Twitte Power Guide

The Twitter Power Guide Advanced tips to make the most of Twitter Sponsored by Christopher S. Penn @cspenn FinancialAidPodcast.com What this eBook is not This little eBook is not about how to use Twitter or how to get started with Twitter. It’s not the answer to the question “What is Twitter?”. It’s not about who you should follow or who should follow you. It’s not about being popular, cool, loved, adored, or anything else that was important in the 7th grade. This little eBook is about how to make the most of Twitter’s power without spending your entire life on it. In other words - how to make Twitter work for you without Twitter becoming work itself. I presume a lot in this book. I presume you know how to use Google Reader, RSS, Yahoo Pipes, Twitter, and more. If you don’t, get up to speed on the basics of those tools first. Will this guide answer all your questions? Definitely not. Will it make your Twitter experience a little more productive, a little more helpful? It should. Four Parts of Twitter Power Power branding Power listening Power networking Power promoting A favor to ask If you find this eBook on Twitter helpful to please add a link from your web site to: www.FinancialAidPodcast.com/twitterbook and tell people about it. Share it. Let people know this eBook exists and that it was helpful to you. This eBook is licensed under the Creative Commons By Attribution, Non-Commercial Use Only, No Derivative Works US 3.0 License. Finally, if you think this eBook is helpful, make sure you try my other eBooks: http://www.StudentScholarshipSearch.com/ebook/ http://www.FAFSAonline.com/fafsa-guide-ebook.php Power Branding If brand is the emotional aftertaste of a set of experiences [1], then Twitter is a bite-sized portion of that taste. Make sure you’re serving what you want others to experience. Decide in advance what you want to share, who you want to benefit, who you want to connect with and get to know. Don’t know what your brand is? Watch this video with Mitch Joel (@mitchjoel) to figure it out. http://www.rcc.ryerson.ca/ pcto2007day1/rcc361s01.qtl As with all things social, the more you benefit others, the more you give, the more you’ll receive in return, unasked. Whether Twitter, Facebook, email, or your web site, find ways to give and be helpful, useful, and friendly. [1] Ze Frank, The Show Power Branding Use Jim Kukral’s (@jimkukral) TwitterBacks (www.TwitterBacks.com) to spruce up your Twitter profile. Add as many ways outside of Twitter for people to find you as possible, such as your web site, email, and other contact info. Make your Twitter profile background useful, not a sales pitch. Some graphic arts skills required, along with a graphic editor like Photoshop. Power Listening Twitter is a stream. By default, it flows narrowly. Use an application like TweetDeck (www.TweetDeck.com) to get many streams together all at once. Group users together, organize by vertical, interests, influence, and more. vs. Power Listening What’s important to you? Chances are you have a list of keywords, be it your own name, your web site or company, your products or services, or jargon from your vertical. Chances are, your web site is (or should be) optimized for these keywords. Use Twitter Search (http:// search.twitter.com) to find discussions about your keyword terms of choice to see what’s on the minds of the Twitter audience. Pay attention to the Feed for this query icon. You’ll need it. psst: need FAFSA help? Visit www.FAFSAonline.com. Power Listening Kick it up a notch and subscribe to the results in Google Reader. This will help you archive popular terms and give you a scoreboard of which terms are most popular and when - then adjust your other marketing initiatives to send out email reminders, change web sites, etc. based on what’s happening in real-time on Twitter. Power Listening Got a sales force or a customer service/customer listening team? Instead of having them all try to subscribe to different feeds and terms, create a master feed in Yahoo Pipes and then just subscribe them all in Google Reader to the one master feed. Power Listening Work in any kind of regulatory environment where you need to preserve conversations? Do you just have a lot of really good conversations on Twitter that you don’t want to have slip into the ether? Use a free service like Feedblitz to transform your Twitter RSS feeds into email digests that you can archive for later. Double power bonus - want to save only certain people’s tweets? Use Yahoo Pipes to extract only the tweets you want and subscribe via email to those. Power Networking Like many networks, Twitter eventually creates a Metcalfe network effect - the value of the network grows in proportion to the number of people in the network, and every additional person in the network derives value from it but also makes it more valuable to existing members. To jump start your network, seed it with your existing customers/friends/clients. Power Networking Got an existing customer database? Cherry pick the best 500 customers you have, export their basic contact info to a webmail client, and import them into Twitter to see who’s already on it. Use this group of “Best of the Best” to jump start your Twitter account. Power Networking Skilled at coding/scripting? Use Twitter search to find all messages with @yourusername in them in the Atom XML format. Strip out just the usernames of those people who are using the reply @, then programmatically (and slowly, be kind to Twitter’s servers and respect their API limits) follow back everyone who @s you. http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=@cspenn http://username:password@twitter.com/ notifications/follow/matthewebel.xml Power Networking Not skilled at coding/scripting? Use Twitter search to find all messages with @yourusername and manually click on their profile photos to get to their Twitter profiles. Follow them from there. Works best with a tabbed browser. Power Networking Miss a follow notification? Use Dusty Reagan’s (@dustyreagan) Friend or Follow (www.friendorfollow.com) to figure out who’s following you, and follow back based on your own personal preferences. Power Promoting Promoting your product or service? No one cares about it. Seriously. What we do care about is how you, your products and services, and your ideas can help us solve pressing problems. If your underlying content (your blog, site, company, etc.) sucks, Twitter won’t help you. In fact, it’ll probably hurt you, because bad word of mouth spreads just as fast as good. @chrisbrogan listening to a crappy pitch. Power Promoting Shorten URLs with a link shortener that gives you analytics, like Bit.ly. You can quantitatively measure how much impact a Tweet has had by clickthrough on the link. Power Promoting Measure the word of mouth viral power of any Tweeted URL using Search and the shortened custom string. For really viral stuff, subscribe with Google Reader and track with more detail. Power Promoting Add a query string to any URL you tweet so that you can see web site traffic in your analytics software. http://www.FinancialAidPodcast.com becomes http://www.FinancialAidPodcast.com/?twitter Want to really kick it up a notch? Turn on Google Analytics on your web site, then use Google’s Analytics URL builder to track as part of existing campaigns or as a new campaign: http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55578 Want more money for college or your wallet? Listen to the Financial Aid Podcast. Subscribe for free at: FinancialAidPodcast.com photo credit: @cc_chapman