones or personal computers that run off of battery power. That allows Duke Energy customers the ability to keep up to date with power outage status without making unnecessary phone calls.

This is a classic example of how a customer service company gets time sensitive information to it’s customers. How do you use Twitter for customer service?

TweetDeck is a free application that you can download onto your computer. It monitors your Twitter accounts. It also allows you to post onto Twitter and Facebook.

TweetDeck lets you create all kinds of sorting and filtering that helps maximize your time monitoring what people are Tweeting.

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Download TweetDeck

Go to TweetDeck.com and download the software. Then create some lists to follow and make some postings. It won’t take long for you to discover what a powerful tool this is.

There are a number to tools that help you maximize your use of Twitter.

Tools like Hashtags, Ping, Hootsuite, Tweet Later, Twollo, Twitter Local, and Tweet Deck are briefly explained in this video. Give some of them a try.

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What Kind Of Followers Do You Want?

The Quantity Of Followers

Some people have made it their mission to gain as many followers as possible. One way to do this is to follow other people. Many people out there will follow you when you follow them. I wouldn’t advise doing this. When you are inundated with thousands of tweets then they are worthless to you. You don’t have time to read them or filter to those of value.

The Quality Of Followers

From the point of view of a business you want people following you that see value in your posts. Choose to target only those people with an interest in your topic. You want them active and engaged in the subject. And with that being the case you are going to have relatively few followers.

If your topic is very general then your followers may be of larger numbers. But keep in mind when your Tweets are in a broad category you have many “competitors” that are doing the same thing. In such a case you need to post content that stands above the competition.

The more common thing for businesses to do is to Tweet about specialized topics. This is a way for businesses to display their expertise in focused areas. If you have more than one focus area then set up more than one Twitter account. And monitoring those various accounts may give you some ideas as to the needs of that market segment.

What Is Twitpic?

Twitpic is a website that enables users to connect images to their Twitter messages. Users are able to upload and post images in near real time. When you set up Twitpic, the system automatically uses the same username and password from your Twitter account.

To post a picture, log into your Twitpic account. Browse for your photo. Add a message to it. Then, you have the option to post it and the option to list the location. After you’ve made those choices click on “Upload Photo” and you’re done.

Twitpic Is Gaining Popularity

Twitpic was launched in February of 2008. Today it is growing by 30,000 – 40,000 per day!  It almost has 10 million users.

Listen to founder Noah Everett talk about TwitPic:

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