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Five Twitter Mistakes You Must Avoid

February 22, 2010 in Communications, Marketing, Technology, emarketing, internet marketing, social media, twitter by gtaylor | 3 comments

Since Twitter went maintream, companies have been trying to implement a Twitter strategy capable of producing a return on their investment.  Being an avid Twitter user since 2008, I have seen an astronomical amount of tweet spam and endless attempts at promoting a product or service, ignoring the fact that social media is about relationship building and creating value for your customers. Depending on your content, you either sink or swim in the Twittersphere. Here’s five tips to help you stay afloat.

Do not follow everyone.

It’s understandable that you have to start following people to get a follow in return, but attempting to follow everyone you possibly can tarnishes your Twitter reputation.  Twitter has begun to automatically shut down accounts that mass follow people.  If you are a small business with one location in Indiana, it makes no sense to follow people in Florida. Applications such as TwitterLocal and Twellow are great places to begin looking for your target audience.  Search for people tweeting about products or services similar to yours and follow them.  Since they already have an interest in your what you have to offer, the more inclined they will be to chat with you.

Never repeat the same tweet.

A quick way to lose followers is repeatedly tweeting the same thing.  If you have two or three tweets that your followers can memorize, you have a problem on your hands.  Providing the same information day after day gets boring after a while.  If your favorite TV show aired the same episode each week, you would find a new show to watch.  Same thing happens on Twitter. People want fresh, entertaining and informative content, and they count on your to give that to them.

Constant self promotion.

The most overlooked tweets are the ones filled with self promotion.  Including your website link and a short bio in your Twitter profile is all the self promotion you need.  Creative and compelling content makes people visit your profile to find out more about you.  Linking to your blog posts and other news relevant to your industry is acceptable because people with similar interests want to stay informed on industry issues.  Constant self promotion is one way communication and holds no value to your network.

Keeping stale followers.

In order to keep a fresh network, you have to perform routine maintenance on your Twitter.  People create profiles all the time, send three tweets and never tweet again.  You want to maintain an active network.  Applications such as Tweepi allow you to see who follows you and how active they are on Twitter.  Tweepi also allows you to see what percentage of your followers just post links and how often they retweet.  Performing maintenance on your Twitter network weekly ensures you will get the most out of your network.

Creating an account and forgetting about it.

If you have decided to start a social media strategy, make sure you have the time to maintain it.  People will easily forget about you if you don’t tweet on a regular basis.  Just like you want an active network, others do too.  With the number of applications that allow you to schedule tweets up to a month in advance, you should not have a problem keeping your account updated.  Schedule your tweets and keep an eye on your replies and direct messages.  It’s better to respond to someone later than not tweeting at all.

As the use of Twitter increases among consumers and businesses, avoiding these five mistakes can attribute to the success of your Twitter strategy.  Losing a follower is similar to losing a customer.  Please tweet responsibly.

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Don’t Settle for Being a Tweeple – Transform Your Company into a Twilebrity!

February 19, 2010 in B2B, Communications, Marketing, emarketing, social media, twitter by MOster | No comments

Photograph by Michael Halsband for Vanity Fair

The six women are profiled in the January 2010 issue of Vanity Fair, glamorous in trench coats and stilettos, flashing their mobile devices as they would the hottest designer bag. Who are these women, and why are they – and their handheld PDA’s – worthy of editorial coverage in a national publication?

They are twilebrities, Twitter’s version of celebrity. A twilebrity is someone who devotes a vast amount of time, energy and skill to tweeting, and is rewarded with a massive flock of followers. It is not necessary to be a traditional celebrity before being assigned twilebrity status, but some celebrities have reached Twilebrity status.

Who is next in line to join the twilebrity ranks? Ideally, your company is. Now, before you protest that you simply do not possess the time or resources to tweet your days away, allow me to clarify: I refer to becoming a twilebrity in your industry. The goal, at least initially, is to build a thriving online community of b-to-b connections. Establish a strong presence on Twitter among those in your field, and word will get back to consumers.

You can start building your follower base by heeding the unspoken rules of twilebrities. The most sacred law? Give in order to receive. Twilebrities are generous to their followers. As referenced in the Vanity Fair article, the most popular twilebrities (of the non-celebrity origin) respond to the majority of those who send them tweets. They are also exceptionally good listeners, paying close attention to their followers and often recommending certain followers to their hefty audience. Though at first glance this may not appear to be the case, at its core, Twitter is all about conversations as opposed to isolated tweets. This is part of its allure.

Gaining twilebrity status for your company is about much more than glitz and glam. Twitter, more so than any other social media network, is in the process of taking over the world. Its army of members has grown at a frenetic pace over the past two years. Make no mistake: Adding a social media strategist to your staff or campaign to amp up your Twitter account is a worthwhile investment, one that has a high potential ROI.

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Blogging and Branding Are in the Same Boat

February 11, 2010 in Business, Communications, Marketing, blogging, brand identity, branding, emarketing, social media by gtaylor | No comments

Your company blog is an extension of your business. Blogs are becoming so popular nowadays that people will visit your blog more then they visit your website.

Blogging is an excellent way of showing your company’s creativity, expertise and personality through words.  Although blogging is a great hub for your social media strategy, a mishandled blog can deliver a crucial blow to your brand identity.

As a marketing communications agency, we tend to blog about topics relevant to our careers.  We blog about the importance of creativity, what’s going on in the world of social media, and how increasing your marketing budget isn’t a bad idea.  Our blogs are consistent with our brand identity.

If your company manufactures tennis shoes, and you are the number one tennis shoe company in the world, your blog isn’t going to be filled with information about the newest steel toe boot.  It would confuse your customers and could possibly have a strong enough impact to lower your market share.

Similar to a products brand identity, your blog will eventually evolve and change based on the feedback received from your readers.  Conduct a poll every quarter to see what you can keep doing and what you may need to change.

Believe it or not, your blog has created value for your readers (that’s why they keep coming back). Please, blog responsibly.

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Will Google Buzz Change the Social Media Landscape?

February 10, 2010 in Business, Communications, Facebook, Google, Marketing, Yahoo, emarketing, social media, twitter by gtaylor | No comments

It seems like just yesterday, the top trending topic on Twitter was Google Wave.  Google Wave was supposed to change social media and connect people in a new, innovative way.  Although Waving to your friends was new and innovative, by the time you received an invite to test drive Google Wave, the hype was gone.  Now, Google wants social media users to believe that Google buzz will be the new “thing”.

Google Buzz blends with your Gmail account, weeds out the noisy posts (ex. I ate a bagel, now I’m headed to work off the calories), recommends outside conversations you should join based on your interests and posted content, allows you to view tweets from Twitter and content from Flickr, Picasa and YouTube.  Unfortunately, you are not able to post to Twitter or view others Facebook updates from Google Buzz.

Google Buzz will also allow you to make status updates by voice and even geotag your posts, allowing you to read location based updates when viewing search results on Google Maps.

Although these features are nice, three valid questions are going to be asked:

  1. Will people who don’t use Gmail and don’t want to have another email account use Google Buzz?
  2. Are Twitter and Facebook loyalists going to stray from their social media home(s)?
  3. Will Google Buzz become another social media marketing channel?

You can filter relevant information so Google Buzz can learn and better understand your interests, while retail locations and restaurants can offer local promos to Google Buzz users by location, and journalists can break news stories and reach people located near the news event.

Google Buzz is the new “thing”.  Although Yahoo claims to have been the pioneers of Buzz, Google’s Buzz is being released during social media’s prime.  Will Google Buzz change the social media landscape?  Possibly, but not right away.

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Will Google Caffeine Make SEO and Social Media Marketing a Perfect Marriage?

January 29, 2010 in Business, Facebook, Marketing, SEO, emarketing, internet marketing, social media, twitter by gtaylor | No comments

Since the creation of search engines, having your website appear as the first search result has been the most sought out position on the internet.  People have created meta tags, specific keywords, submitted their website to directories relevant to their business, etc. to hold that prime position.  Now, Google’s new Caffeine will soon change all that.  Google Caffeine’s real-time search feature will combine SEO with Social Media Marketing.

For a while, SMM and SEO were viewed as complete opposites.  But as Paula Abdul once sang about, opposites attract.

Google Caffeine recently rolled out and if you haven’t noticed tweets and blog posts showing up frequently in your Google searches, it’s only a matter of time before you will.

As a note of warning, watch what you say in your tweets and watch who you tweet.  As stated before, these are real-time results.  One bad tweet can leave a lasting impression on a potential client who decided to do a little research before contacting you.

Your social media marketing efforts can satisfy your SEO’s need for links and content thus making that relationship a perfect marriage.

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