The world is saturated with twits, tweets, and tweeps. Everyone, from Oprah to NPR has decided that this is the most brilliant application ever devised by man. They constantly cite it, talk about it, and overhype it to the Nth degree.
The one thing they never explain about twitter is how it is intended to be used. They don’t explain the reTweet, or spambot followers. They just tell random people to get online, and drop their thoughts, in 140 characters or less, of course.
It’s not their fault, really, as twitter doesn’t really have a defined purpose. The idea is that it is supposed to enable real-time communication, sort of a text message broadcast to the entire world. The actual purpose of tweets are left up to the users’ imaginations.
It was too much for me to get my mind wrapped around when I started, that is for sure. With this in mind, I’d like to tell you a couple uses that will make twitter a valuable investment of your time.
This article will serve a very practical purpose, both for the novice user of twitter, and for those who have lost interest: It’ll tell you how, what, and why to follow certain users, along with giving you the ability to find and organize that data in a meaningful manner.
With that in mind, let’s begin. There are around 7 major types of twitter users. Your interests will determine which of these folks it would be in your best interest to follow:
1. Newsies: The New York Times, Tribune Media, Huffington Post, Drudge Report, and various other news agencies use twitter as a point of distribution for their articles. Updates commonly carry newly published content, or respond to readers of their content, which will naturally drive new readers to their site.
2. Gurus: These people, like Tony Robbin or Robert Kiyosaki(of Rich Dad, Poor Dad fame) use their accounts to push out mini-seminars. Their updates range from the inspirational to motivational, deliver news updates, and of course, push product in-between.
3. Gossip Gals: They don’t miss a single controversy. It doesn’t matter how small, these girls(and guys—think Perez Hilton) won’t let it rest. While TMZ and the Smoking Gun throw out some really interesting stuff, I wouldn’t put it in the category of “news”.
4. Info-Marketers: Pushing everything from get-rich-schemes, to plugging their latest eBook, these folks peddle all things downloadable. They are always mentioning some resource that seems designed to help you make money, but will make them money instead.
5. Regular Marketers: Generally, tweeps of this ilk are pushing a physical product, or building up that brand. You’ll see everyone from tire companies to toilet paper purveyors interacting with their customers and fans. To spice things up, fun facts and interesting news are served with soft-sell promotional tactics.
6. Power Tweeters: This is an odd group. They generally tweet about anything and everything. Most of the time, they are female in gender, and are a mixture of Gossip Gals and Newsie fare, with a spatter of hometown chatter. They never sell anything. Many times, they will live-tweet their thoughts on concerts, television shows, and fashion.
7. Everyone Else: This encompasses roughly 97% of the twitterverse. They followed a few people, didn’t learn how to link, reTweet, or even reply inside of twitter. Eventually, they get tired of the whole thing, and move back to playing “Mafia Wars” on facebook.
While there are sub-groups within every group, these are where the lines are generally drawn. The most important takeaway from this breakdown is the following: Most people on twitter are trying to sell you something. Now that you know who’s online, how can you get the most out of twitter?
Glad you asked. The first thing to get is a twitter client. For the purpose of this article, we’re going with TweetDeck, a leader in the twitter client arena. It’s easy to use. Download it, open it up, enter your username and password…and magically, you have a bird’s eye view of everything happening in twitter(or at least who you are following, and their activity).
You’ll see your live twitter feed on the far left, in-between you’ll find any replies that have been made to your messages(if you’ve just opened an account, there won’t be any messages here), and on the far right, your direct messages(private messages between you and another user that are not broadcast to other users).
The first thing you should do is find twitterers who meet your basic informational needs. For that, I actually prefer to use google, as it generally does a better job of finding who, or what you are looking for than twitter’s native search service. Google your local station’s call sign and add twitter to the end.(e.g. WKPY twitter). Let’s say we were searching for a our local station in New Mexico. We’d follow @KOBTV. That will be useful for weather alerts, local news, and community events.
Next, get a national news feed you trust. CNN, MSNBC, and Fox all have twitter feeds kicking out news at the speed of type. You can now see what is making waves at the national level, along with any upcoming special reports.
Now comes the fun part…your interests. Love tech…grab @TechCrunch. Need your daily fix of stats and scores: Follow @ESPN. Pick 2-3 twittering entities that don’t overlap. For instance, unless you just love too much information, don’t follow ABC, NBC, and CBS news.
From there, it’s time to find interesting people to follow. See if your favorite celebrities, nobel laureates, or trashmen are online. Check out their profile online, either by searching google with their name, followed by twitter, or by going to their website, and finding out what it is. This is probably the greatest chance at interaction with the rich and infamous that you will get. Rainn Wilson(Dwight Schrute of “The Office”) is one celebrity with particularly interest thoughts, links, and conversation.
You have a base of good, solid tweets that you are now following. Here comes the fun part. There are people around the world having conversations about the latest news, movies, restaurants, whatever. Now, you just have to find them. Pull up the search feature in TweetDeck. There are two ways to search: hashtag, or plain text. Hashtags denote a post in a certain category. For instance, if you were looking for all the updates that include the President, but don’t actually mention him in the body, this is the easiest way to search. If you are just looking for all mentions of Barack Obama, you would enter his name in plain text.
Searching in TweetDeck will open a column that automatically updates each time the search term is mentioned. For instance, you could keep a column opened for any topics you are interested in, and monitor them in real-time. I like to keep an eye on precious metals, mining, and tire news(boring, I know). When I am monitoring twitter, I keep a #gold, #silver, #mining, and #tires tab open, so that I can keep abreast of what is happening. It’s like a stock ticker. Glance, see something you like, and read any article links that come through. If I see someone who is tweeting regularly about a topic I am interested in, I follow them, so I can see any of their general tweets as well. Rinse and repeat for each topic you have an interest in, and the list of people you follow will be over 100 in no time.
Now, for the bad part: Taking out the trash. Twitter is full of people who will spam you, by doing the most flattering thing of all: following your account. Since twitter sends you an email notification that someone is a follower, your curiosity makes you want to check them out. Many times, they will masquerade as a female in a bathing suit(or less). Their names will often be followed by a dash with a 4-digit number. You should immediately go to your follower page, and hit “report as spam”. This helps twitter eliminate them from the roster, and keeps any of your followers from checking their garbage out.
On a lesser note, I try to clean out people I follow from time-to-time. Some of them have reverted to inane chatter, instead of providing important news. Even worse, they are tweeting more often, and saying even less. If you are spending time in twitter, make sure that dump a few people to keep things uncluttered.
Some of you might be wondering how to get legitimate followers. It’s simple advice: Be you. If you are chatty, be chatty. Talk about your interests. ReTweet things from others that you find interesting. Be consistent. Spend time on twitter. The more you are engaged with others, the more likely it is that people will like, and follow what you have to say.
Now, let’s recap how to get the most out of twitter:
1. Know the major categories of Twitterers. Filter them out based upon your interests.
2. Get a twitter client, like TweetDeck, to help you manage the vast streams of information coming through.
3. Make sure you are following a local news station, national news station, and sources that cover any informational gaps that you might have.
4. Follow celebrities that are active and intelligent.
5. Use search and hashtags to sort out topics and people to follow that are of interest to you.
6. Take out the trash regularly to make sure your feed isn’t overloaded with garbage. Block or report bots as spam.
7. Gain more followers by contributing to the conversation, and being yourself.
That’s all for now. There are far more advanced methods of tweeting, following, and being heard. Most of those methods are custom rules, developed by each user. You wouldn’t think publishing a message would need rules. After all, how complex should sending out 140 characters be?
Evidently, as complex as we can possibly make something that has no definable purpose.
Kurt Hartman
With a husband and two teenage boys, Laura Betterly is among the 72 percent of mothers with children one year or older who are in the workforce. She is also the CEO of In Touch Media Group, Inc. (www.intouchmediagroup.com), a full-service marketing company that specializes in using the Internet as a public relations and advertising tool. While acknowledging that her high-powered career allows her to take advantage of services that aren’t accessible to lower income mothers, Betterly maintains that every woman can develop the skills necessary to balance work and family.
“For women, balancing a career and family doesn’t have to be a high wire act – it just requires a bit of juggling,” says Betterly. “Prioritization, organization, and delegation are key to achieving the balance that allows a woman to enjoy a rich family life while also gaining fulfillment from her career.”
Betterly continues, “Prioritizing is the process of realizing that you can’t do it all, deciding what’s important, and not sweating the small stuff.” Although she likes to provide her family with home-cooked meals, Betterly would rather spend time with her sons than in front of the stove every night. “I go to a place called Get Cooking Now, where I can make twelve dishes in their kitchen all at once,” she says. “I bring them home, freeze them, and am able to give my family good, nutritious meals without a lot of preparation time or mess.”
Betterly also carves out more family time by being organized and streamlining other household tasks. “I do all of our personal banking and bill paying online, and use Quicken to track all of our expenditures and due dates,” she says. And, if you’re on Betterly’s gift list, you can count on the fact that what’s inside the box came from an online source. “I utilize the Internet for gift shopping, especially at holiday time,” she says. “I can find everything I’m looking for online, and I’d rather spend time with my husband and sons than traipse through shopping malls.”
Finally, Betterly is a firm believer in delegation. “Each member of the family has a list of jobs to do around the house, like taking out the garbage, washing the clothes, and doing the dishes,” she says. “By delegating chores, the boys have learned that their contributions are important to our family, and that we have more time for fun.”
And what does Betterly, her husband steve blom, and sons Craig and Chris do with their extra time? “We go to movies, concerts, visit friends, and barbecue,” she says. “Plus, I’m getting pretty good at play the Digital Dance Revolution video game with the boys.”
Betterly concludes, “As women, we don’t have to make a choice between work and family. With a few skills and some practice, we can juggle the two beautifully.”
Kris Nickerson
http://www.articlesbase.com/women’s-issues-articles/laura-betterly-balancing-career-and-family-64981.html
A lot of people are confused by the term “social media marketing” and believe that it is only advertising on a social networking site, where networks monitor what users are doing and place ads next to them, hoping they will get a click. However, social media marketing is actually about different kinds of collaborations between people and finding ways that individual fans of a particular brand product or even a company can endorse it themselves on various social media sites like MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and others.
Social media marketing differs from industrial media marketing in that industrial media generally uses very expensive tools requiring a great deal of financial capital to publish its information, where as social media marketing uses fairly inexpensive tools that enables anyone anywhere to publish or access information. Both social media and industrial media have the capability to reach a small audience of one or two, or large audiences of millions. However, the time lag is generally much longer between a communications from industrial media as compared to social media when responses can be instantaneous. In addition, there are currently few, if any, limitations on social media such as on pages or hours. The audiences are encouraged to be active participants, to add comments, or blog or even edit articles or stories, as they deem necessary.
Social media optimization, or SMO, uses methods that generate publicity through social media and online community websites. There are many different types of technologies and applications for social media like blogs, vlogs, wikis, emails, podcasts, instant messaging and many more. Two of the most popular reference services are Google and Wikipedia. You can share photos at Flickr, videos at YouTube, personal music at Last.fm, microblog on Jaiku and Twitter. Besides the now universally known Facebook and MySpace, you can also go social networking on Avatars United, Youmeo and Second Life (social network via virtual reality).
Experts insist that social media is here to stay. Companies are now recognizing the need to be more involved in social media marketing, because it is through these channels that they can hear most quickly and honestly what consumers need and want. Businesses are learning that they now no longer wield absolute control over the behavior and buying decisions of their consumers. By paying attention, for instance, to a pro- or anti- product blog from a consumer, marketers have access to open customer discussions they never had before and then, in turn, open their own dialogue to be able to drive the needed change quickly.
Social media marketing opens up a world of fast-flowing creative experimentation where an idea can be tested online in the morning and by afternoon there is a response. Social media techniques should be combined into the marketing mix to optimize the places where the impact can be maximized. The key element in successful social media marketing is to be swift but make sure to drive change in proactive way rather than being reactive.
SEO Sapien
http://www.articlesbase.com/marketing-articles/understanding-social-media-marketing-702141.html
World-wide, people use Google to search the internet almost 200 million times a day . . . every day of the year.
And research in the United States indicates that in more than one third of those searches, the user is actively looking for a product or service to buy (source: Bizrate.com – Kelsey Group survey)
Some 70% of American households now use the Internet as an information source when shopping locally for products and services (Source: ConStat – Kelsey Group survey).
And 85% of Google users in the US have made an online purchase in the last six months (Source: ComScore Media Metrix).
Stats like those have made good exposure on the world’s number one search engine a business necessity in more and more industries.
But as you’re no doubt aware . . . achieving a top position amongst the natural search results on Google is like a mirage in the desert for many companies.
It’s no wonder then that over 800,000 businesses around the world so far have decided that the answer, in part at least, is Google’s pay-per-click program.
Where Do I Get Started?
So you would like to create your own AdWords success story but you don’t know where to get started . . . right?
There are literally thousands of web sites and blogs that post articles to the web on this subject matter, ranging from outright amateur through to professional. In almost every case, the publishing model is ‘ad supported’, so access is free.
Quality issues aside (which are significant), the single biggest limitation with these resources from a user perspective is the piecemeal nature of the information discovery process. No one site offers a step-by-step training course online.
Whilst many web articles are individually useful, information overload (and double handling) make this route a frustration for many who want to learn about the AdWords program from the bottom up.
There are currently three books available on this topic:
“Winning Results with Google AdWords”
by Andrew Goodman
“Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords”
by Perry Marshall
“AdWords for Dummies”
by Howie Jacobson
All three books are listed on Amazon.com at US$24.95, but only the last title is suitable for beginners . . . the other two assume some experience.
If the idea of wading through several hundred pages of dry text on this subject doesn’t appeal, then head on over to the author’s web site where you’ll find the only step-by-step AdWords boot camp available on DVD.
Watch and learn about AdWords marketing from the comfort of your couch on television instead!
Gary Elley
http://www.articlesbase.com/entrepreneurship-articles/adwords-marketing-how-to-get-started-699465.html