Shrill – Social Media Marketing for the Rest of Us

This page contains all the basic information you need to navigate one of the most popular Social Media platforms on the planet. I will be addressing advanced Twitter tactics later on in the blog. Stay tunned. In this Page you will find:

• Twitter Basics, dos and don’ts.
  
• Step-by-step sign up guide
• Step-by-step mobile configuration guide
• Basic Twitter applications and ad-ons
• Main Twitter commands and features

1. What is Twitter?

Twitter is a micro-blogging platform. Basically a place for you to publish updates about you and your business, share links and communicate with a network of “followers”. The reason why they call it “micro” is because on Twitter, every update is limited to 140 characters, including spaces.

2. How is Twitter good for me or my business?

Twitter has many of the benefits of most social platforms, as listed in my previous article found here, with a few advantages. It is easy to use, very user friendly, and is not too time consuming. How long does it take to type a 140 character message? That is how fast you can update Twitter and get feedbacks from your followers. Twitter is also a great plate to find interesting content, meet interesting people, build interest groups. It is also a fabulous tool to build inbound links and seed viral content.

3. Should I have an account for me or for my business?

If you are the business owner or the marketing executive, you need both. You want to market yourself as much as your company. You want your name to be tied to that company and vice versa. Although you can market and speak as a corporation, Twitter crowds are more likely to follow a person. People like to talk to people. People buy from people. They will be more receptive of a company that is being represented by a person.

Administering both accounts is a breeze with some multi-account management tools I will introduce to you later on this article.

If you are am employee you will have a personal profile and then link yourself to the company through several mechanisms I will explain later.

4. What can I post on Twitter?

As long as you obey the Twitter Terms of Service (http://twitter.com/tos) , which are nothing but common sense and common courtesy, you can Twit about anything you want your audience, current and potential to know. If you are marketing your company, post links to your company and interesting pages in you website, links to news and press releases about your company. If you keep a company blog, Twit the blog posts. But don’t just self promote, bring in industry related news and articles you find in other sources, about things like home improvement, real estate, energy efficiency. Link to educational content that is not hosted in your website.

5. What should not be posted on Twitter?

Don’t post anything you don’t want the world to know, and that is specially truth if you are marketing yourself. Even when your target audience is limited to closest friends, don’t post anything that can come back to haunt you later on. Many social media users commit the sin of giving away too much personal information about themselves, The TMI syndrome, as I call it, ruined many lives over the internet. Your profile is public. Your children and spouse might see it, your colleagues, your potential customers and clients, your future employer or prospective business partner. If you don’t want them to know, that info should not be in Twitter.

6. Is it ok to use Twitter to market my business?

You will hear over and over people complaining about how marketers are “ruining” social media. Some will say that social media and marketing should not coexist, and as I see it, social media IS marketing and the term “social media marketing” is a redundancy.

Truth is that, if social media is any fun at all, we owe it to marketers or to people who are there to market or promote something, that something usually being themselves, their work, their ideas and content of interest. Other than that social media becomes boring babble.

You can’t use and have fun in social media, and especially not Twitter, if you do not have an audience. That means followers; people who are interested in what you have to say. To get people interested, you need to create interesting posts, that will captivate the audience you want to reach. Whether it is updating closest friends on your latest accomplishments, sharing an interesting link about movies with movie loving online friends, or educating potential customers about your business you are marketing. You are producing targeted content.

6. How to Market on Twitter without being spammy or obnoxious.

• Be helpful, provide useful information
• Don’t advertise, educate.
• Be catchy, witty, fun
• Act like a person, not a marketing machine
• “Smile”, meaning, be cheerful and courteous
• Start a dialogue, ask questions, and poll your audience.

Getting Started

1- Create an account

Open an account. Go to http://www.twitter.com and you will be presented with a screen like this.

Click the sign up button and the next screen will prompt you to enter email, username and password.

TIP – Chose a username that is easy to remember and that people can associate with you, or your business. If it is a personal account, use a short for your real name, or a nickname you already have, or just choose something fun and witty. Please, be careful with the “fun and witty”. Your name will be linked to your business so keep it professional. This name will also be the URL for your Twitter page, which you can publish on your website, add to your email signature and your business card. So chose it wisely.

Click ok and you will be taken to a list to people Twitter suggests you follow. Most are celebrity Twitters and news sources, like Time Magazine and the New York Times. You can pick some to follow un-checking the ones you don’t want, or follow all of them.

Review your account Settings.

Click on Settings on the top page and you will be able to change or add information in your account and profile.

2- Get people to follow you

The easiest way to do it is by importing your contacts from Yahoo, Google or AOL. Cilck on Find People, on the top right corner of your Twitter home page, click on Find on other networks,  and you will be presented with this:

Input your email and password for each of the services you want to import contacts from. After a while, Twitter will return a search with contacts that are already in Twitter and give you the option to follow them. You pick the ones you want to follow. The next window should present you with names of contacts that are not on Twitter and suggest you invite them. Chose some and invite them.

If you do not use Yahoo, Google or AOL, you can find friends by manually entering your contact’s emails.

You can also find people with similar interests by clicking the Find on Twitter tab and type names and industry related keywords such as “home improvement”, “waterproofing” “remodeling” etc

When you follow people they are notified of the fact and many will follow you back. Try to follow people that are relevant and have something to say. If someone follows you spontaneously, check their updates for relevancy. Don’t follow back if they look like spam or just advertising.

3- Start Twitting!

Update your Twitter regularly to keep your audience entertained and informed. If you stay idle for weeks, your followers lose interest. Interact with other Twitters, replying to their posts or talking to them

You are free to share pretty much anything you want there, as long as you obey their Terms of Service http://twitter.com/tos. No harassment, no x rated content, no spam, no bullying, no hatred, etc.

So as long as the content dos not qualify as one of the above, and is within the 140 character limit, anything goes.

What you should not post on Twitter: anything you don’t want the world to know as anyone can read your content. You have the option to set restrictions so that only those “following” you can see what you post. However your control over who follows you is limited. Anyone can “follow” you with the click of a button and if you don’t want someone to follow you, you can individually block that person.

The purpose of Twitter is to connect with people who are interested in what you have to say.

Twitter for Mobile Setup

Setting up Twitter to work with your mobile device is really simple.

1. From your home page, click Settings and then the Device Tab. You will be presented with something like this:
2. Enter your mobile number and notice that the system will not let you sign up if you do not check the “It’s ok for Twitter to send text messages to my phone. Standard rates apply” .You will need to check that because Twitter will confirm your mobile number by text messaging you. Twitter charge you nothing for this process, but your mobile service carrier will. So count on paying for that first confirmation message. After confirmation you can turn off all text messaging or select which kind of text messages you want to receive.
3. If you wish to opt out text messaging after confirmation, click on the settings tab and you will be presented with a window like this.
4. Chose what kind of messages you want to receive or turn them all off, wish to. You can also turn off the service for a number of hours every day. Another way to turn off messages is through your device by Texting “off” to 40404, Texting off once will turn off updates, text it twice to turn off direct messages. If you ever want to turn any of them on, text “on” to 40404.

Optimizing your Twits

There are 3 vital things you need to know to make the best of your Twitter experience. How to use the @ and the # character to interact with other and organize content, and how to shrink URLs.

Dialogues in Twitter.- the @ character.

The “@” character allows you to establish dialogue with one or multiple followers, and reply to their Twits. If you are replying to a single person, you can just click the little arrow icon that appears on  the left corner of that person’s update, when you roll your mouse over. Or you can just type @username and the message. To talk to multiple users, just type their usernames preceded by the @ character. Let’s say I want to talk to my friends sally, angel, and ashley at the same time. Here’s what my update would look like:

“@sally and @angel and @ashley let’s go out to lunch.”

Organizing content – the # character

The # character defines “tags” in Twitter. Tags are ways of organizing similar and related content in Twitter. Anyone can create a Tag and anyone can use any Tag in their posts. Tags also make it easy for you to organize groups of interest in Twitter. For example, if you search Twitter for the tag #treehouse09 you will find Twits from the Tree House team, including Convention updates.

If you have colleagues on employees on Twitter, create a tag for your company.

BEWARE: unless your Twits are protected, every update on Twitter is public, including the ones that are made under the @ and # characters. If you want to talk to someone privately, send a Direct Message. Never publish sensitive private or company information under the @ or # characters. Well NEVER publish sensitive information on Twitter, period. Use emails and phone calls for that kind of exchange.

URL shrinking
With the 140 character limitation, you will many times find that a single URL that you might want to share takes up all your 140 characters allowance or leave you no room to explain what the URL is all about which pretty much defeats the purpose of sharing it. It is highly recommendable that you learn how to use a URL shrinking service, like Tiny URL.

The choices are many and personal. My favorite URL tracker is the bit.ly (http://bit.ly/) because it allows you to add multiple Twitter profiles into a single account and track each individual post, in each account. You can see how many people clicked your link, answered, mentioned or re-twitted your posts. Combine that with some Analytics data and you have a nice way to track yout Twitter campaings per event.

Alternativelly, you can add an application called Shareaholic (http://www.shareaholic.com/) to your Firefox or Explorer browser. I absolutely love this browser add-on, as it allows you to right click on any page and get a Shareaholic menu that allows you to pic different services in which you want to share that page, including Twitter, Delicious, Digg and Facebook. IIt is a one click move and it automatically shrinks any URL. And it is a right click menu only feature, not a Toolbar as many similar applications are. I work with multiple toolbars all the time, so I love anything that saves me room on the browser window and increases productivity.

Twitter Apps

Twitter by itself is not as interesting as it becomes when you begin to add or use Twitter applications with it. There are a lot of applications to perform a myriad of different tasks in Twitter. From monitoring your network and brand mentions, to generating stats, to optimizing searches.

There are apps that allow you to share pictures, music and video on Twitter, widgets that let you insert your Twitter updates and feeds into your website and page and applications that are made just for fun, like Twitdraw, that allows you to share doodles on Twitter. There are applications that let you access, update and manage one or multiple Twitter accounts from your computer or mobile desktop screen rather than your browser.

I am listing down some basic tools I use and tested, but if you use different ones, I would love to get a review and feedback on them.

Multi account management and brand monitoring

If you are the marketing official or the owner of the company, you will need to manage at least 2 accounts on Twitter: your personal account and the company’s.

There are two services I use on a regular basis, that allow multiple account management, and they are both browser based. (I have enough windows and tabs open at any given time, therefore I don’t like to have floating windows on my desktop)

Splitweet (http://www.splitweet.com) allows you to update multiple accounts at one time, and follow a single user from multiple accounts with a couple of clicks. It also has a brand management feature, that screens the service for any mention of your company or products.

Hootsuite  (http://hootsuite.com), after the last update became by far my tool of choice. The last update allows you to create different, customizable tabs for each of your accounts, and create different columns in each account Tab to pull feeds, updates, searches, keywords, mentions, etc.

Amazing brand management tool. It also allows you to create additional tabs for  # tagged subjects. For example I have a tab for the #treehouse09 tag, to keep up with my team mates’ updates.

You can also create columns for groups of people, so that you can get separate updates from your family, your colleagues and your business contacts. Please contact me if you need help with the Hootsuite.

Twibs – The Twitter Business Directory

This is a must. Listing your business under the Twibs directory creates a sort of Twitter business card for the business in which you can add you address, URL and information. You can also, with one click, have your followers vote for your business, and they can ask their followers to vote for you with a single click as well. Get the most votes every two weeks and your company appears in the first page for two weeks. It is a great way to capture audience and reviews.

#followfriday adds value to Twitter
FollowFriday is a Twitter event that happens, well… every Friday of course.

Basically people recommend some of the people they follow to their own followers by adding the tag #followfriday and then adding the @ followed by usernames of the people they are recommending.

A typical followfriday update would look like this:

“ My contribution for today’s #followfriday  – @cooldude @coolgirl and @awesomeguy “

Use this event to build your network. Follow your friend’s recommendations, recommend some of your friends and they might recommend you too.