The Twitter Marketing Blog

The great thing about Internet marketing is that it is very measurable – in most respects, much more so than traditional forms of advertising. Using Twitter to brand and promote your business is no different. There are many tools available for you to use to measure the reach and performance of your Twitter marketing. This post will discuss just a few of them.

TwitterAnalyzer.com

This is a full-fledged analytics application that provides a lot of information about your account. Initially, you supply it with your user name and it will show a graph with the number of updates to your account every day for the last month. Even more useful is another chart that will show the number of times your user name has been mentioned in others' updates. This is a real measure of your account's popularity. What you want to see if your user name being mentioned more and more often. This is a very useful tool that you should take advantage of to measure how effective your tweeting is.

TwitterStats.net

This is a keyword trend tool. It lets you type a single keyword, or up to three keywords, which will be displayed on a graph that shows the number of times the keyword or keywords were used every hour for the last 24 hours. It will also list a number of tweets that contain the keyword. Ideally, you could type in your own Twitter user name and see how many people had referenced your account, but you will probably not receive very accurate results because there will likely be a lot of data from keywords that contain your target keyword. But it's still an interesting and simple tool.

TweetBuzzer.com

This is a tool that counts the number of references to "brands." A brand can be any keyword, but obviously the point is to measure how many people are mentioning the name of your company or your product. To add your brand to the system, you just type it into a textbox and submit. You then have to wait for it to be approved. Brands are displayed in a live scrolling list of updates as they are mentioned in updates.

Tweetiator.com

This tool allows you to view who is tweeting links to your web site or blog content. It requires that you install a JavaScript script on every web page that you want to track. Another caveat is that it only tracks a link that has been clicked at least once. The service costs $4.95 per month, but it does offer a free trial.

Twitter can be an important part of your online branding and search engine marketing campaign. The more knowledge you have, the better you can fine tune that campaign. There are many options beyond those mentioned here, but these will give you a good start in learning how you are doing with your Twitter marketing efforts.

One of my goals for the new year is to write at least 30 minutes every day, which should allow me enough time to do a much better job of updating this and our other search engine marketing blogs. In the meantime, I just want to say:

Happy New Year! 2010 here we come!

Twitter's Goodies section has a page that allows you to download a button to install on your web site that makes it very easy for anyone to follow you. There are a whole array of button sizes, from a tiny t in a box that looks to be about 20 pixels wide, to something more substantial that has a picture of the little blue Twitter bird.

I have noticing these things popping up all over the place and have even clicked on it a couple of times. We've talked before about streaming your Twitter updates to your web site (which is very easy using one of the Twitter gadgets), so it just makes sense to also give your visitors a very easy way to follow you.

The page is located here:

http://twitter.com/goodies/buttons

Clicking one of the buttons will open up a small textbox that contains the code that you use to place the button on your site. You don't have to worry about downloading a graphic because it is hosted on Twitter's servers. So all you have to do is copy the code it gives you and place it on your web pages wherever you want it to appear. I suggest placing on all the major pages of your site. If your site uses a template or include files this is simple because you will only have to paste it into a single file.

This is a subtle little piece of Twitter marketing that will not get you in trouble and will help build your follower list in an organic manner.

You can now update your Twitter account every time you update your LinkedIn account. If you aren't familiar with LinkedIn, it is the top social networking site for business professionals. It is similar in concept to Facebook...only instead of reading about people doing laundry or eating a sandwich, you can actually have intelligent business-oriented conversation with potential referral sources or clients.

Like any social networking web site, it is critical that you log into your LinkedIn account and update your status often. The more involvement you have with the site, the more effective it will be for you for generating business. Unlike Twitter, where the MAIN thing is posting your updates, which really doesn't require you to log into the Twitter web site, with LinkedIn, you actually need to log into the site to use it.

So if you're going to log into LinkedIn to update your status, you might as well update Twitter at the same time. Doing so is very simple. There is a little Twitter icon and button next to the status box that you click to integrate your account with Twitter. After adding Twitter, you can click a checkbox to turn Twitter on or off, in case there are some updates you don't want to appear in your Twitter account.

If you just use your Twitter account to talk about day-to-day stuff or nonsense, then none of this matters anyway. But if you are a business person looking to use Twitter for business (to generate leads or make connections), then start using LinkedIn, and use its Twitter integration feature.

I have an imaginary character I use for a Twitter account that is mostly updates from news feeds. But people absolutely love the guy. I do sometimes post commentary in his name as well. But I don't do a whole lot of social type stuff like retweeting or making reference to other users' names. Not because I'm an asshole, but because I just don't have much time to spend on this account.

One Friday just for kicks I did a follow friday post (#FF) with a few names of people who regularly retweet my news links in this account. And it caused an explosion of retweets and reFF's. It definitely reinforced what I discussed in an earlier blog post about how people love to see their names in others' tweets.

I really think making reference to other users is a critical part of using Twitter as a marketing strategy. Personally, I always thought the Follow Friday thing was a little goofy. But if you're gonna do this stuff, you've got to do what is effective. And one of the best ways to get your name spread around is to spread around the names of others.

I do, however, think this technique is more effective is you use it with users who are genuinely good people to follow or with whom you have had some kind of interaction. I know of at least one program that automatically does Follow Fridays for random names in your account. I'm not sure that is a good idea. You don't really want to be passing around names of people who are nothing but spammers or who contribute nothing to the Twitter universe. Use the power of the #FF to reward those whose names deserve to be spread around.

For the record, I am embarrassed by the lack of updates the last couple of months. Business at Work Media is quite good. Unfortunately, the better business does, the less time I have for the fun stuff...like writing about Twitter. I will try to do better.

Twitter has unveiled its new "list" feature. This will come in very handy for those who have made it their goal to follow many other users as part of a Twitter follower building strategy. It lets you segment those you follow into lists. So if there is a core group of people you really like to read, but their updates are mixed in with updates from hundreds or thousands of other users you really don't care that much about, you can set them up in a list so that you have a way of just reading those updates.

To create a list, click on the Create a New List button. On the next screen, you give your list a name and add users to it. You can search for users using the search text box, but you are probably going to want to add existing users you follow to the list. To do that, you just have to visit those users' Twitter pages, then click the Lists button at the top. Your newly created list will appear as an option. Click on the list name to add that particular user to the list.

One interesting feature of lists is that you can follow someone else's list. So if there is another Twitter user you really like, and you think he is tied into a good group of users for what you are trying to accomplish, you can follow one or more of his lists to instantly follow many of the people he is following without having to go through the work of manually searching for those people.

If you have multiple Twitter accounts, it is also a good way to help explode those accounts' followers by putting all of your own accounts in a list. Anyone who follows your list will then be following all of your own accounts.

This is a great new feature by Twitter and one that you should definitely experiment with.

Jerry Work here. For people like me, properly using Twitter (i.e., actually logging into my account and posting updates) requires discipline. I am not a chatty person. Even in the online world. I'm just not naturally conversational, especially when I'm busy.

Business has been up and down this year, which means there have been times when I've had plenty of time for social media experiments. During those times, I would post to Twitter often. Then I would get busy, and I would pretty much let my account run itself with automation.

And that is fine to an extent. But you really do miss out on the human element...and ultimately that is the point. Putting messages on autopilot is fine if it is your intention to build up huge lists of followers to try and sell stuff to.

Lord knows there is a lot of that going on.

But if you're not just trying to sell stuff, but are looking instead to make connections, talk to interesting people, learn, and hopefully do some business...then you've got to check in. Work Media has been so dang busy the last few weeks that I have not checked in. And certainly I am costing myself many potentially interesting or prosperous interactions.

However...business is good, and it's nose to the grind to keep up. I can't complain. The problem for people like me is finding the balance. For people like me...

it just comes down to discipline.