What is Twitter?

Twitter is a one-to-many social-networking site set up in 2006. Users send messages (tweets) up to 140 characters long to answer the question ‘What are you doing?’ These messages are seen in the timelines of the user’s followers and, if the profile is public, can be viewed by anyone.

By far the most chatty of the social networks, Twitter can help a business build up strong relationships with people you may otherwise have no way of getting in touch with. For best results, it’s recommended to have both a Twitter and a Facebook account (but to send different messages on each), it’s okay (but not required) to send a few tweets a day, and that you should vary your tweets between promotional, industry comments and conversations. If all you do is send messages about yourself and your news, sales and products you start to be seen as a spammy account and in turn you will begin to lose followers.
Self-serving links are okay if used sparingly but the SEO value of these links is debated. The majority of Twitter’s core pages are set with the ‘no follow’ tag, so no link juice will follow naturally. No follow links do still seem to provide some value, but obviously not as much as the do follow ones. There is also the chance that your tweets will be taken away from Twitter (such as in an RSS feed) in which case the new site may allow links to be followed, thus giving you some SEO value.

Benefits

Twitter is a useful way to build relationships with people or businesses you normally wouldn’t communicate with. Useful connections can include customers, journalists and industry experts.
Having a Twitter account is a good way to build a community around your brand; to keep in touch with existing customers and make new ones; and to announce special deals, sales and company news. It’s also a good way to keep track of what’s happening in your industry and to see what competitors or similar companies in other cities or countries are doing.
With the right mix of messages, you can build up a reputation of being an expert in your industry. Helping users with problems, giving tips about the industry and sharing relevant news stories (with a short summary of why they’re useful) will see people following you to see what you’re saying about your area of business.
Using the trending topics or the search function you can find out what people are talking about. This is a good chance to help and share your expertise which could end up in more business. Don’t be too pushy or salesy and don’t get distraught if you don’t get any business from it, Twitter’s more about building a profile and a reputation.
Twitter can be a useful marketing tool. Announce to people why your site is currently down or hold a contest that involves users retweeting your message or brand. Some companies have made the trending topics through this method.

Risks

Many companies have made mistakes through Twitter that have seen them receive publicity they’d rather avoid. Furniture retailer Habitat abused the system by adding hashtags of trending topics, completely unrelated to themselves or their industry, to announce a sale. The company blamed the mistake on an intern, but nevertheless received a lot of bad press. Skittles briefly allowed tweets with #skittles to appear, unedited and unchecked, on their homepage which led to scurrilous claims about the effect of Skittles on the human body to appear on their official site.
It’s easy to come across in a negative way: too many tweets (especially with links back to your own site) comes across as spammy, too many irrelevant messages and you might lose business followers, automated tweets can lose personality and give a very robotic appearance to your account.
A whole new vocabulary has sprung out of Twitter (often words beginning with ‘tw’) which can bamboozle many newbies. Twittonary.com has a pretty substantial list of these.

Tools

There are a plethora of tools available to help use Twitter in a more efficient way. Desktop tools allow you to keep track of your account, giving you alerts whenever you receive an @mention or a direct message, phone apps allow you to update your status on the go, monitoring tools can keep track of conversations that mention you or your products and automated tools can be programmed to send out messages at certain times of the day, week or month.

Twitter Bird Icon

If you take your business marketing strategy seriously, you probably already have a Twitter account. That’s a good start, but do you really know how to promote your business in 140 characters or less? Twitter is fun, Twitter is challenging, Twitter can be dead annoying (info overload!) but it’s without a doubt an amazing tool for direct marketing.
The following Twitter Rules are a guideline for the small business owner who wants to make it on Twitter. Some of them refer to the Twitter etiquette, some explain common Twitter terms and some offer a better understanding of Twitter as a marketing tool.

1. Tweeting Ratio:
Tweeting like crazy every few minutes will not only be frowned upon by the community (especially when tweeting for your business), it will also be completely counter-productive. Each new tweet that you post replaces your previous tweet on your followers’ timeline. Tweeting too often will reduce your tweets’ actual reach.

2. Hashtags:
Marked by the symbol #, hashtags turn certain terms and keywords into (searchable) tags . By adding the hashtag #camera, for instance, you increase the chances of your tweets being seen by people who are interested in photography and cameras. Using multiple hashtags in one tweet is considered spam, so use them scarcely and wisely.

3. Check Out The Competition:
Use Twitter to find out what’s going on with your competitors. You don’t have to follow them as a Twitter user, but you should follow their activity. It’s a priceless insight – for free!
4. Trending Topics:

The 10 most tweeted terms at any given moment. To see a quick snapshot of the most tweeted-abot topics, look to the sidebar on the right of your Twitter homepage. Spammers will tweet about trending topcis like crazyto increase their reach but moderate use is harmless. Keep track of Trending Topics (in short: TT) and if they ARE relevant to your business, join in the conversation by adding relevant tweets.

5. Analyze Your Work:
Every tweet should be examined – did it generate replies? Was it retweeted? How many people actually clicked on the link you tweeted? How many new followers were gained in a day? These things are all easy to track and they will help you measure your success and see your weak spots.
If you want to delve into your stats more seriously, check out these Twitter Management tools:
-Commun.it
-Twitalyzer
-Twitter Counter
-Klout
-Twitter Effect

6. Twitter-Talk:
The 140-characters limit requires a lots of creativity. Tweeple (people who use Twitter) have created a whole new vocabulary that you need to familiarize yourself with. A few examples:
RT – Retweet. The act of sharing someone else’s tweets in your stream
MRT – Modified Retweet. An RT that was altered by the Retweeter
DM – Direct Message. Private message between users who follow each other
FF – Follow Friday. Tweets marked with FF recommend to follow certain users
Spitter – A Twitter spammer
Tweed – A Twitter feed
b/c – Because
w/ or w/o – With or Without
RTHX/TQRT – Thanks for the Retweet
Dweet – A drunken tweet

7. Be Social:
Communication and interaction in Twitter are very versatile. You can follow tweeple, retweet their content, mention them (by tweeting “@username”), send direct messages, or credit them for content that you tweet (by tweeting “via @username”). Use these tools to keep in constant contact with followers and potential followers. It’s vital that you interact with people and not just shoot general tweets into the air.

8. Links:
Businesses often tweet links, as part of their promotional efforts. Keep in mind that adding more than one link in one tweet can harm the clicking rates. When you tweet links, use a link shortening service that will be able to track the number of clicks.

9. Attractive Content:
You need to make it worthwhile for users to follow your Twitter feed. Use original content, creative incentives and relevant information to get as many people as possible to click “Follow”.
Twitter tools like TwitPic, TwitVid, TwtPoll and others allow you to tweet non-textual content as well. Depending on your type of business, they can be awesome for maintaining an interesting feed.

10. Be Patient:
Twitter has its own dynamics. It takes time to develop a faithful and growing following, but if you’re persistent it will pay off. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes, but don’t fail to learn from them!

Can you even remember the days before you felt compelled to tweet about your life or share interesting links?

How would we have learned about Osama Bin Laden’s death? What would have been the outcome of the revolution in Egypt? Would we care about @BronxZoosCobra?

To help us envision a world devoid of tweets, HubSpot designed an infographic illustrating 10 ways our lives would be different today if we didn’t have Twitter. Here are a few of them:

Companies wouldn’t have to worry about what employees might or might not tweet.
Charlie Sheen wouldn’t be holding a #winning record on Twitter—he would just be one more celebrity gone wild.
Using cell phones during presentations would still be taboo without the concept of “live tweeting.”
The chances of more than 300,000 people finding out you were “slizzard” last night would be considerably slimmer.

Here’s the infographic:

Whole Foods has its sights set on a new target market: Muslims celebrating Ramadan.

While Muslims traditionally celebrate the holiday by forgoing meals during the day, elaborate meals when the sun goes down could mean sales for the supermarket chain, Neal Ungerleider says in an article in Fast Company.

Whole Foods is partnering with Saffron Road, a brand that sells Halal frozen entrees and Indian, Thai and Moroccan meals. Whole Foods will run blog posts promoting Saffron Road, and giveaway Saffron Road products and Whole Foods gift certificates. My Halal Kitchen blog will contribute additional content.

“While it is a relatively small promotion, it also marks a new benchmark for the Muslim-American community: the first coordinated Ramadan promotion by a national supermarket chain,” Ungerleider writes.

The campaign will start online, in an effort to reach Muslim consumers in a place where they are already discussing halal foods and preparing for Ramadan, Saffron Road spokesperson Lisa Mabe explains.

With approximately 1.8 million Muslims in the United States and 45 percent of Muslim immigrants claiming an income of $50,000 or higher, Whole Foods is reaching out to a population that is squarely in its target audience. The supermarket chain hopes to not only make money during the fasting holiday, but build “brand loyalty from a demographic not traditionally courted by megastore advertising,” Ungerleider writes.

Though many brands are on a clear race for “likes,” those smart Facebook page owners will be looking beyond the number of “likes” and into more detailed analytics that show them how their page is performing, and where they stand in relation to their competitors.

Facebook itself offers a comprehensive analytics dashboard, and I wanted to take a look at tips for using this, as well as offering other tools that can help you get more out of your insights. As with most analytics, remember that the magic really comes when you make actions off the data and don’t fall into analytics overload.

See what you did right/wrong

Under the Users dashboard in Facebook, you can access a simple graph that tells you how many new “likes” and “unlikes” you get each day. This is incredibly valuable information, as it enables you to see what’s working for you on your page. When you see an unusual pattern, such as a sudden increase in the number of “unlikes,” look for what you did that day that might have turned people off. Did you post too often, close a competition, or post irrelevant content? Try to find a pattern, and make sure you don’t keep doing the same thing.

Optimize your traffic referrers

Also within the Users dashboard in Facebook Insights, you can see the external traffic drivers to your page. Pay attention and optimize these in order to get even better results. You should also be looking at those sites that are referring traffic, but maybe not at the level you had hoped for. If you’re running a promotion on your own site or another site, for example, and the traffic isn’t coming through, you might need to look at how well you’re enticing people or how prominent the link is. The external referrers are incredibly important for growing your fan count organically, so make sure to optimize this activity.

Are your fans actually active?

If you’re investing in a campaign to drive up the fan count on your page, you should look at whether these fans are actually active or are just contributing to an idle number of likes. Use Facebook Insights to track daily, weekly or monthly users. If this number isn’t where you’d expect it to be, consider how you might drive interaction or, more important, bring the right kind of fans into your page.

Implement on-click tagging

Although Facebook’s own insights tell you a lot about how fans are performing on your page, you can get more in-depth analysis by combining with your own analytics package. By implementing on-click tagging for a Facebook app for example, you can get a complete overview of how the app is performing. Through this you can effectively see drop-off rates, such as the number of people who entered their email addresses versus the number of people who simply landed on the page. If you’re getting high drop-off rates at certain points, maybe you’re asking for too much information, perhaps or the page isn’t user-friendly, so you’re losing the conversion.

Track against competitors

Social Bakers is a great site for getting free Facebook stats worldwide, as well as those that apply more specifically to you. If you want to see how many “likes” you’re getting compared with your competitors—perhaps for benchmarking before a new campaign—you can do this easily through Social Bakers. Simply click on “pages” at the top, then filter by country and category to view the page breakdown by industry. As well as looking at the overall number of fans, you can also look at the rate of growth to see, for example, whether a new promotion is driving up your Facebook numbers. This information is also important for your own Facebook page, so you can get a quick overview of how quickly you’re driving fans.

Get Insights for your own site

A lesser-known feature of Facebook Insights is the ability to track analytics for your own website. This enables you to see how content is being shared throughout your site, such as the number of “likes,” or links that are being shared through Facebook. Here you can choose who can view that information, setting this either for your profile or a particular Facebook page. You can also access additional insights such as how many impressions a particular link or content has gained. This is great information to show how your content is performing socially; you can see the type of content that is shared most often and then try to replicate it.

Here’s an example:

FaBio Madeup is the senior financially concentrated marketing professional assistant to the assistant vice president in the public relations department for Long Name Company Incorporated in Big Town, IL. She also serves as governing co-director of the social media rules foundation. Her innovative and unique leadership in the field has revolutionized the world of health care communications. She graduated with Very High Honors from Random University. She has won awards from Who Cares.com and I’m The Best Committee. In other words, she is just the most amazing, most talented, perfect health care communicator in the western hemisphere (if not the world).

Sound familiar?

Here are five things not to include in your professional online biography:


A job title longer than two words

Are two or more words really necessary in describing your job? I’m overwhelmed by the amount of superlative descriptions from communicators to describe their title. They make me feel as if I’m in the presence of royalty. However, instead of “Prince William Arthur Philip Louis of the House of Windsor, Duke of Cambridge,” I bow down to “senior financially concentrated marketing professional assistant to the vice president in the public relations department for…”

The words “innovative” or “unique”