I had five minutes to share some 'best practices' and 'real-life' twittering stories with my fellow co-workers on an internal Twitter 101 Session that our Social Media Marketing Manager put together. The attendees where mostly sales and marketing colleagues. It is a relatively new program we have in place, and i applaud them for taking this step. They went through general how-tos which would be useful for any new user.
My notes outline follows at the request of @tjsweeney to share some context of what i talked about.
- I have been tweeting since March 2007, currently have 2,811 followers (since the presentation it has gone up to 2821) and have over 4,000 tweets (so tweeting for 1601 days so an average of 2.5 tweets a day)
- I started tweeting during the famous 2007 SXSW Twitter tipping point- where Twitter hit 'mainstream' well the mainstream of Silicon valley that is. During that conference, tweets went from 20,000 tweets per day to 60,000 tweets per day. We all shook our heads and said how will i manage all this? Today there are over 200 million tweets per day. I still find value every day in my tweet stream.
- I use Twitter to be smarter, hopefully provide some value to my followers and to help me build my personal 'brand'
- How do i let people know i tweet? Beyond engaging with them if they are on Twitter, i link at bottom of my corporate and personal email (currently linking to my aboutme page) and also tie it into my LinkedIn account- when i tweet it gets posted there- provides a somewhat different follower list
- I currently use Tweetdeck to manage my streams, Blackberry Twitter or Twitter Ipad when i am on the road. Flipboard i use mostly in the evenings to catch up on my evening 'tweets' and deeper reads
- Have various saved searches on Tweetdeck (e.g. Competitive Intelligence, Librarians, Supply Chain, Enterprise Sales, semantic web) and follow companies and people who are prospects/clients or just plain smart peeps.
- Lists are very helpful, and there are a lot of wonderfully curated lists or you can create your own and make them private or public
- Hashtags- for example to follow a conference like #sla2011 , even if you are not there you can still 'attend' and interact
- I use bit.ly to shorten my URLs and find their tracking data very valuable to see how many clicked on my link.
- I have many Clients who follow me- i can see that they follow me but they also tell me- often before a meeting starts instead of talking about the weather we might talk about a certain tweet i made earlier in the day- and vice versa- i try not to get on the phone with a client without checking their 'output channel'
- I have clients who Direct Message (DM) me and i might do the same to them i find the engagement and response rate to be much higher
- To my last point, Twitter has a big vanity aurora around it. regardless of who you are you want to see who retweeted, @ed you, DMd you , favortied your tweet- instantaneously
- I spend a lot of time finding (mostly through google search although i recently found the twitter advanced search feature) and listening to what prospects may be saying . One thing i try to do sometimes is wait for someone to tweet something - then i know they are in front of a device (laptop,mobile,table etc.)- per my previous vanity point, they want to see who replied. i might not reply through twitter because what i want to talk to them about is not a conversation to start there - but i might send an email or give them a ring because i can assume they are working on their 'device' and are connected
Tweet away my friends.
1 comment :
Excellent and helpful recap! Thanks again for sharing!
Post a Comment