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How to Use Twitter for Marketing & PR

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Twitter is a tool for "micro-blogging" or posting very short updates, comments or thoughts.  In fact, since Twitter was designed to be very compatible with mobile phones through text messages, each update is limited to 140 characters.  Truly, a micro-blog.  Another way to think of Twitter is like a cross between instant messaging (IM) and a chat room, because it is an open forum, but you restrict it to the people with which you connect.

I have to admit I have not always been sold on Twitter.  At first I did not get it at all.  Then I thought I understood it, but thought it was stupid and useless.  Then I used it a bit more and got some more followers and followed a few more people.  Now I think it has some value.

Ideas for How to Use Twitter for Marketing & PR

  1. Engage your CEO in social media.  Social media is a great way to have a conversation with your market and make and mange connections with prospects, customers, bloggers and other influencers.  But for a CEO, the typical routes to social media can be hard.  Especially if you are a larger or global company.  A CEO typically has little time to write a blog or answer lots of messages and friend requests on Facebook.  I cannot tell you how many CEO blogs I have seen with only 1 or 2 posts because the CEO never had time to update the blog after the first couple entries.  But, Twitter is limited to 140 characters per update, so it is all about short thoughts and comments.  If your CEO can send a text message, they can use Twitter from anywhere in the world.  Twitter is actually perfect for CEO or founder who is always on the road meeting with people and who has some interesting opinions on your market.
  2. Keep in touch with bloggers / media.  It is really easy to follow someone on Twitter (see below). And you'll be surprised how often they decide to follow you as well.  In fact, I have 3-4 people I consider "famous" in the marketing world following me.  In my opinion, this is a way easier way to connect with influential people in the media than calling and emailing them.
  3. Monitor your company / brand on Twitter.  A while back we noticed that Guy Kawasaki mentioned Website Grader on Twitter.  Well, of course we had to let him know a bit more about Website Grader and maybe ask if he would also blog about it?  The result was this blog article on Website Grader which drove a good amount of traffic and leads.  (See below for a cool tip on how to easily monitor people talking about your company on Twitter.)
  4. Announce specials, deals or sales.  If you are a retailer or anyone who often has special offers, you can use Twitter to announce these deals instantly to a large audience.  You know those commercials from Southwest Airlines about that "Ding" application you could download and would then alert you about specials on flights?  Well, Twitter can be used as a kind of free version of that.
  5. Live updates on events or conferences.  If you participate in a large trade show or run your own corporate event, you can use Twitter to announce last minute changes, cool events that are happening ("Just announced, David Meerman Scott book signing in the exhibit hall until 11am")
  6. Promote blog articles, webinars, interesting news and more.  Its really easy to post a link to something in twitter, and I often post links to blog articles on this blog, or other news articles relevant to HubSpot.  A good idea is to post articles on other websites that are relevant to your business, like a customer success story or other PR coverage.  If you have other content that is appealing to your audience like a free webinar, post links to those too.

Using Twitter for Marketing & PR - A Step-by-Step Guide

  1. Sign-up and post a profile.  Visit Twitter and click on the "Get Started - Join" button in the middle.  The rest is simple enough that I think you can figure it out without my help.
  2. Write some updates.  The beauty of Twitter is that the 140 character limit is the great equalizer - I am about as good of a writer as Shakespeare on Twitter.  Post a link to a news article you liked with a one line comment, mention an interesting thought you had, or tell everyone what you are cooking for dinner.  Just write something.
  3. Make friends.  Making friends on Twitter is pretty easy.  Just surf around the web on your favorite blogs, people's Facebook profiles etc, and when you see a Twitter box that tells you what they are doing click on it.  That will bring you to their profile and then you just click on the "Follow" button on the top left and you are now following them.  Most of the time they will then follow you back, and the audience for your 140 character insights will have grown by one person.  If you need a friend I would be happy to be your first follower, just follow me to let me know: Mike Volpe on Twitter.  You can also click on the people that other people are following,
  4. How to post URLs.  Twitter is based on 140 character updates.  If you have a really long URL, that doesn't leave much room for  Most people on Twitter use www.TinyURL.com to take a long URL and make it short.  Give it a shot if you have a long URL.
  5. Monitor conversations about your company.  Even if you don't join Twitter yourself you can monitor what people are saying.  Terraminds is a Twitter search engine that lets you do just this.  For instance, here is a list of everyone who is talking about HubSpot on Twitter.  You can subscribe to these searches by RSS to keep yourself updated.  Another tip is that you can "follow" all the people you find talking about your company (just click on their username to go to their profile).  If they are talking about your company, they would probably be pretty happy that someone from the company wants to follow them.
  6. How to "chat".  Using the @ symbol before someone's Twitter username is how people have "conversations" in Twitter.  This makes their usernane a link to their profile so other people can follow the conversation (sort of).  For example if you wrote "@mvolpe70 thanks for the cool blog article about Twitter today" that would be a way of telling me you liked this article. Try it out.  Its not IM (instant messaging), but it is sort of like a public broadcast IM service.

Have you tried to use Twitter for marketing?  Has it been successful?  Why or why not?

 

Posted by Mike Volpe on Wed, Mar 05, 2008 @ 09:51 AM

COMMENTS

Please be our friend...puh-leeeease???
www.twitter.com/5alarmmusic
:)

posted on Wednesday, March 05, 2008 at 1:27 PM by Production Music Library


@5 alarm music - done!

posted on Wednesday, March 05, 2008 at 1:42 PM by


I blogged about exactly the same topic today. The first thing I recommend clients consider when thinking about Twitter marketing is to ask their clients and prospects if they Twitter. If you get blank stares it might be best to hold off for now.....

posted on Wednesday, March 05, 2008 at 2:26 PM by Outsmarts


I think Twitter is a great and fun site...It has a lot of potentials...also the people there are pretty friendly and helpful.

posted on Wednesday, March 05, 2008 at 4:23 PM by Internet Marketing Joy


would love to follow you LOL....
http://twitter.com/ethnicomm
tks :)

posted on Wednesday, March 05, 2008 at 11:40 PM by Bhupesh Shah


@Bhupesh Shah - you got it!

posted on Wednesday, March 05, 2008 at 11:54 PM by


Mike,
Our <A HREF="http://twitter.com/LAFD">agency experiment</A> has proven that success with Twitter is limited only by your imagination.
Thanks for the always enjoyable site!
Respectfully Yours in Safety and Service,
Brian Humphrey
Firefighter/Specialist
Public Sercice Officer
Los Angeles Fire Department

posted on Thursday, March 06, 2008 at 5:32 PM by Brian Humphrey


to be a twitter user is really cool

posted on Thursday, March 06, 2008 at 9:46 PM by amelia


Well... why not?
Here is mine, I would be glad to follow you guys.
http://twitter.com/buyandwalk

posted on Wednesday, March 12, 2008 at 4:46 PM by Federico Muñoa


Twitter is definitely catching on, it is another tool to add to promo arsenal. It speaks highly to web 2.0 and the future of marketing.

posted on Saturday, March 15, 2008 at 9:54 PM by Missy


I just visited your site by chance on the normal web crawl we do nightly and got stuck listening to and watching your "make your site a marketing machine" video presentation,. Excellent job, well done, it has helped me and whilst listening i could not help but make the changes, not all obviously, its taken me 5 years tio get we we are in a very competative industry, we WILL become clients of yours this year!

posted on Wednesday, March 19, 2008 at 8:31 PM by debt help Uk


Hi Mike Volpe,Great Information.
Thanks

posted on Tuesday, March 25, 2008 at 11:49 PM by Gregory



Awesome tips!
Thank you for sharing!
Webmaster and money makers, please add me on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/MoneyMakers

posted on Monday, May 26, 2008 at 2:40 AM by Debbie Johnson


Added you Debbie Johnson, please add me too: http://twitter.com/jasonlowjy

posted on Monday, May 26, 2008 at 2:45 AM by jason


It'll be great to follow each other as we are like minded people.
http://twitter.com/NetworkMarketer
Followed the rest above.
:)

posted on Monday, May 26, 2008 at 2:46 AM by Daegan Joel


Awesome article. I'm definitely atwitter about Twitter as I see it as a simple, easy way to blog without getting glassy eyed at the computer. It's a terrific marketing and PR tool that can be fun in the process!

posted on Thursday, June 05, 2008 at 11:53 PM by Paula


We feel that twitter is so easy to use and it offers so much potential for marketing on a budget

posted on Thursday, July 03, 2008 at 7:54 AM by IVA debt advice UK


------------------------------------------------ 
Dave Winer, father of RSS says “Twitter, as it was conceived, was never meant to live.” 
 
“It’s very possible with better engineering its architecture might have gone on for a few more years, but eventually it would have hit this wall, where there were too many people posting too many twits to too many followers. The scale of the system as conceived rises exponentially.” 
 
So is the end of Twitter getting near? I hope not. Twitter I hope that you are listening and you better start taking things more seriously. 
----------------------------------------------- 
 
Here's my two cents. 
 
For instance there are about 100m users of yahoo messenger and usually 2-3 of them talk at a time that means scalability of 300m conversations. On the other hand with 100m twitter users who usually send messages to 100-10,000 other users the scalability required is 10,000m to 10^6m I have never known any current architecture based on webservers to handle such a scale. So according to me Twitter was never meant to live. It is like a concept car that will never see production. Users of twitter don't understand this and they don't care.  
They don't know whats happening when the website is down. The sad part is that the best analysts claim that Twitter is a billion dollar company in one year of operations. There is an old saying before the days of when people understood permutation combinations. One peasant asked a king to give him rice equal to the total amount gotten by placing double the number of rice grains on a chess square than the previous square, starting with one rice grain. There are 8x8=64 squares. We seriously need to visit grade 7 mathematics.  
 
I know of only one News/Messaging system that supports around 1 billion users sending messages to all 1 billion users each. Thats a scalability of 10^12m. It is not Web based but rather on a massively scalable serverless P2P architecture based. The team is soft spoken and when I last talked to them I was told that they don't care about money or hype or fame but rather for just the passion of next generation global systems that will stand the test of worldwide use. Its called Mermaid News <a href="http://mermaid.metaaso.com"> Mermaid </a> 
 
They have other softwares too but this post is about Twitter and Messaging. Once everyone comprehends basic mathematics that goes behind scalable algorithms they would go past the flashy screen and hype to actually want a system they can trust. To the analysts I would say it is easy to create a business plan, create a hype and raise $20m funding it is far more difficult to create something of use. 
 

posted on Friday, July 04, 2008 at 9:02 AM by peter parker


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