Tweet, Tweet, Tweet…. That use to be something you would here from an episode with Tweety Bird and Sylvester the Cat, …. I taw I saw a Pussy Tat… I did, I did! Well, this time it is more likely to be the tapping of typing keyboards as everyone is frantically tweeting on Twitter and telling the world in 140 characters “What are you doing”, the latest craze in social networking.
And what stir it has created. A compete.com blog entry put Twitter users in February 2009 between 4-5 million with other website analytics sites putting its growth at around 1382% (Check it out on Wikipedia). That is huge by any means!
If you have already checked it out or if you have no idea what I am talking about, then I want to talk through a couple points on what it is, what it could mean for your business or website and offer you some tools to make it even easier to manage your “tweets” and “followers” so you, like every other Twitter person can be letting the world know “What are you doing?”
Twitter - it is a free social networking website where you can basically post short 140 character messages or what is called a micro-blog post for other users that you are connected to, called “followers”, so they can read your posts and you can read theirs. These small mirco-blog posts are also called “tweets”, and can be easily posted by logging into Twitter on your computer, iphone or portable internet device. So, no matter where you are in the world, your followers will always be up to date on what you are doing. You can even SMS your updates via mobile in certain countries : ).
Now think about the possbilities – imagine news feeds come through on the latest world news, so that you are getting short snippets or headlines of news that you can then selective look at reading more on that new post. If you follow a person that information on topic you are interested in, you can get this information rapidly by checking out their tweets. The list goes on. But what does this mean to your website and business. Well, here are some ways you could leverage Twitter, no matter what niche market you are in.
1. Finding and Connecting with people interested in your niche. Twitter now has a search function on the right hand side, so you can find and follow people that are talking about a particular topic / keyword. Once they are following you, they will see your Tweets, so you can add value through useful updates and then start to link through to your websites. Remember, as with any social networking, you want to add value before going for the big sell : )
2. Building your list : Your database or list of potential customers can be built up by offering access to resources to your twitter followers. You can do this through your tweets, or use automat tools, to provide these automatically to those that follow you.
3. Crediablity in your niche or market : Promote your blog posts or other content that people can get to know more about you and possibly help them directly. If they are getting massive value from you, then you will build crediablity. Some times, people that are following you will “retweet” your tweets, so that people that are following them get to see this and you get promoted virally. Simply use the “RT” function if you want to do this yourself.
Check out some of these tools to help automate and make using Twitter an everyday part of your online marketing.
- Automation With Tweetlater.com : You can use tools like Tweet Later to automate much of what you do on Twitter, including auto-follow those that follow you, being able to send a thank you message to everyone that follows you automatically. You can also schedule tweets to appear at certain times. It also allows you to feed the updates from Twitter straight onto Facebook, so you are not doing both.
- TweetDeck.com: An application you can run off your computer. This will allow you to see Tweets from your followers and your own tweets in a simple layout. You can post your tweets, which you can then also feed onto your Facebook profile as well, meaning that your Facebook friends can be kept up to date at the same time. When you have 140 characters, having lenghthy website addresses will also limit what you say, so TweetDeck will allow easy URL shortening as well. Check it out – I use it myself as well.
- Search for Twitter users that have similar interests or possibly in the same market you are wantin to connect with. There are several services for doing this Twittie Me or Just Tweet It, but there are so many more.
The rapid growth of Twitter users means that it is not something you want to ignore. Whether you are in business or have a website already in a paritcular niche, I would suggest adding it to your online marketing mix.
Set up an account today and connect with me by going here http://www.twitter.com/timlukethompson and clicking the follow button – that simple and then you will see all my micro-blogging posts : )
Tweet you later!
Join Me LIVE On the Gold Coast – 30th of May 2009 – VERY LIMITED SEATING
Now, I also just want to give a brief promo for an upcoming event that I am doing. I am doing some LIVE training for some of my own mentor, Brett McFall’s Internet Marketing Students up on the Gold Coast. Brett has allowed my a very limited number of seats at this event to invite people along to attend. So if you are newbie, in business already and need an edge to get through these tougher times, just starting out or just need that acceleration to get your online business moving forward, then you need to register now http://www.timlivenow.com for full details and to register.
Go here now http://www.timlivenow.com
