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

Hello Earth! Tweeting from Mars… December 6, 2008

Saw this story yesterday about NASA’s popular Mars Phoenix Lander Twitter feed.

“When NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory News Services manager Veronica McGregor was tasked with delivering word of the agency’s first-ever robotic landing on Mars during a holiday weekend, she turned to the social-networking website.

Readership and viewership in traditional news media usually goes down over a three-day weekend,” said McGregor, a former CNN correspondent.”

McGregor created a distinctive Twitter persona for the Lander and the number of followers skyrocketed to over 39,000.

“The Lander’s writing style helped the blog stand out, according to Twitter co-founder Biz Stone.

“It was the way she chose to send out the updates — in the first person and anthropomorphizing the Lander — that really made all of the difference,” Stone said. “As a result, NASA gets a level of engagement with citizens they didn’t have before.”

Pleased with the Phoenix Lander’s Twitter success, NASA plans on adding more Twitter feeds for future agency missions.

Doonesbury and Post-Election Twitterholics November 12, 2008

In case you missed it, yesterday’s Doonesbury cartoon nails how many of us political news junkies are doing post-election, with no more waking up to tweets of the latest swing state polls and head counts at campaign rallies. It feels weird not to have campaigns to follow, or at least until the 2010 senate races heat up!

“It’s the social media tools, stupid…” November 11, 2008

Now that Election Day is over and we have a new President-Elect, another huge winner coming out of Campaign 2008 are the new and ramped-up social media tools that played key campaign roles this election cycle.

Back in 2007, when McCain and Obama first announced their intentions to make a White House run, Twitter was barely a year old, blogging superstars like Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com were unknown and having texting numbers in the millions was pretty much only seen on American Idol.

Fast forward through 50+ primaries and caucuses, two nominating conventions, three presidential debates and one Election Day, and here’s a quick look at some of the highlights:

- Twitter: Barack Obama’s campaign Twitter feed continually ranked #1 in followers. The Obama campaign deftly leveraged Twitter’s ease of use and reach to send out daily tweets to supporters about campaign rallies and posted links to campaign updates and video streams. The McCain/Palin campaign’s use of Twitter was very limited with the campaign not showing a Twitter account as late as September ‘08. But what the official campaign site lacked, McCain supporters created, with their own Twitter feeds of McCain campaign news and videos.

For Election Day, a coalition of volunteers, tech companies and online news outlets banded together to create a real-time vote-monitoring web site called Twitter Vote Report where voters could report via tweets, mobile texting or phone calls on long waits, faulty voting machines, registration problems or if everything was moving smoothly.

- Mobile Texting: Barack Obama’s campaign put mobile texting on steroids. Texting was used to build massive supporter, volunteer and fundraising databases, as well as breaking news rollouts as the Biden Veep pick. Texting keywords like HEALTH or IRAQ would send mobile users periodic updates on the subject of interest and a dozen ringtone downloads from Obama speeches were offered as well. On Election Day, Obama supporters were sent constant text messages about GOTV volunteering needs and contacting friends who hadn’t voted yet. Can you imagine running a campaign now without using mobile texting as a major player in recruiting campaign volunteers, fundraising and votes? I can’t.

- Blogs: With all of those primaries and debates getting major broadcast air time, live-blogging came into its own using tools like CoveritLive to build audience for major media sites such as MSNBC.com and Newsweek.

During the campaign, blogging superstars emerged such as pollmeister Nate Silver, and internationally, blogging experienced explosive growth with the launch of sites such as the Reuters-sponsored Voices Without Votes, an aggregator of the international blogosphere focusing solely on the U.S. presidential race. The site’s tagline: “America votes. The world speaks.”

- Digg: Digg was used by both campaigns to move stories into the national spotlight. Over the Labor Day weekend, for instance, more than 40 stories about Sarah Palin, John McCain’s VP pick, received enough diggs to become popular. The site is also responsible for creating the early buzz and massive online fundraising for former presidential candidate Ron Paul.

- Community Sites: The McCain campaign created its own social networking site called “McCain Space” where supporters could post videos and photos as well as connect in forums. My.Barack.Obama, massively popular with millions of members, gave Obama supporters the online tools to create blogs, find local events and groups and contact undecided voters. In a recent post, Chris Hughes, an Obama staffer, revealed that post-election, the site will not be taken down and will remain up for continued collaboration among community members.