Twits and Tweets

A little about this Twitter and social marketing thing:

A recent comment from a client about Twitter made me realize it was time to poke around that place and see how the "Social Marketing" worked over there. I mean I hope you guys realize that FaceBook, MySpace and now Twitter have become the latest rage in marketing to you!
FaceBook has smartened up. We "Page" makers can even purchase Pay Per Click advertising on Mother F. now, they have become the latest marketing powerhouse. Probably not what Mark Z. had in mind when FaceBook got created. Or was it ;-)

It's actually the way i like marketing best. In this brave new world at least, the golden marketing rules basically seem to be:

1) Keep the interactions real!
2) Keep the content relevant!
3) Talk about the ups and downs of your product (and maybe learn from it)
4) Let the customers enjoy your online identity with humor
5) Let them participate in the discussion that revolves around you
6) Don't just pitch yourself. Can you say boooring!

Even Coke has figured out how to do it correctly. They have the second most popular FaceBook page on the site with something like over 385 Trillion fans (or was that the US deficit $). They have a nice looking page with constantly update imagery and comments.

I made a comment about friend or fan quantity not equaling quality a while back and added "except maybe for Twitter". Well scratch that. In a nutshell the only difference between marketing on Twitter and FaceBook is that you do it all in sentences no longer than 140 characters. So what does that mean??

How it's done on these different sites:

Well on FaceBook you get to set up a neat looking page (which they change the appearance of randomly, thanks) and upload media, start or participate in discussions, list events, etc and wait and build up your fan base. Once this fan base is built up you can blast the whole group with announcements and keep the love alive.

With Twitter you get to (and have to BTW) do all those things. You just do it in said 140 characters. So one might ask, how do i upload my 200MB video if all i get is a little box that accepts only 140 characters?? Well one answer is FaceBook. Everything you upload there can be linked to. But have you seen the size of their links. ouch. I think most are about 200 characters long, so where's the room for the marketing message?

Well I'm glad you asked.

Thanks to a tweet from my SEO Mentor Jill Whalen at High Rankings I found out about a great short URL service called "Cligs". It's like tiny url but it gives you analytics tracking so you can tell how many people used your link. Yay. You can turn a huge link into a few characters and have plenty of room for your short, sweet and relevant comment.

A little wrap up:

I did an expirement and had some pretty interesting "short cycle" results. I found that if you search the topic your marketing on search.twitter.com, find really relevant results that you can @reply to and point out your clig url you can get about 50 hits in a day with about 10 minutes of work. Since this is taking advantage of the search on Twitter and activity happens at a fast rate, your reply will drop off the charts quuickly too. But the point is you can have a direct impact with little effort a day and get youself noticed. 50 hits/day X 365 Days = 18,250/year hits for 10 minutes a day. Not bad ROI and not a bad way to build that fan base.

That stratergy should be part of the bigger goal to do on Twitter what you do on FaceBook, build up a fan base. On Twitter your building up a "following". Same animal. Like the best practices of any social marketing you should do the following:

• Reply to only relevant tweets. If you reply to a tweet about someone not feeling well with a comment that points out your vacation web site, you'll get a resounding go F... yourself. If you reply to a tweet about not feeling well with a comment that is real and point them to this great site you know of with self help remedies for their ailment, you'll get a thank you and widely noticed. Maybe even pick up a few followers
• Worry about your Twitter reputation. That means talk about something besides your product. Talk about your life, be part of the "community" not just a marketer. That later will bore and annoy people. Actually contribute.
• Follow people and get people to follow you. This is one of the more important long term goals with Twitter (and the others). When you have a big following and you make that comment that mentions the wonderul web site with the self help books, your followers get it right in their Twitter homepage.
• Remember with all social marketing, put it out their as a friend not a seller of something. How would you feel about your FaceBook friends loading you up with a sales pitch??
  

Labels: facebook, myspace, social marketing, twitter

posted by adam @ 5:20 AM