Here are some of the things that have worked for me:

Measure Your Chatter

About six months ago, I came across a tool called Buffer. It basically allowed me to store tweets that I thought were worth sharing, and shoot them out at pre-determined times. This allowed me to catch up on news for 15 minutes in the morning, and share my thoughts and other links over the next 8-10 hours without having to go to Twitter.

The real value in Buffer is the analytics feature. When I logged into Buffer at the end of the day, after the tweets had been sent, it showed me how many people had clicked on them and who retweeted them. This allowed me to learn what was appreciated by my audience and what times of the day got the most clicks.

Do Not Chase Followers

A higher number of followers translate into having a larger audience for your words and thoughts – agreed. But you will grow a much more meaningful base of followers – if folks follow you for your tweets, as opposed to a reciprocal follow. In other words, stick to organic content that can benefit people in some way, instead of following people by the hundreds and expecting a follow back.

There are two good tools that can help you clean the clutter and follow relevant folks aligned with your interests:

1. Manage Flitter allows you to see who in your follow list is not following you back, and who is not an active user. You can use this tool every couple weeks to assess what kind of news feed you want to receive.

2. Twellow is a proactive tool that allows you to search for people by interests, industries and professions. You can get lists of people with their Twitter descriptions and can add them if you like.

Don’t Annoy People

Too many Tweets might not be a good thing. Imagine if you were following someone who was hogging your feed all hours of the day. You might lose more followers with excessive, irrelevant posts.

Here are three little tricks that you can use to have more weight with your followers:

1. Five Tweet rule: If you have a several article links or other data to share, stick to around five tweets a day (at three hour intervals using Buffer). Your followers will not be overwhelmed and might look forward to your links on an ongoing basis. You can answer questions and engage in conversations in addition to these five tweets.

2. Ask a question: This is a genuine way of engaging with real people rather than throwing information at them. If you have the right follower base, asking questions is the best way of introducing yourself and vetting out who wishes to remain engaged with you – this might give you a few pointers as to who you should write to about your next product update.

3. Personal Critique: Whether it’s a person or a brand, posting negative tweets on a consistent basis might alienate your followers. You might have a valid reason but don’t get too personal with your attacks. Keep it professional and polite.

There is some charm in moderation. I know it’s easy to fire off seven words and hit enter, but try to resist it – until you have something meaningful to say.

Social Media Exhaustion Photo via Shutterstock

From Small Business Trends

Spending Too Much Time on Twitter

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In yesterday’s post on mastering good blogger outreach I talked about how small business owners can use tools like Tweepz to search Twitter bios and help them find blogger and media contacts to reach out to. Well, guess what? Small business owners aren’t the only ones searching Twitter bios to find relevant people to follow. So are news outlets, potential customers and anyone else interested in learning more about your brand or industry. So what are you leaving in there for people to find?

Below are 4 quick tips to help you craft the perfect Twitter bio to make sure you’re attracting the right people and allowing like-minded folks to find you.

1. Use Keywords

As I mentioned above, you’re not the only one searching Twitter to hunt out potential contacts – so are your vendors, customers, would-be customers, colleagues, etc. Make it easier for them to find you by incorporating the keywords they’re most likely to search for. If you’re not sure what types of keywords to include, ask yourself:

• Who do you want to connect with on Twitter?
• Who would you want to find you?
• What would they be looking for? What need would they have?

These are the types of terms you want to be sure to use to help people locate your account. Be careful not to use too many, of course, or your bio becomes unreadable and appears spammy. But you’re on Twitter for a specific business purpose, it makes sense that your bio would reflect a bit of that.

2. Use a Real Location

Something that makes Twitter unique compared to many other social networking sites is that there’s no site standard for how people handle the Location box. Twitter asks, “Where in the world are you?” and users are able to fill in their city, state, country or even make up something they find particularly witty. While it may be tempting to get creative, don’t. Always opt to include your full city and state. This is important for people who want to add you to neighborhood- or city-specific Twitter lists, media contacts who want to talk to someone in their local area, or even a potential customer who is looking to find someone knowledgeable about tile within 50 miles of their home. If I’m looking to talk to someone about insurance in my area, setting your location as “up, up in the air” won’t help me find you. Again, you’re using Twitter for a reason. By giving detailed, relevant and accurate information, you help the right people find you.

3. Describe What You Really Do

Another area where Twitter users get clever is in giving themselves fake titles. Again, I would urge you to resist the temptation and to use the limited space you have to accurately describe what you do. While it’s nice that you consider yourself the “Wizard of SM,” what people really need to know is that you’re the “Director of Social Media” for your company. While you may jokingly call yourself a “Web Fairy,” if your real title is “Lead Web Designer,”  use that, because that’s what people will be searching for and it’s how they’ll get to learn a bit more about you. Users don’t always have much to go on when they’re evaluating whether or not someone is worth following. Make sure you’re giving them the proper information.

4. Don’t Use a Shortened URL

Twitter offers you space to share your URL with whoever is looking at your Twitter profile. Take advantage of it. And when you include a link, make sure it’s the full link to your website, blog, social profile, etc. Avoid using a shortened URL; using a full one helps people trust that you’re sending them to a trusted location. An unfamiliar URL from an unfamiliar user account can turn someone off before they even have the chance to investigate what you’re all about.

Just because Twitter doesn’t leave a whole lot of room for you to tell the world who you are and what you’re about (that’s what your tweets are for), doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make good use of the space that you do have. What you include in your Twitter bio can often be the main factor in whether or not someone follows you. It can also be the only hope they have of even finding you on the site. Make sure you optimize your bio as much as possible to help you attract the right people.

From Small Business Trends

4 Steps to Crafting the Perfect Twitter Bio

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The topic is going to be branding – how to brand your business online and off, cost effectively. We’ll also cover re-branding for those of you who think your business brand needs a facelift or just freshening up. We’ll talk about logos, business cards, cost effective strategies for print collaterals and signs, and much much more.

To participate in the chat, just log on to Twitter on October 20th at 8 pm Eastern and follow the hashtag #FedExSmallBiz. Be sure to use the same hashtag in your tweets, too, so others will know you are participating.

$100 Gift Card Giveaway

To sweeten the pot a bit, Small Business Trends will be doing a $100 gift card giveaway. The gift card will be good for services at a FedEx Office store near you. To be entered into the giveaway here’s what you need to do. Just give a Twitter sized tip to answer this question:

Q: Which social media profiles should go on your business card, and why?

Your answer needs to be no longer than 140 characters, and must include the hashtag: #FedExSmallBiz.

Please tweet your tip answering that question, prior to or during the chat. At the end of the chat I will choose the best tip to receive the gift card. To be eligible you must be located in the United States. The gift card is to be used at a FedEx Office near you. Void where prohibited. No purchase necessary. FedEx Office has no involvement in the selection of winners. This is sponsored by Small Business Trends.

Disclosure: FedEx Office compensated me to write this post and participate as a small business expert during the FedEx Office Boost Your Small Tweet Chat program. FedEx Office also provided the $100 gift card. The ideas in this blog post are mine and not ideas or advice from FedEx Office.

This Twitter chat is the third in the FedEx Office Boost Your Small Business Tweet Chat Series. We earlier published the press release about the chats – you can find more information there.

This Twitter chat is sponsored by FedEx Office. Questions will be asked by a representative from FedEx Office.

From Small Business Trends

Save the Date: Twitter Chat, October 20, About Branding

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3 Ways to Use Twitter to More Deeply Engage Influential Prospects

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

Amidst all the talk of Google+ and the new, new Facebook, Twitter has a lost a bit of its glow.

_DaniloRamos via Flickr

But, it’s still a very powerful and useful tool for marketers and in some cases the communications vehicle of choice for your best prospects and customers.

Today I want to talk about a couple of ways you can use your Twitter routine to more deeply engage customers and prospects.

If they are active Twitter users, then the following tips may help you gain insight about them and give you some ideas on how to create the kind of value for them that builds trust and opens doors.

Just to be clear, however, these are not meant to be used to manipulate or create a fake show of interest, these are just practical ways to get the most out of your Twitter use while also focusing on targeted users and creating good content for your followers.

Scan the favorites

Once you’ve identified prospects and customers on Twitter there is a tool that might help you learn a little more about what’s really important to them rather then just monitoring their entire stream. You should have customers and prospects in Twitter lists so you can easily monitor their activity in a tool like TweetDeck, but you’ll also want to scan their favorites.

This tip isn’t 100% foolproof, but many times people will mark favorite tweets because they represent the things they really like and care about. It might be their own tweets about their most important topics or those of their most influential friends – either way it can be great information.

You can find a list of favorites by adding the word favorites after a username – my friend Jason Falls is going to be in Kansas City this week to promote his new book, No Bullshit Social Media, so I’ll use him as an example. You’ll find Jason’s favorites here – http://twitter.com/JasonFalls/favorites

Retweet the best of the best

Another way to provide great content for your followers and also show up in the streams of those you want to get to know better is to Retweet their tweets. I know, duh, but here’s where I add a tip that makes this something more strategic. Don’t simply RT everything they write, it’s not very effective and won’t do a thing for your followers.

Go to Topsy and find the best Tweets from your customers and targeted prospects and RT those. Depending upon who you’re targeting, their best tweets are likely ones that have been RT’d by lots of other folks already.

You can find this on Topsy with the search query – from:twitterusername. So you could find my most popular tweets with this search – http://topsy.com/s?q=from:ducttape (You can also create email alerts for your searches.)

Filter targeted search

I’ve always touted the use of custom filtering and aggregating of content as a great way to add value to the world and, more specifically, customers and prospects. The idea here is that you set up all kinds of searches that automatically feed you information that could be useful to a prospect or even to your own education about a prospect’s world and then package that information in a way that’s useful to your prospect.

RSS technology is a great aid here so you can easily subscribe to or show your prospects how to subscribe to these custom searches. Unfortunately, Twitter decided to make it a little harder for just anyone to subscribe to searches via RSS. (Many services seem to be moving away from RSS in favor of their own custom APIs – so perhaps the Twitter Dev page is a place to start some advanced education.)

In the meantime, I’ve found a query that still produces an RSS feed for custom Twitter searches (no guarantees on how long this will work.) If you want to create an RSS feed, so you can subscribe to the updates via Google Reader for example, for the search phrase “small business marketing” you would create it like this – http://search.twitter.com/search.rss?q=”small business marketing”+filter:links – the key here is to add search.rss to the URL and then standard query stuff – ?q= – and then your search phrase. I also added +filter:links so that I would only get tweets that contained links to web pages.

Try this yourself and you’ll find that you can create RSS feeds for Twitter searches. Get creative and create some searches that you know will contain great content that your prospects would love and then start sharing bits with them. They’ll thank you for it.

View full post on Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing

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It’s true, not all of the older business executives understand the value of using Twitter. The micro-blogging tool is placing a human face on corporations that otherwise wouldn’t be able to directly communicate with their stakeholders. The Fortune 50 is an exclusive club of the top companies in the United States with a minimum entry point of $48 billion in revenue. I would hope these companies are taking full advantage of social media as their reach is massive.

This feature is to highlight the Twitter marketing lessons we can draw from America’s 50 largest companies. Let’s start by crowning the winners. With the follower count metric the top five includes: Dell, Best Buy, Target, Microsoft and Pepsi. Apple could be included in this list because they are using several different accounts that sum to millions of followers.

Now let’s crown the losers. Believe it or not, there are actually 10 companies in the Fortune 50 that are not using Twitter at all. The industry is usually energy or banking. For example, JP Morgan Chase whom ranks #13 with $115 billion in revenue has no account despite having $400 million invested in Twitter. It’s fair to assume they are laughing their way to the bank so hard they need not worry about Tweeting with the peasants.

The follower count metric isn’t everything. Recently I wrote a Social Media Marketing Ideas feature and I want to expand the idea of using Twitter as a tool within a big business.

The Home Depot

@HomeDepot is one my favorites as they are fully taking advantage of the human angle. They are always Tweeting customers directly and making conversation. Occasionally they will feature an article on the topic of home improvement. The hardware store has a daily Do-it-Yourselfer feature that gives the spotlight to one of their customers. The store truly shines in making their consumers feel special.

Ford

@Ford mixes the corporate approach with their online marketing message. They are constantly pushing #thefordstory hash tag which matches the title of their blog. By pushing resourceful articles they create a community-esque feel for the Ford driver.

Kraft Foods

@KraftFoods can’t help but covertly push their products by providing you with great recipes to try out. Can you really blame them though? The company account mixes in the proper amount of user engagement by polling their followers on their favorite foods. Kraft expertly caters to the mom demographic.

UPS

I’m partial to @UPS because it bleeds with love. It’s covered in hearts because of their latest slogan “We <3 Logistics.” Despite the relatively low follower count, the voice behind the account is very friendly and positive. The name of the game is human relations and positivity rules above all so it’s fair to say UPS is doing a good job on social media.

Pepsi

@Pepsi takes a cool approach because they take the least blatant effort to talk about themselvses. The soft drink giants seems to just be Tweeting for the fun of it. As a marketer I know it’s mostly for their branding effort. Needless to say it’s working as they have amassed over 100,000 followers.

I want to clarify that we have only examined the first 50 companies within the Fortune 500 henceforth the title is not missing a digit. We hope this article inspires those large corporations and small businesses that have avoided Twitter because it’s a new tool. It’s easily one of the best ways to reach your consumers. The business world should start to see Twitter as one of the primary consumer communication channels available.

Guest contributor Jay Singh is the co-founder of ViralMS, a social media agency. ViralMS offers large scale social media campaigns along with the ability to buy Twitter followers.

View full post on Business Pundit

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