Posts Tagged ‘Mark Schaefer’
Best Twitter Guides, Tips and Tools of 2010
Monday, January 31st, 2011Twitter came of age in 2010, growing at a scorching pace—from 75 million users at the beginning of the year to more than 190 million by the end of December. Twitter is used (officially) in 65 of the Fortune 100 companies, 63% of small to midsized businesses, and nearly half of all B2B enterprises.
As adoption skyrockets, marketers are striving to optimize their use of the world’s most popular microblogging platform. And that leads to questions, like: What are the best ways to attract more (relevant) followers? What types of information are worth sharing, beyond blog posts? Which companies are really succeeding on Twitter, and how are they doing it? How can I get more retweets? What’s a Twitter chat, and how do I participate in one? Which are the most helpful third-party tools for Twitter?
Get the answers to these questions and more here in some of the best Twitter guides, tips and tools of the past year.
How to Get More Followers on Twitter
How to grow your Twitter following by iMedia Connection
***** 5 Stars
Based on research, Courtney Wiley reveals what type of content to tweet, when to tweet it, and the ideal frequency of tweeting to use in order to grow a Twitter following.
47 Twitter Power Users’ Secrets To Getting Many Followers by JobMob
A selection of the Twitterati share their advice—ranging from short snippets to fairly detailed guidelines—on how to grow your Twitter following. Robert Scobel, Dan Schawbel, Peter Shankman and many of the others are legit no doubt, though a few of the “power users” here are questionable. Still, lots of good advice.
Get More Twitter Followers by Treating Your Profile Like a Landing Page by Social Times
Darko Johnson shows how to apply the principles of effective landing page design to your Twitter profile in order to increase the likelihood that people who see your profile will choose to follow you.
20 ways to increase the number of your followers on Twitter by Web SEO Analytics
Wisely warning against the use of automated programs or techniques, Vasilis Vryniotis offers 20 “white hat” best practices for increasing your Twitter following naturally, such as promoting your Twitter handle in online and offline locations (your blog, website, email signature and business cards), adding yourself to Twitter directories, and perhaps most important: mentioning and thanking the people who help you.
Why 150 Followers Is All You Really Need by TwiTip
Then again, do you really need more followers? Srinivas Rao uses the theory of Dunbar’s Number to argue that 150 followers is all one needs on Twitter. The author makes an intriguing case, but I’m not sure I buy it (particularly given that he follows over 1,300 people on Twitter).
How to Do Lots of Other Things on Twitter
16 bitchin’ commands and shortcuts for Twitter by eConsultancy
Want to quickly see the last tweet from a particular Twitterer? Or the most recent tweets mentioning that person? How about performing advanced searches on Twitter, like exact match, either/or, hyper-local (with x miles of…), or find questions you can answer? Chris Lake shows you how to do all of this and much more with these helpful Twitter shortcuts.
40 useful things you can share on Twitter besides blog posts by Social Media Today
Frequent best-of contributor Adam Vincenzini contends that “the more unusual and varied your stream is, the better—both for you and your followers.” And with that in mind, he lists more than three dozen types of items you can share on Twitter other that stuff from your RSS stream, such as a new app or tool (with a quick tweet review), an interesting hashtag or discussion, an interesting/relevant YouTube video or a link to a Twitter list you think is worth following.
7 Really Cool Things About the New Twitter by Social Media Today
Tia Peterson praises seven features of the new Twitter interface (such as the “Recently Listed” box, easy DM replies, and ability to send a tweet from any page) but also cites three areas that still need improvement.
How Many Times Do You Tweet Your Blog Post? by Ask Aaron Lee
Most bloggers tweet each of their posts only once. How many times should a post be tweeted? In this post, Aaron Lee and Guy Kawasaki recommend an ideal frequency, backed up with some highly logical reasoning. Spock would approve.
How Twitter increased my blog’s traffic by 300% in one week by MackCollier.com
Ever wonder exactly what impact Twitter can have on blog traffic? Mack Collier details an experiment he ran and shares the nitty gritty numbers and percentages, as well as the process he used, concluding “even if you only have 100 followers, you can still leverage Twitter as a tool to build your blog IF you are active on Twitter. Active interacting with others, engaging in conversations, and linking to valuable content.”
13 Twitter Tips for Increasing Engagement by Sazbean
Sarah Worsham lists helpful tips for increasing engagement and growing your following on Twitter, such as sharing and retweeting, asking questions, attending tweetups and using Twitter directories to find people in your industry.
Twitter success stories: Explaining the ROI of Twitter by {grow}
As Mark Schaefer explains, “There are MANY benefits to Twitter besides direct sales. You might gain information, competitive intelligence, insight, a new supplier or partner, publicity, brand awareness, an idea, customer insights, and yes, even a potential customer. And while all of these are great, most are intangible and difficult to display in an Excel spreadsheet! So why keep trying to do it?…When benefits are difficult to quantify, the best way to explain the value is through a story.”
8 Ways to Not Get ReTweeted by HubSpot Blog
Dan Zarrella uses extensive HubSpot research to show that practices like talking about yourself, dumbing down the readability of your tweets, eschewing links, and repeating the same things everyone else is saying are great ways to avoid being retweeted.
26 Twitter Tips for Enhancing Your Tweets by Social Media Examiner
***** 5 Stars
Debbie Hemley provides a highly creative A-Z list of practical tips for maximizing the business impact of your tweets, from Answers and Behind-the-Scenes info to utilizing YouTube and a Zippy Writing Style.
4 Rules for Marketing on Twitter by Practical eCommerce
Paul Chaney reveals the “unwritten” rules for earning influence on Twitter, for example: “Don’t Follow Just to Pitch. A distasteful trend has developed among newer Twitter users. For example, people are following me and when I respond in kind, their first tweets are frequently to pitch me on a website they want me to visit or a service they provide…If you want a formula for how marketing via Twitter and other social networks should work, it’s this: Connect > Converse > Convert.”
Calculating and Improving Your Twitter Click-through-Rate by SEOmoz
The brilliant but oblivious Rand Fishkin illustrates how to calculate your Twitter click-through rate (CTR) and notes some findings from his own experience: shorter tweets and those that are on-topic (whatever your primary topic is) tend to get retweeted more frequently. Somewhat surprisingly, Klout scores appear to have little correlation with retweet rates.
Twitter Dictionary | 35 Twitter Abbreviations by Bit Rebels
Primarily for Twitter newbies, Diana Adams defines nearly three dozen common Twitter / texting abbreviations such as DM (direct message), IRL (in real life) and Gr8 (self-explanatory).
Typecasting Twitter: 7 Top Uses by iMedia Connection
Noting that “Twenty nine percent, one in every three tweets yields some kind of reaction—comments, re-tweets or clicks. Ten percent prompt a reply to the original tweet. These are direct marketing nirvana numbers,” Daniel Flamberg dissects research to isolate the seven most common uses of Twitter.
How to Participate in a Twitter Chat Session like #BlogChat or #AgChat by ag – a colorful adventure
For those who haven’t participated in a Twitter chat session before, Janice Person provides clear, step-by-step instructions for getting setup, using controls, and keeping up with the stream of conversation.
3 Absolutely Cool Twitter Search Tricks to Help You Save Money! by Sexy Social Media
In this helpful but brief post, Annie Wallace shares three clever Twitter search tricks you may not be aware of.
Best of 2010: 14 Ways Every Business Should Be Using Twitter by Inkling Media
Ken Mueller lists 14 practices businesses can adopt to optimize their benefit from Twitter, such as providing customer service, promoting events and monitoring competitors.
Twitter Tools
20 Top Twitter Monitoring and Analytics Tools by Pamorama
Pam Dyer serves up brief reviews of more useful Twitter tools including Twitscoop (trend-monitoring), TweetBuzzer (identifies popular brands on Twitter), Twitter Analyzer (kind of like Google Analytics for Twitter) and Tweeps (get stats that help you decide who to follow—or not—and find people you’d like to have following you).
How to Add a Tweet Button Anywhere by SitePoint
While there are several easy avenues to placing a Tweet button on a blog, Alyssa Gregory supplies simple instructions for adding Tweet buttons in other venues like emails, PDFs and Facebook pages.
11 Websites to Schedule Your Tweets Online for Free by TwiTip
Young Yang reviews free tools for scheduling tweets, like FutureTweets, HootSuite and SocialOomph. It’s important to remember that Twitter is a social platform, so your followers will expect interaction; if you’re busted relying too heavily on automated or pre-scheduled tweets, you will lose followers. However, these tools can be very helpful if used strategically and sparingly.
Type in any three words or phrases and compare how often each is tweeted about.
5 Best Twitter Tools For Smarter Blogging by Smedio
Sridhar Ramunajam provides quick reviews of five helpful Twitter tools including dlvr.it for auto-publishing blog content to Twitter and TweetStats, which provides stats about your account (e.g., tweets per hour, tweets per month, tweet timeline) in graphical format.
Six Benefits to Using Twitter.com Instead of an App by TwiTip
Shannon Albert makes the case for using Twitter itself rather than a third-party app (e.g., HootSuite or TweetDeck) for interacting on Twitter: it’s faster, has no limits on Tweets per hour and lets you see other users’ custom backgrounds among other advantages.
Twitter Stats
All You Need to Know About Twitter in 2010 [Infographic] by Mediabistro
Lauren Dugan presents an infographic from Flowtown that reviews Twitter highlights of 2010, from Bill Gates setting up a Twitter account in January through celebrity digital death at year end.
Related Post
50 (of the) Best Twitter Guides, Stats, Tips and Tools of 2010 (So Far)
2011 Social Media Marketing Trends
Friday, January 7th, 2011Social media marketing has progressed from radical new idea to widely adopted practice in a remarkably short period of time. Just 5% of Americans said they were familiar with Twitter in 2008; by the fall of last year, that figure was 87%, and Twitter is now adding 300,000 new users per day. Facebook added more than 150 million new users in 2010. Three-quarters of b2b buyers use social media at some point during their purchase decision process, and marketers are responding with increased spending on social media marketing.
So what’s next? A new report from Focus, 2011 Trends Report: Social Media Marketing presents observations and predictions from eight leading social media experts (and me) about social media trends and developments to watch for in the coming year.
The thrust of this brief but enlightening report is that social media is moving from the “what is it and should we do it” stage to the “how do we integrate social media with operations and do it better” realm.
Among the top 10 trends identified:
1. Social efforts will permeate the enterprise. “Social is much bigger than marketing and PR. “Social is much bigger than marketing and PR. It’s a customer phenomenon. This will demonstrate itself as social moves into product development, operations, customer service and even sales,” according to Michael Brenner.
3. Stronger focus on global audiences. “Much of the social innovation will come from Third World countries that are using these free platforms to make up for deficiencies in their communication infrastructure,” says Mark Schaefer.
5. Metrics will mature. “News Feed Optimization (NFO) on Facebook will become the new SEO. Basically, 2 percent of fans return to a fan page, and in some cases it’s more like .02 percent…What you need to focus on is the content and optimizing the content to get comments and likes,” per Paul Dunay.
6. Social media will become targetable. “Soon, we’ll be able to email only to customers who clicked a particular bit.ly link on Twitter. We’ll be able to send a Facebook status message only to customers who visited a particular page on our website. By combining what we know about our customers and prospects and friends across multiple social outposts, we’ll end up with a centralized view of each of our connections,” in the words of Jay Baer.
There’s much more, from Frank Days of Novell, Maggie Fox of Social Media Group, Stephanie Marx of Cisco and Lee Traupel of Linked Media Group. Download the report and join the discussion on Focus.
The One Effective Use of Facebook for B2B Marketing
Tuesday, March 9th, 2010You’ve seen the eye-popping statistics: Facebook now has more than 350 million active users. If it were a country, it would be the third most-populous on earth, behind only China and India. TechCrunch predicts that “by this summer (2010) well over half of all Internet users will likely visit Facebook each month.” It’s now the second most-visited site on the web, behind only Google.
Given that level of popularity and traffic, it’s no wonder that marketers have embraced Facebook in a big way. What’s curious, however, is that of the top 50 brands on Facebook according to Slate magazine, not one is a b2b vendor. Not even close. And as Mark Schaefer has noted, b2b Facebook success stories are notoriously hard to come by (he found one).
With a mammoth audience and the acceptance, even embrace, of brands there, why is Facebook success so elusive for b2b marketers? It isn’t demographics. Granted, the potential pool of customers for most b2b companies is minute compared to that for major consumer brands, but given the sheer size and ubiquity of Facebook, there are still a lot of b2b buyers using it.
The challenge rather lies in the way Facebook fan pages are used. I’ve heard countless people, within the b2b community, express the sentiment that “LinkedIn is for business, Facebook is for friends and family.” As such, it’s not surprisingly that many of the entries on Slate’s top Facebook list are lifestyle brands. If you buy a new Audi, you might use Facebook to show it off to your friends, but if you’re part if a buying team that just acquired a new enterprise software system—eh, not so much so. And as one more bit of anecdotal evidence, I have my Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook badges all displayed in the left column of this blog. I pick up a lot of new Twitter followers here, and a fair number of LinkedIn connection requests, but rarely a Facebook invitation.
Still, this doesn’t mean that Facebook can’t serve any purpose for b2b marketing. It can serve one helpful role: humanizing a company. As a very wise b2b sales executive said to me several years ago, “people don’t buy from companies. They buy from people.” With the emergence of social media as a marketing tool, that sentiment is arguably even more true today.
Because of the intimate, informal nature of Facebook, it is the ideal venue to showcase personal content related to your company that may not be appropriate on a corporate website or even a LinkedIn profile. Many employees within b2b companies have email communication with customers and prospects, but never actually talk to them. Or they have phone conversations but never meet face to face. Facebook provides an excellent means for sharing photos and even (limited) personal information, to help put a human face on an organization, and “put a face with the name” or voice of an employee for customers and prospects.
Just a few examples of content that work better on Facebook than in more formal settings are:
- • Photos of employees in casual office settings;
- • Photos of employees and customers interacting, or casual shots of a customer using a product (with permission, of course);
- • Trade show photos;
- • Pictures of employees working on community service projects;
- • Company executives speaking, accepting awards, meeting with VIPs, etc.;
- • Photos of production facilities (for manufactured products);
- • Photos taken with resellers or channel partners;
- • Informal or even humorous videos, such as HubSpot’s spoof of The Office or Resco’s “border battle” video shot before last season’s first Vikings-Packers game;
- • And of course, interaction! Most customers and prospects probably won’t want to interact with your brand on Facebook, but for those who do, it’s important to engage them through this channel.
In short, Facebook provides a place to show the human side of your company, to cut loose just a bit and have some fun. While it may produce a lead now and then, it isn’t a very effective lead generation vehicle. Instead, by humanizing your company and giving a glimpse inside, it’s business value lies primarily in lead nurturing—helping move leads through the buying process. It’s more about making current sales cycles more productive than about generating new potential business.
Because the ROI is likely to be difficult to measure with precision, it’s best to keep the “I” fairly modest. Still, with realistic expectations, using Facebook as a means to put a human face (or faces) on a B2B brand can be one effective component of an overall social media marketing strategy.
How to Suck at Twitter (And Still Appear Successful)
Sunday, December 20th, 2009This post was originally published on the WebMarketCentral blog in December 2009.
There are a lot of great b2b marketers and social media contributors worth following on Twitter, like Ardath Albee, Mark Schaefer, Eric Fletcher, Jennifer Kane and Rob Rose to name just a few. These are people who definitely do not suck at Twitter. They are intelligent, discerning, helpful and social. All have respectable, even impressive, but not gargantuan numbers of followers.
But there is a different group of tweeters out there as well, a group whose members often have immense numbers of followers, though they seem to add little value, socially or intellectually. Yet these individuals often have immense numbers of followers—20,00, 30,00, even 50,ooo or more. They aren’t celebrities. How do they do it? After careful observation and analysis of the practices of these twerks, here are some of the secrets of those who suck at Twitter, yet appear highly successful.
Twitter Name
Never use your real name. It’s boring (plus it makes it too easy for the feds to track you down). Incorporate your spammy promise into your name, using something like @BigMoneyOnline. You can even cleverly insert special characters to create a handle like @WebCa$hMachine.
Twitter Bio
Leave it blank. Just because this is social media doesn’t mean you have actually share anything about yourself. Besides, leaving your bio blank adds an air of mystery!
If you feel compelled to put something there, make it as spammy and sales-y as possible. Here’s an example of an actual bio, only slightly retouched to protect the identity:
MLM, Internet Marketing, Cashflow, Twitter Automation. Just click the link above! = 40,000+ followers
(Are you barfing yet?)
Web Link
Point your link to an obnoxious “buy now” page. Make sure it is filled with lots of CAPITAL LETTERS and exclamation points!!! Be sure to include terms like “exclusive,” “limited time offer,” “secret,” and “free bonuses.” Hit your visitors hard. Remember, your goal is to convince the gullible that they can have better health, lose weight, or best of all, make big money working from home, without any real effort on their part.
Twitter Avatar
Don’t use your real face (again, makes it too easy for the authorities). The default Twitter bird is always a safe choice. Or, get creative and reflect the junk you’re trying to sell: use dollar signs, a sexy man/woman photo, or a cleavage shot.
Another tactic is to keep people guessing; if your “real” name is John, use a female photo, and use a male underwear model if it’s something like “Christine.”
Twitter Background
Again, make sure this sells your “promise.” Popular options include piles of cash, skinny models, fancy cars, yachts, or a photo of someone who looks kind of like you standing in front of some one else’s mansion.
Okay, that covers all of the header and background considerations, so let’s see how that all works together. Here’s an actual example from someone who sucks at Twitter, with only identifying information obscured:
Note the complete lack of a web link or bio and the use of the default Twitter background and avatar. Yet with only 3 tweets (all of which were sales pitches with a link back to the account owner’s spammy website), this person has almost 50,000 followers! How do they do it? Two more areas to get right:
Automate Everything
Hey, just because they call it “social” media doesn’t mean you have to actually interact with anyone, right? Use a tool like SocialOomph to create automated tweets, so you don’t have to actually read what all those other boring people are tweeting. Create an automated message to welcome new followers, because after all, people love getting spammy, untargeted, impersonal DMs. Make it blatantly self-promotional, somelike “Thanks for following. I’d love to help you! Buy my crap at [link].”
There are also automated tools to help you find new followers. They randomly follow a whole bunch of the people, then as soon as those folks follow you back, the tools automatically unfollow them and start over with a new group. Sure, you’ll pick mostly spam bots and low-activity accounts, but you’re bound to catch a few suckers in there as well! Especially with your impressively large number of followers.
Finally, there are your tweets themselves. There are several possible strategies here. One is to tweet nothing at all—remain mysterious! But that won’t help you sell your garbage, so a second, better approach is to tweet the same spammy sales message over and over.
Note how this account combines several of the recommendations above. The default background and avatar are used, there’s no bio or link, the tweets are no more than broadcast sales messages, and, as the tweet times indicate, the tweets are automated:
Almost 1,000 followers—not bad! Many more-socially-active small businesses haven’t hit that threshold yet.
A final tweet strategy is to mix slight variations of your pushy sales message with banal, tired and trite quotes from people like Zig Ziglar and Albert Einstein. I see this approach employed quite frequently. Is there a website out there somewhere, maybe called cheesyquotes.com, that collects these for people?
Whatever you do, don’t engage in conversations. That’s time wasted that could be spent fleecing the ignorant! And don’t ever retweet anything; who cares what other people have to say? If you absolutely must interact, make sure you tweets are absolutely worthless to anyone other than the recipient, such as “@imafool2 LOL! ROTFL!!” or “@takemycash Oh sure. Not!” And if you feel compelled to occasionally pass another’s tweet along, retweet only links that point back to your spammy sales site.
There you have it. Follow this guidance and you too can abuse the entire concept of social media, annoy others, build up a huge following despite the complete lack of value you provide, and no doubt, make big money working from home.
