ABOUT TWITTER:
Twitter is a micro blogging web application. You’re telling people what you did or will do or experienced like a blog, but micro because it only allows 140 characters. So people are using it many times a day. Sometimes up to 50 times a day.
There are so many tweets from so many people that you can quickly get drowned out. So posting 1 twitter a day means nothing. It’s like driving a sports car on the autobahn at 5mph.
HOW YOU USE IT: (For Marketing)
Twitter is a marketing tool, used correctly, you can market to hundreds of thousands of people.
Don’t always be a salesperson. People don’t want to be sold to 24/7. Be informative, helpful. Have a personality. People need to know there someone on the other side of that message with a life like they have.
Some examples:
You will need to actively participate in following other’s tweets to find out if who they’re following are potential customers for you. Your customers or in this case “Market Plan” are people in east bay San Francisco, California, looking for a home with buying power. So say following a teenager twitter is out of scope. When someone follows you, you will get an email to the account you signed up with. This is more than information, in the infancy stage of your twitter account this is crucial to send them a direct message as well as go check them out and follow them as well. This is how you grow your followings.If you don’t have time to follow others, or tweet, or send new followers at least one direct message, using twitter is a waste of your time.
Useful things:
- @ - The ‘@’ symbol is used to reply back to someone’s tweet so that everyone can see the dialogue between you and that person, this allows them to read about someone they’ve never seen before allowing them to be followed. If you are using apps like “TweetDeck” then you will see it show up in your “Mentions” area where you name was mentioned on twitter somewhere.
- Example: TomJones: Las Vegas rocks! AprilTyler sees this and agrees: AprilTyler: @TomJones Right On!!
- RT – ReTweet is a very useful feature that allows people to Retweet something they saw on someone else’s twitter.
- Example: TomJones: Las Vegas rocks! ….AprilTyler: RT:@ TomJones: Las Vegas rocks!
- # - The ‘#’ Symbol is used to create a search term. When people use the twitter search feature your profile and message will show up. This is very powerful as it will bring you closer to those people that you would have never thought you could come in contact with.
- D - Direct Messages are private messages from you to someone else. It’s advised to try to send a DM to someone as they start following you.
- Example Initial Following Message: Message from Tom to April… “Thanks for following me. To find out more about me in Las Vegas check out my website. http://TomJones.com
Value added extras:
When twitter first started, people created their account, chose a color background and their profile picture and got started writing. Now, marketing yourself or company is the name of the game.
It’s advised to add some kind of extras to your twitter experience, to either appeal to your followers, or speed up your time using it.
- Tools for your browser
- First things first. Firefox is a plug-in enabled browser. Even if you’re in love with internet explorer (and I won’t go into the many benefits of firefox over internet explorer). Firefox has allowed developers to build plug-ins to install and use during your browsing experience. In this case since, Twitter plug-ins.
- Tools for your phone
- Tools to download
- TweetDeck – http://tweetDeck.com - This is the one stop shop direct access to all your twitter users, direct messages, etc. Highly recommended
- Services to use.
- http://tweetlater.com – Signup and link to your twitter account. This service allows you to create messages to be automatically sent to the new follower, as well as auto follow that same person. This is useful for the person that doesn’t have time to invest in following.
- Twitter on facebook - http://apps.facebook.com/twitter/ - tie your twitter into facebook to update your facebook status to widen amount of people that see your messages.
- Twitter Diagram
MY ADVICE:
Go and spend some time on a weekend to view others twitter pages and see how they’re doing it. What are they writing about? How are they writing it? How are they posting the links? How are they using the codes?
People are doing so many things it’s great. You can become a social GIANT in your industry if you learn how to use these types of media tools.
You get out what you put in to anything, and if you have no time, you’ll see no results.