A Tool for Twitter (and Facebook)

Huck

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. Find out when they are talking about you or your company. See what they are saying. And then determine if you need to respond. It may be a sales opportunity, or it could be an opportunity to put out a fire.

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A YouTube Demo

Take a look at this demo from YouTube and think about how you can use it for your business.

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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.

The basic concept of Twitter is to send short messages to individuals who elect to hear from you. What a simple concept. Twitter users have expanded that concept to paradigms that were not dreamed of when the tool was developed.

A Two Way Communication Tool

Too many people think of Tweets as one way communication. Those are the folks that think their word is golden and yours is not. We all know who they are. The real beneficiary of Twitter is the person who gets quick answers to urgent questions. Ask a specialized question and get an expert response.

People that are following you elected to do so themselves. They probably did it because they share some of your interests. So when a question pops up, odds are someone following you has some knowledge on that subject. When they see your request, they can respond to it. And the odds are pretty good that you’ll get a response.

Follow Back

When someone follows you, be a little liberal on following back. When in doubt, follow them. Chances are they share a common interest and their posts may be of value to you. You can always remove them it you find they are the type that post useless information 20 times a day.

Lists Save Time

Twitter provides a list tool that allows you to organize the people you follow. You can place the people in categories and then you are able to choose the categories of tweets you want to see.

Sometimes you want to see tweets related to a particular business topic, other times you may just want to see the tweets of your friends. You can add as many categories as you want.

Here is a great video to learn how to use Twitter lists.

What categories do you divide your tweets into?

Huck Huckabee

Keep Up-To-Date

If you are keeping up-to-date on your social media, then you are running into the same problems we all are. And that is keeping up to date! Everything is changing and changing very quickly. A lot of times we get so caught up in the new elements that we forget to review the basics.

Review The Basics – Tagging

Erin Blaskie has put together some great videos on the basics of Tweeting.

Her Part 2 video is a great one for learning some of the basics. In this video you can also learn how to find someone to follow, learn how to tweet to the world, learn how to send a direct message. And learn more sophisticated procedures like tagging. This is a good review of how to get followers and how to make sure people know when you mention them on Twitter.

This video was created in October 18th. So it is very up to date and does a good job explaining some of the new features of Twitter.

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Need Help Setting Up Your Twitter Account?

If you have not set up a Twitter account and need help setting one up go to Erin’s first video by clicking here.

Who Should Manage Your Company Tweets?

First, this person needs to be able to represent your company. He needs to have the ability to represent management, sales, customer service and other sectors of the organization. This is often a sales person or other member of the company marketing department or management that already interacts with the public. A good communicator is imperative.

Multiple Twitter Accounts

Your marketing manager then needs to study what successful businesses in your industry are doing with Twitter. You may find there is a need to set up multiple Twitter accounts. One may be designed to notify existing customers of updates to their services. Another may be to offer free advice to the public in an effort to turn them into customers. And various other target audiences should be considered.

If Your Company Is Not On Twitter Yet…

So if you haven’t done it, get a Twitter account set up for your business. Have someone get started learning to use this tool. Invite your company contacts to follow you. Follow your industry contacts, industry leaders and even your competitors. You can learn a lot from other people and organizations. Tie it into your blog site if you have one. Services are available that will put initial text of your blog postings on Twitter and provide a link to your blog article.

If you need help, contact us at Business And Social Media, or call Huck Huckabee 704-438-2910.

Use Twitter to direct traffic to your websites. You can share information that is useful for prospective clients. You can also share information with employers to enhance your reputation. Use the 140 characters to generate curiosity and provide a link to your website.

Avoid Hard Selling

Don’t pursue hard-sell tactics. You should focus on building relationships. Take full advantage of Twitter and gather information about what customers, competitors and others are saying about your business.

You need to figure out what you can learn and what you can offer. From there you will generate contacts that will help you reach your goals.

The Hand Crafted Pen Business

Here is a video on how a craftsman uses a blog and Twitter to market his products. It shows a great example of how a business can use blog posts linked to Twitter to promote it’s unique products.

The video is over 15 minutes and starts a little slow. But some good points are made on how to post your messages and how to create a relationship with your followers.

Show Your Passion

RichardInk is the Twitterer being referred to in this video. He creates hand crafted pens. Every item is unique. When he starts a new projects, he posts it on his blog. And when his post it on his blog, his blog is set up to automatically post on Twitter. When he learns a new trick about his work, he posts it. When he completes a project, he posts it and he posts his asking price for the pen he has just created. When he sells the item, he posts it. Get the idea?

Through his tweets and the logging of his work schedule, Richard allows his followers to see the passion for what he does.

Make Yourself A Human

Outside of his blog Richard is posting his interesting daily activities directly onto Twitter and responding to messages. Notice I said “interesting daily activities” (he doesn’t note every time his is walking into the grocery store). Followers keep track of what he is doing. Of course, they are not watching him every minute of the day but when someone sees an interesting post, they can click on his name and see all of the posts his has made in reverse chronological order.

Take a look at his video and see if you could use this strategy:

I post many of my projects on my SmallBusinessWebsite.com blog and it is linked to post automatically on my Twitter account. What do you post?

Twitter Making Major Changes

Over the next couple of days your should begin to see some major changes taking place on Twitter. Titter will add photos and videos to the stream. This will closer approach some of the capabilities that Facebook has.

The rollout is suppose to take a couple of weeks to become fully implemented. But, some locals are expected to start seeing the changes as early as today.

Are your getting the new Twitter yet? What do you think of the change.

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.