How to Maximize Your Tweets October 8, 2009

While working with clients on their Twitter feeds, I’ve been using these Twitter guidelines that I’ve put together over the last few months. But I’m always looking for new ideas to share, so feel free to add your best Twitter maximization practices in the comments or email me.

Here’s my list:

1. Add your Twitter URL to email sigs and business cards. Link to your Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn etc. profiles. If you have a blog, add a graphic or link asking people to follow you on Twitter.

2. Find the most knowledgable and relevant people in your niche and follow them. Respond to their tweets when possible and if you’re lucky enough to get a response, you may see a surge of new followers.

3. Mix it up. As with blogging, give your Twitter followers a good mix of helpful content as well as slices of your own life. We want nothing more than to connect with each other and giving your followers 140 character bursts of who you are — interests, thoughts, questions, etc. — serves as a powerful connection tool. It’s fine using Twitter to give information about your company but make sure to mix it up with tweets of third-party links and other resources for more reader interest. If you want to find out what your followers are interested in, check out Twittersheep and create a tag cloud from the bios of your network.

4. A great way to get more followers is to promote others. Whether giving them props on their tweet or linking to a choice post on their blog, giving credit to your favorite @username will help get you noticed.

5. Add your feed to We Follow: http://wefollow.com

6. Twit the peak. Post most often to your twitter account during peak browsing hours of your targeted followers. Not sure of the hours, ask yourself when you tend to be online the most. You are more likely to interact with more of your followers online as the same time as yourself, as well as maximizing your tweets’ exposure to more potential followers. Which days of the week do most people tweet? Research shows Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday are the most popular days.

7. Tweet often. It’s a fine line between too many and not enough but 3-5 a day seems to be a range that works. (According to @timoreilly, the tweet average is 4.22.) The more you tweet, the more opportunities for new followers and search engines to find you. For the time-crunched, try using a client such as HootSuite to schedule your tweets ahead of time to keep up feed momentum.

8. Respond to @Replies. Take the time to respond to replies directed towards you. Whether it’s a RT (retweet) or a general comment or question, respond to as many replies as time permits. Try not to give @replies like “Yes”, “I agree”, “Thank you” which are meaningless to the rest of your followers. Provide some context with your @replies to raise follower engagement.

9. Live-tweet events. Share observations, speaker content, questions, and shout-outs to other attendees. Make sure to add the event’s agreed-upon Twitter hashtag to your tweets to make it easier for others to follow and find you.

9. Ask questions. Whether you’re looking for information on how to do something or curious about what others think about a product, take advantage of Twitters enormous crowd sourcing power and ask your followers for help. Not only will this engage your current followers, but you increase your odds of showing up in http://search.twitter.com where many users go to find relevant tweets.

10. Check out the most popular trends and keywords at What the Trend and Twitscoop: http://www.twitscoop.com

Planet Forward — Viewer Collaboration TV April 2, 2009

A few nights ago, I had an opportunity to attend the first taping of a new PBS series – Planet Forward. Moderated by former CNN special correspondent Frank Sesno, the show’s theme is to promote a discussion about energy and climate change, but in an innovative twist, starts off the discussion in the online community and then goes to broadcast and then eventually back to online for post-show discussion and critique.

PBS started the ball rolling back in early March with a request to the Planet Forward online community for submissions of questions, ideas, videos, podcasts and even poetry, which were then rated by PBS editors and the online community as most popular and deserving to be included in the show. Winners appear on the show and have an opportunity to debate and pose questions to Sesno and panels of industry experts.

This inaugural show featured Carol Browner, Energy Coordinator for the Obama Admnistration; industry experts L. Hunter Lovins, president of National Capitalism and internationally recognized promoter of sustainable development; Shai Agassi, CEO of Better Place, a company focused on building transportation networks of zero-emission electric vehicles; and Jim Connaughton, Constellation Energy executive vice president, corporate affairs, public and environmental policy and former chairman, White House Environmental Quality for the Bush Administration.

I found the show engaging with its lively mix of average citizens and experts, and extremely informative (for example, I learned the famous DC landmark Ben’s Chili Bowl with a 50s-era menu of cheese fries, shakes and half-smoke sausages uses renewable energy sources to power the restaurant. Cool!)

Planet Forward airs nationally on PBS April 15th. It will be fun to see how this show organically grows when it goes back for online discussion and viewer collaboration after its initial airing.

Some things I’ve learned… February 25, 2009

I’ve been doing more tweeting instead of full out blogging of late, and also have been on the road at seminars and with clients. Time to catch up with an actual blog post that’s more than 140 characters.

Here’s what I’ve learned over the last few weeks:

- Digital vs. traditional. Wave the white flag — no longer a debate. This came up at last week’s MediaPost Digital Marketing in a Downturn panel discussion. Razorfish’s Shiv Singh, VP of Social Media, pronounced the end of this seesaw battle over which is the more important media calling it for both. These days, consumers are watching their traditional media tvs while typing a tweet on their laptop and answering e-mail on their BlackBerry. We live in a multi touchpoint information world and it requires multichannel marketing to reach us these days. (Great multichannel marketing resource – Akin Arikan.)

- Social media is marketing. Social media is communication. Social media is… confusing? Answer: All of the above. I’m still hearing clients repeating a similar theme: “We know we need to so some social media but we’re not sure what we want to do.” And for those organizations that have plunged into social media and have blogs and videos and maybe even a Twitter feed on their sites, I’m hearing a need to sit down and actually plan a better strategy to optimize results.

On both counts I’ll give the same advice: First, go back to basics. Why are you in business? What are the goals of your web site? What does success look to you? Answer these three questions and then see how and where social media fits into your organization’s business plan.

- Twitter has exploded with new users and publicity over the last few weeks. I witnessed this especially in the DC journo community with NBC’s David Gregory, MSNBC’s David Shuster, and Air America’s Ana Marie Cox getting into Twitter a few weeks ago which then generated widespread coverage in the New York Times, Washington Post and Politico. Is Twitter just a fad that will go the way of Second Life? I don’t think so. I hope not anyway. I love the immediacy and variety of information that Twitter offers users and I believe we’re just seeing the beginning of its possibilities – especially with the recent infusion of $35 million of new VC money.