Twitter is about to make it a whole lot easier to see just how well your social media marketing campaign is working. After years of relying on third-party, backdoor or inefficient ways of measuring the traffic Twitter generates, the service has started rolling out a web analytics tool that allows site owners to see exactly how much of a boost they’re getting form the short-burst messaging service. READ MORE
The FTC has begun an inquiry into Twitter. Although the specifics are not clear, it might have something to do with the company’s recent moves toward greater control of its platform. The FTC as a matter of routine, examines companies to ensure compliance with anti-competitive rules, but generally “after receiving allegations from rivals,” says The Wall Street Journal’s Amir Efrati. READ MORE
CNN Money reports that Twitter has quietly acquired TweetDeck, the nifty application that organizes basically your whole Twitter life. The price? Reportedly around $40 million. For months, there’s been speculation that the acquisition would happen, but Twitter reps refuse to comment on the deal. READ MORE
You know Twitter can be a game-changer. You’ve read about companies achieving amazing results with tweeting campaigns. And you wonder if you could you make the same magic work for your product or company. There’s no way to guarantee success with a Twitter campaign, but you can stack the odds in your favor by following some simple tips to vastly increase your effectiveness. Here’s how to get the most bang for your tweet: 1. Follow wisely. Some think of Twitter as a numbers game, in which the more followers you have, the more powerful you are, and so they build up as large a number of followers as possible. Experts say a more surgical approach works better. Whatever you do, don’t automatically follow every account that follows yours. Some may be spammers or even porn spammers. And services that promise huge numbers of followers are probably a bad investment. “If you have 25 super powerful followers willing to review your product and they each have a lot of followers and blog readers, then you are going to do a lot better than with 5,000 more random followers,” notes Penny Sansevieri, CEO of Author Marketing Experts. She particularly recommends following industry experts who do a lot of retweeting—with any luck your posts may get retweeted too. How do you get these powerful followers? The first step is to follow them. Some will follow you back if your tweets contain valuable or interesting information. Another good strategy is to connect by reading and commenting on their blogs. 2. Take full advantage of search. “The biggest unused Twitter resource for small business owners is the search.twitter.com function,” says Alexis Wolfer, founder and editor-in-chief of TheBeautyBean.com, an online publication that got its start on Twitter. “You can search for what people are talking about in real time, which is very powerful. I can search for ‘drugstore mascara’ and see the people doing anything using those words. So if someone is at a drugstore wondering what mascara to buy, I can say, ‘Hey, did you see this article we wrote on the best drugstore mascaras?’” Advanced search settings give you many useful options, including the ability to search for keywords in a specific geographic location, or in tweets containing question marks. These are likely to be questions that you may be able to answer, which will build good will and gain you new followers. “Twitter’s search only goes back for a few weeks, so if you want to search further back in time, consider using FriendFeed, advises Tim Frick, author of Return on Engagement: Content Strategy and Design Techniques for Digital Marketing. He also suggests getting an RSS feed for the keywords most important to you. (You can do this on Twitter by clicking “RSS feed for this query” near the bottom of the page after entering a search term.) By the same token, you should know which hashtags are most important for your industry and company. How do you find out? On hashtags.org you can enter any hashtag and see how it’s trending. 3. Time your tweets. Most Twitter users don’t look at tweets that are more than a couple of hours old, so if you want people to actually read your posts, you should time them for when you have the largest live audience. When is that? “If you have followers all over the world, Eastern Time during business hours is the best time to tweet,” Sansevieri says. “Generally, past noon Pacific Time is less useful. Retweeting starts to drop off toward the end of the day.” Although this is a good general rule, your customers’ habits may be different, so try experimenting, for instance by offering giveaways on different days and at different times to see which get the greatest response. If the best tweet time for your market isn’t the most convenient for you, you can schedule tweets in advance using applications such as TweetDeck or HootSuite. Wolfer does this, for instance, to schedule some tweets in the middle of the night Eastern Time in order to reach her followers in Australia and Asia. 4. Aim for Friday. One of the most popular hashtags is #ff, an abbreviation for “Follow Friday.” Follow Friday is a tradition in which Twitter users on Fridays list interesting Twitter accounts that they recommend following. Though the hashtag is overused and sometimes abused, it’s still worth considering when making your plans. It’s counter-productive to ask your followers or customers to recommend you on Follow Fridays. But you can time your most interesting tidbits of information, giveaways, announcements or other posts you know the Twitter community will especially like so that they happen on Fridays. That way, you may be top of mind when your followers start thinking about whom to recommend. “Friday is when you want people talking about you,” says Ashley Jewell, director of social media marketing for NAP, Inc. which launched its Boba Baby Carrier with a highly successful Twitter campaign. 5. Think retweet. What’s the longest your tweets should be? If you answered 140 characters, you’re wrong. That’s because — you hope — your most interesting tweets and appealing promotions will be retweeted by your followers, and then their followers, and on and on. A retweet means adding the initials RT followed by your Twitter name. If someone retweets someone else’s retweet of your tweet (whew!) a second Twitter name may be included as well. If you started out with 140 characters, some will get lopped off at the end to make room for these additions. “If the end of the tweet is a link, as it often is, then your link will be lost,” Frick notes. To avoid having this happen, he and other experts recommend keeping your tweets to 120 characters at most. A relatively short Twitter name can help too. But you won’t get retweeted in the first place, or gain much attention on Twitter, unless you tweet information and links that others find interesting or valuable. Thus, you should avoid having your Twitter stream consist of a list of announcements about your products and other marketing messages. “Business owners get caught up worrying about issues such as what their background will look like or what their brand will be,” Sansevieri says. “None of that is as important as their engagement with the community. That’s why posting things on Twitter when you have nothing to gain will bring huge rewards. The more you give people what they want, the more they’ll give you what you want.”
Last year when Joe Pulizzi got serious about using Twitter to promote his business, he downloaded an add-on application for the social network called TweetDeck and configured it to send an automated greeting every time someone new started following his tweets. Almost instantly, the Cleveland, Ohio, marketing consultant’s connections let him know on Twitter any kind of automatic message is a big no-no, whether it’s an innocuous “Hi, thanks for following, how’re you doing?” or the most blatant self-promotion. “A couple people replied right away to say, Joe, this is lame, it’s basically spam,” says Pulizzi, owner of Junta42. After two weeks he shut the auto-replies off and hasn’t been tempted to use them since. If you’re using Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn in your small business, the last thing you want is to alienate potential customers before they’ve even gotten to know you. So along with avoiding automated replies, industry experts and companies that have successfully navigated potential social media faux pas say it’s best to have a strategy and share it with employees who’ll be representing the business online. Though it’s a new medium, the rules of old-fashioned etiquette and common sense apply. Here are other common social media mistakes small businesses make, and what they can do instead: Posting without a plan — Going on Twitter or Facebook just because it’s there isn’t a good enough reason and could lead to sticky situations if employees post something inappropriate or inadvertently disclose confidential company information. Kent Lewis, a social media marketer and head of Anvil Media, in Portland, Ore., recalls the time an intern at a local hotel he works with was given statistics about the property’s competitors — and immediately shared the info on Twitter. “It made her look stupid,” Lewis says. “We didn’t realize we had to coach her on life, not just social media.” Before you do anything, figure out how Twitter et al fit into your company’s marketing or customer service strategy, then decide how to use social networks to get that message across and make sure employees are on board, he says. Repeating yourself — A tweet or status update to announce the latest post on the company blog, a new customer win or some other good news is okay. But broadcasting the same message over and over is not. Unfortunately some newcomers don’t figure that out and post the same tweet or status update over and over, making them look like the newbies they are, according to Lewis. Selling 24/7 — It’s okay to use social networks to plug whatever your company sells or does. It’s not okay to do it in 100 percent of the time. A one-trick pony is a major turn off. Instead, mix promotional tweets with links to industry news, and retweet interesting things people in your network are saying. Do it long enough and your connections will come to know and trust you as a voice of authority in your industry, and will be more accepting of your promotional tweets, Lewis says. Faking it – Some companies mistakenly think that no matter how many people represent their business online — whether it’s one or 20 — everyone has to tweet or post in a single voice, either through a made-up mascot or persona, or by using a certain tone or language that tows the company’s party line. That works in some cases, but it’s hard to pull off, Lewis says. The better solution is to coach employees on what is and isn’t acceptable, then let them be themselves. Farming it out — Some companies pay “ghost tweeters” or outside experts to run their social media strategy. Wrong, Lewis says. Comcast developed a huge Twitter presence by putting their best people on it for tech support, and making sure they responded quickly to customers’ problems, he says. “It was minimal cost for maximum return,” he says. Of course Lewis believes companies should hire social media consultants — he would or he wouldn’t be in business. But if you do, use them to craft a plan and train your employees, not speak for them, he says. Today all that advice makes sense to Pulizzi, the marketing strategist, who now spends a good chunk of time traveling through the United States and Europe preaching the gospel of social media. Pulizzi also recommends against solely using Twitter or Facebook to re-tweet or repeat what other people say. “To be regarded as a thought leader or solution provider, you need to have your own content,” Pulizzi says. The worst thing small businesses can do is look at Twitter and other social networks as just another sales channel. “Marketers are horrible publishers,” Pulizzi says. “They want to create content about their products and services. There’s a time and place for that, but it’s not social media. You create relationships with social media, so when people are ready to buy they look at you as a trusted resource.”
Boloco, a burrito restaurant chain with 16 locations often runs ads in a Boston newspaper. The ads contain coupons for the chain’s popular burritos for a special price of $3. It makes sense to advertise in Boston, since 13 of the chain’s 16 restaurants are there, but CEO and co-founder John Pepper wished the ads could also bring customers to Boloco restaurants in New Hampshire and Vermont. So, when he ran one recent ad, Pepper also posted a photo of the coupon on Twitter, inviting diners to bring in any image of the coupon — a photocopy, printout, or even an image on a mobile phone — to get the discount. “It was a way to bring people outside Boston in the print advertising, and a way to increase our visibility,” says Pepper, whose Twitter ID is @boloco. The tactic proved wildly successful, he says. “Usually we get about 350 coupons on that kind of promotion. This time we got 900, including the mobile phones. About 25 percent of our transactions that day came from the coupon, which never happens.” In effect, he says, posting the ad on Twitter decreased cost per reader by increasing circulation. Connecting with customers Most business that use Twitter think of it mostly as a promotional tool, a way to announce new products, perhaps gain readers for a blog. But some smarter companies are actually using Twitter to sell products, such as Dell Corp., which recently acknowledged that it had made $3 million in sales in two years over Twitter, primarily by posting coupon numbers for discounts of 10 percent or more on Dell Outlet items. “There’s no reason not to try Twitter,” notes Stefanie Nelson, marketing manager for Dell, who created Dell Outlet’s Twitter campaign. “There’s no cost, and it’s a limited time commitment, at least it was for me at the beginning. Before we built up the following and reach that we have now, it took me literally minutes a week.” (Things have gotten a bit busier now that @DellOutlet has over 700,000 followers.) According to Nelson, the most important first step is to know exactly what you want your tweets to accomplish. “Understand why you’re on Twitter,” she says. In her case, she adds, the objective was to quickly sell Dell Outlet items, which are usually excess inventory. And, she says, “If you know your objective, and who your target audience is, Twitter can be just as effective for a small company as a large one.” Boost sales with Tweets Using coupons to create boost sales is only one way to reach customers with tweets. Here are a few others: Give your company a human face. Pepper uses TweetDeck to track mentions of “Boloco” on Twitter, and one day it flagged a tweet in which a woman bemoaned the cool, rainy weather this summer and pondered whether to spend the afternoon at Boloco or a different restaurant. “I’ll respond to that one, with something like, ‘I vote for Boloco!’” he says. Twitter users are usually pleasantly surprised, he adds. “They expect @Boloco to be like @DunkinDonuts. They don’t expect to hear from the head of the company.” There’s a delicate balance between making human contact, and sharing too many everyday details that may not interest your customers, Nelson says, a dilemma she partly addresses by using @StefanieatDell for more personal tweets. Whatever you do, she advises, avoid spamming followers with promotional direct messages not specifically written for them. Find customers when they’re looking for your product or service. Searching Twitter can be a very effective way to find new customers. For instance, Rocky Mountain Ace Stores, an affiliation of Denver area Ace store owners, uses monitter to search Twitter for both keywords and locations of tweeters. One day, the group flagged a Denver man worrying about insects in his lawn. “So we tweeted to him about beneficial insects, such as ladybugs, which will eat bugs all summer, and which we sell,” says Andy Carlson, who owns an Ace store in Denver and is on the group’s board. “He wound up coming in to one of our stores and buying ladybugs.” Chris Savage, CEO of Wistia, a video-sharing site for business use, advises putting some thought into picking the terms you search on Twitter, just as you would for meta tags. “Research the most frequently searched terms in your market on Google and other search engines,” he says. “Then search or monitor those terms on Twitter. Deal with disgruntled customers — fast. One evening Ace customers posted an angry tweet because a tool he’d bought from a Denver area store broke after one use. “We got in touch, recommended which store he should go to to return the item, and alerted the manager at that store,” Carlson says. “He didn’t know that Ace hand tools all carry a lifetime guarantee.” The man was very impressed, and went from being angry at Ace to being a devoted Ace customer. The complaining tweet came through late at night, Carlson notes, well after the stores were closed. And, he says, it was especially important to intervene quickly. “You don’t know whether he’s going to go back to the store right away, or stew about it for three or four days and tell more people. The more time between the bad experience and the resolution, the more likely he is to tell his friends, so the quicker we can solve a problem, the better.” And that’s the nice thing about Twitter, he says. “You can catch a problem when it happens, and do something about it.”
