Posts tagged ‘Twitter’

January 25th, 2012

Six Top Apps to Help You Save Time on Twitter

There are so many Twitter applications available it can be extremely difficult to know where to begin, and what to select. I continue to try out new applications at the rate of at least one a week. Some barely last longer than it takes to set them up, because they are clearly not for me. That is not to say there is anything inherently wrong with them, they just don’t improve on what I am already using. Others tend to stay around on my desktop or in my browser for the duration of an evaluation period, while I try to give them a good test.

Some of the tools I use are now almost household names, but some are a little more obscure. I want to share those that make up my current Twitter Desktop, and thus remain active in a browser all day.

 

SocialBro

I’m starting with a measurement tool. SocialBro trawls through your Twitter account and slices and dices it in every imaginable way. When it is done it provides you with a dashboard, and a series of filters that allow you to analyse most aspects of your followers and friends. The options include time zone, language, account, age, tweeting frequency and whole lot more. There is also a menu item called Insights which presents this information in pie charts and bar charts.

SocialBro also bucks the trend a little and chooses to link to Peer Index to add influence scores. Being somewhat ambivalent about Klout, I see this as a positive move.

Once you have got your head around all of the basic dimensions of your Twitter profile, you can begin to explore an array of additional capabilities. The scope is considerable, but the following bear a mention:

  • Best time to tweet - I know other tools do this, but as well as determining when your followers are on-line, it looks at the times when re-tweets have occurred historically, AND then lets you import all of this information into Buffer (see more below).
  • Analyse your competitors –  want to know all of the above for any other Twitter account? You can just add the user name and you are away. This also shows you who your common friends and followers are.
  • Analyze your lists – check out the broad dimensions of the people on your lists

There is one thing that has puzzled me and that is a number of references to limitations, normally volumetric, associated with the free account. Now that is entirely reasonable, but I can’t find a paid account and what it might offer!

 

Garious

Garious is great tool for scheduling tweets from multiple sources and to multiple destinations. In my view, Garious has one of the easiest and most intuitive interfaces around. Essentially it has 3 components:

  • Lists - these are made of your own twitter lists, your blog feed(s), Google Reader sources and, any other RSS source your care to use.
  • Schedules - each schedule you create has a number of really useful components. You can determine the start and finish times, the number of tweets to be sent during the period and, the list or lists from which the tweets are to be selected. The tweets can be selected sequentially or at random, and a schedule can be run indefinitely, repeating tweets over time.
  • Social Networks - finally you can target the network or networks that each schedule will deliver tweets to.

I’m not often given to using superlatives, but this application truly is awesome! It is simple, straight-forward and effective.

 

TweetDeck

Certainly one of the better Twitter clients in its original desktop form, and better yet when used in Chrome. Since I imagine most people will know TweetDeck reasonably well, I won’t elaborate further, save to say that it supports all the basic day to day stuff extremely well.

 

Buffer

A great means of drip feeding a steady stream of interesting tweets to your followers on Twitter and Facebook. For me this enables me to spend just one or two sessions a day reviewing all of my feeds in Google Reader. Instead of immediately sharing those items I believe to be of interest I just add them to Buffer. Buffer then sends out the tweet or status update complete with a link to the article, at the next time slot I have set for the network in question. (See SocialBro above, which can set the best times for your status updates automatically)

For each Twitter account or Facebook profile you are linked to,  you can define the number of statuses you wish to post each day and at what times. As you add items to Buffer they are allocated the next available slot, overflowing to subsequent days if necessary. It is possible to post the same item to multiple accounts if you wish, and you can also post immediately if you find something that is time critical.

A useful feature allows you to review all items in Buffer and edit them if you wish with your own comments. While I use Buffer predominately with Google Reader, it can also be used as a Browser plugin, enabling you to post from anything of interest from anywhere!

 

BottleNose

I am still exploring the potential of BottleNose, which provides a combination of insights and suggestions for re-tweeting or mentioning. Essentially it takes your Twitter timeline and allows you to segment this in a number of different ways using ‘Assistants’.   You can add Assistants that will track:

  • Popular items that have been shared often
  • Suggested items that are aligned to your interests
  • Breaking News within your network
  • Suggested Reposts of items deemed to be highly relevant or trending

You can also set up specific streams to track your Twitter lists; a wide variety of popular topics; specific individuals; items that are exclusively News, Video or Pictures; or something else that you can customise.

Finally there is a clever graphic capability called Sonar. Within any of the
streams you have defined you can see how you link to other Topics, Hashtags or People. You can also select any Topic, Hashtag or Person to be centred in Sonar to see how the connections form around your selection. The screen grab shows part of an instant snapshot of my stream.

 

ManageFlitter

ManageFlitter is one of those really useful applications that is easy to use and performs a helpful housekeeping role. It quickly loads the people you Follow and segments them in to a number of different categories, such as:

  • Don’t follow back
  • No profile image
  • Inactive
  • Talkative
  • Quiet

In turn each of these categories can be sorted by criteria such as ‘follow date’, ‘listed’, ‘last tweet’, ‘username’ etc.

The purpose is to allow you to quickly segment people that you may decide to unfollow because they are inactive, or have no profile image. To aid the process you can select as many as 100 people at a time. There is a Pro version that offers more sophistication.

 

Conclusion

These applications are among my current favourites, and I see little reason to replace any of them in the immediate future. (Well at least not until something amazing gets launched tomorrow!).

If you want to explore some other interesting applications then do try Strawberry Jam, Commun.it and TwentyFeet, AND then share your findings.

Peter Rees is an independent Internet Business Consultant. He specialises in a metrics based approach to internet marketing, making extensive use of website analytics and website performance auditing tools to best inform and advise his clients. He is a strong advocate of the need for companies to implement a formal Social Media Strategy, supported in turn by Social Media Policies and measurement systems.

CategoryTwitter | CommentNo Comments »

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December 9th, 2011

Social Media Measurement Tools for the Small- to Mid-Sized Business

There are so many different tools around that help you to measure the efficacy of your social media campaigns, it can be extremely difficult to know where to start and what to use. Before proceeding much further, I want to emphasize that this post considers the requirements of SMBs, and therefore assumes a modest budget.

The many dimensions you can track can be quite bewildering and are described using terms like ‘engagement’, ‘velocity’, ‘influence’, ‘sentiment’ and ‘signal.’ All of which, it seems to me, are pretty meaningless in business terms. Of course there are terms that do convey more meaning, such as ‘followers’, ‘comments’, ‘retweets’, ‘mentions’, and ‘likes’, but the question remains – do these lead to positive business behaviors?

I suggest that starting point has to be to challenge yourself about what you are trying to achieve, and then use the tools that best measure the behaviors you employ to meet your business objectives. Not too helpful perhaps, but unfortunately, while there are many free or moderately priced tools, they all measure different things and are driven, it would seem, by different motives.

I have tried a wide variety of the available tools in an effort to find a basket of products that I can recommend to my clients. My findings are based on my own use of these tools. I won’t pretend any rigorous process has been applied here; my views are pragmatic and reflect my perceived value in each case.

I will start with a couple of the tools that try to set the standards for influence and social capital respectively:

Klout

There are a wide variety of social media tools available for small- to mid-sized businesses. Here is a list of some of the top social media measurement tools you can use to track your campaigns.

Klout is allegedly ‘The Standard for Influence’, but what does that mean? Does a high Klout score mean you have a high level of influence? If so, does this enable you to add value to your bottom line, and is the value you add proportionate to your influence score?

Right now there seems to be much argument about changes to the Klout algorithm and whether or not it measures all of the components it claims to. There is also plenty to suggest that Klout can be ‘gamed’, and I have certainly seen evidence of certain people who seem to spend more time giving and receiving ‘K+’ and tweeting about it than anything else.

It also seems that Bots can gain high Klout scores without ever making any effort to ‘engage’ with their audience. Interestingly those that are most vehement in their detraction of Klout are those whose scores have declined. I wonder if this directly impacted their businesses or just their egos?

In its current form I find it difficult to see what Klout’s measure of influence really is, this is because it seems that the same Klout score can be obtained by people who:

1. Just get on with the stuff they do well – a positive outcome
2. Spend a lot of time gaming the system – a pointless outcome
3. Have no interaction with anyone – a negative outcome

PeerIndex

PeerIndex claims to ‘Understand your social capital’. Again, I am not sure that I yet know how to apply this in a business meaningful way. However if this is an index that measures an individual’s propensity to value social relationships, and to cooperate and collaborate with others within and across networks, then I think this is a reasonable method of indexation.

PeerIndex scores seem less volatile than Klout, and seems not to be driven by the same demand to ‘feed the system’. It also appears that there is less ability to game the system, and I sense that PeerIndex is less likely to attract or reward celebratory.

On balance those that score well on Klout for the ‘right’ reasons, also score well on PeerIndex.

Is it any better or worse than Klout? I think it is simply different, and doubtless still evolving. I guess I am slightly more drawn to it than Klout, but I still find it difficult to translate this to something business meaningful for my clients.

Okay, so in my book at least, I am no further forward. So where else might I get a general perspective on how my social media interactions measure up? Let’s have a look at some of the tools that are designed to make the management of all of our social streams a little easier, and along the way provide some sort of health check on how we are doing.

Sprout Social

Sprout Social is certainly one of the more user friendly products out there. It comes in a number of different guises and prices, which define how many profiles you can track and the extent of analytics data you have access to. I am limiting my views to the entry level ‘Pro’ plan costing $9 per month, which has limited measurement tools. However this does include some key data, so you can get basic demographic information, and details such as followers, clicks, retweets etc. shown as trend charts.

You also have a bar chart which tracks ‘influence’ and ‘engagement’. These are both a little easier to understand than perhaps the more pretentious measures used by PeerIndex and Klout. Yes they can be ‘gamed’ by pumping out high volumes, re-tweeting incessantly, and the like, but there is perhaps less motivation to do this because you would only be fooling yourself, rather than trying to impress a wide audience. (Gosh did that sound cynical!).

As you go up the range of plans, so the extent of monitor and measurement tools increases, including in the DeLuxe plan integration with Google Analytics, which is where I believe this all starts to get real.

So a nice tool with good functionality, and some measurement capability, however at the ‘Pro Plan’ level I still don’t see how these measures necessarily fuel my bottom line. Upgrading to DeLuxe at $59 per month, will, I suspect, begin to answer the questions.

CrowdBooster

CrowdBooster is quite an interesting toolset that allows you to manage your Twitter and Facebook accounts, 1 of each in the free account, more in the paid accounts.

The measures provided are relatively basic, but provide a useful gauge of your daily and accumulated activity, including total followers, tweets, mentions and retweets. It also provides a nice graphic representation of the potential reach of your retweets.

Other charts show follower growth, tweets, retweets and mentions over the past week, month, all time or a custom period.

It also shows you who your most influential followers are (that word again, this time influence is measured solely by numbers of followers) and identifies those who retweet you.

Recommendations appear from time to time suggesting you follow or follow back certain people, or respond to someone who mentioned you.

So if you have any conversion metrics that can equate business generated, relative to retweet reach or similar, then maybe this is for you. Otherwise it is one of many tools that provide a dashboard of your overall ‘busy-ness’ but not necessarily business.

Others

There are no shortages of tools in this broad category, most of which will provide some volumetric based measurements reflecting your activity levels. They all have different strengths and weaknesses and which, if any, you choose will be largely based on personal preference. I quite like CoTweet, but I can’t get to grips with MarketMeSuite. Sendible has lots of functionality, but lags behind real time significantly and is rather ‘clunky’ to use. Twaitter soon, allegedly, to become Gremln is potentially useful, but right now seems to be very unreliable.

If you are still reading, I’m grateful, but you must wonder where this is leading. Well I’m going to fast forward over more Twitter products than you can shake a stick at, but do investigate them, oneforty.com is the place to find out about this vast range of tools.

So what can you measure and how? Well I’m a big fan of sticking to the basics, and trying to work out what will prompt a business interaction. Not surprisingly this leads me back to the hub of most marketing campaigns – the website.

Google Analytics

I firmly believe that using Google Analytics will best inform most businesses of the efficacy of their marketing campaigns. The key is to identify the outcomes that are most likely to result in business, and define these as goals within Google Analytics. To understand this in more detail my article “How to measure the success of an internet marketing campaign” might help.

Having determined what website visitor interactions lead to business generation, it is now possible to cast your net wider and look at how social interactions might generate more website visits and, in turn, how these can fuel business growth.

Google Analytics enables you to determine the origin of traffic to your website, so the first step is to look at the traffic that comes from social properties such as Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin etc. Are your campaigns and the content you generate through your blog encouraging prospects to visit your site for more information? Are your efforts being rewarded with comments on blog posts, sharing of your content and updates, etc.? If not, it really doesn’t matter what your Klout score is, or how much ‘signal’ you generate.

By starting closest to the point where you turn interested bystanders into supporters, advocates and customers, you can quickly and easily determine which of your social interactions are most likely to fuel this process.

Google Analytics will at some stage integrate Post Rank into the product set to further enhance the ability to track social activity. The inclusion of ‘Share This’ or ‘Add This’ capability along with ‘Like’ and ‘+1′ functions will all help to determine what content is most engaging. Measuring comments, trackbacks and pingbacks by using an enhanced comments tool such as ‘Disqus’, will again show you what impact you are having. At present all of these tools provide analytics which will help you monitor these activities. With PostRank integration into Google Analytics it is likely that much of this information will also become integrated.

So let me, at long last, wrap this up.

All of the social tools will continue to evolve and develop, and as they do will doubtless offer more meaningful measurements. There is increasing evidence of many of them providing an interface into Google Analytics, which suggests to me a growing awareness of the need to set meaningful business measures.

There are plenty of reasons to exploit the rich portfolio of tools available to help you manage the increasing volumes of social activity, but use them for this purpose. If you have determined what social interactions drive business and you can relate those to a measure offered in any of these tools then that is a useful bonus. But please don’t waste effort modifying your social behaviour to influence these scoring systems, modify your social behaviour to support your business.

 

Peter Rees is an independent Internet Business Consultant. He specializes in a metrics based approach to internet marketing, making extensive use of website analytics and website performance auditing tools to best inform and advise his clients. He is a strong advocate of the need for companies to implement a formal Social Media Strategy, supported in turn by Social Media Policies and measurement

CategoryGeneral Marketing | Comment2 Comments »

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October 12th, 2011

5 Ways To Market Smarter with Social Media

When it comes to a successful social media campaign, the key is to make sure fans, followers and connections aren’t just reading, but engaging in what you have to say. Often, engagement is thought of as being pro-active, but it’s equally as important to use tools that help organize and disseminate information to give you the best chance of getting a good response.

Here are 5 tips to help you market smarter, and one free tool to make it all a piece of cake.

MarketMe Suite

The MarketMeSuite is a cool, free dashboard that can help you market smarter using social media

Tip 1: Organize Your Team

First and foremost you need to organize your social life. If you work as a team, who is managing which accounts? Do you have clients you post on behalf of? Are they posting at the same time as you? These are all questions you need to ask so you never double contact someone. By this, I mean, someone asks a question like “Where do I find info on your return policy?” and 3 different people all reply to that same person. It’s reply inundation and a major turn off. Even if you’re a “one man band” you may wear different social hats. Setting yourself up with different “team” views (even if you’re alone) helps keep you organized and on task.

Tip 2: Geo-Target

Never under-estimate the power of local. Did you know that almost all tweets are now geo-tagged even if not sent from a phone? Use this to your advantage by searching what’s being said about your industry in your location. A restaurant monitoring all tweets about their cafe within 20 miles has a perfect chance to send someone a “thanks for eating with me, mention this tweet code and get 10% off your next meal!”

Tip 3: Stop ignoring Linkedin

Linkedin is still, to some extent, the red haired step child of the “big 3,” behind Twitter and Facebook. But for marketing, there’s a big opportunity. Start Linkedin Groups and start building a following around your brand, and post to it regularly. Get the Linkedin share plugin on your site.

Tip 4: Give Credit

RSS posting is a great way to keep information going out to your followers and fans, but what if the information is not yours? Make sure to marke “RT @ ” the person, or “So and so wrote a great post.”  You do not want your streams to be cluttered with so much information that your following has no idea what’s important. Also, people tend to like being mentioned, and there’s a good chance if you’re posting someone’s feed, they will post yours in return, so let them know!

Tip 5: Be Regular

Granted, you can’t be at your social media dashboard at all hours of the day, but it’s important to have content going out to hit all the time zones you need to interact with. Schedule some posts up for when you’re away (or sleeping) to keep all corners of the world engaged. Just be sure to be ready to respond as soon as you get your computer started the next day.

One Simple, Free Solution to make this all happen for you….

Lucky for you, there is one tool… one FREE tool that helps you do all these things. It’s called MarketMeSuite, and it’s the intuitive social media marketing dashboard.

You can grab it, totally free, here: http://marketmesuite.com/get-app

Posted by Tammy Fennel, CEO of MarketMeSuite. 

 

 

 

 

CategoryFacebook, LinkedIn, Social Media, Twitter | Comment3 Comments »

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September 20th, 2011

What the New Facebook “Subscribe” Means For You

If you’ve been playing around on Facebook lately, you may have noticed yet another new button popping up in the top right of people’s profiles. The new button, which is a “subscribe” feature, was introduced on Wednesday in what many are calling an attempt to copy social media rivals Google+ and Twitter.

Subscribe button

When you subscribe to someone you have the option to choose how many and what type of updates you see from them.

The new feature allows users to “subscribe” to people’s profiles and see their updates without being their Facebook friend. The updates of people you subscribe to will appear in your news feed along with your friends’ updates, however, you will only be able to see the updates that the poster marks as “public.”

For those who are concerned about the privacy of your posts, note that if you have your settings on “friends only,” subscribers who are not your Facebook friends will still not be able to see your updates. And if this still isn’t satisfactory, you can always disallow the subscribe option altogether so you will not begin accumulating subscribers.

The concept of subscribers who are not not your Facebook friends seems a little odd to most, but for thought leaders, celebrities, and public figures the new feature may become a powerful tool. Now, instead of merely having Facebook pages, public figures can also broadcast directly from their profile to interested followers, much like a Twitter account.  This will be especially important for musicians, journalists, and other small-time public figures that do not currently have a blown-out Facebook presence and will help them get around the 5,000 friend limit that Facebook imposes.

Though the main premise of the subscribe button is to be able to follow people you’re not friends with, you can also subscribe to friends. If you subscribe to a friend, you will be given the option of how many and what type of updates you receive about them in your news feed.

For example, you can block out a friend’s constant Farmville updates and only request updates deemed “important.”  While Facebook has always let you block certain friend’s updates from entering your feed, this new feature allows you to cut out overzealous friends’ random posts without missing out on major news, such as an engagement, that you would want to know about.

However, while the subscribe button has benefits for individual users and public figures, the feature does not bring anything to the table for businesses. You cannot subscribe to a company page, and while Facebook will be rolling out a tool to migrate all of a Fan Page’s fans over to subscribers on a personal account, if you choose to do so you will lose all of your Fan Page content. Additionally, while profiles are prioritized over company pages in search, and are easier to update on the go, they don’t have analytics associated with them and can’t be updated by multiple admins, which poses a problem for companies on Facebook.

So the bottom line? While this tool may be helpful in cleaning up your news feed and may help a select set of moderately popular public figures advance their Facebook presence, the impact of the tool is somewhat limited. Maybe the subscribe button will catch on, but for now, it appears to be an imitation of the much more popular Twitter “follower” model. As such, businesses would be better off keeping their company pages and leaving their public status updates on Twitter.

Posted by Nicole Hall, Account Manager with Mobilize Worldwide. Mobilize Worldwide develops mobile apps, mobile ad campaigns, mobile websites and just about anything else related to mobile marketing for brands interested in growing their sales and revenue using this new and emerging medium.


CategoryFacebook, Social Media | Comment4 Comments »

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June 28th, 2011

Top 10 Tips on Using Twitter for Business

Twitter, launched in July of 2006, has emerged as one of the top social media platforms enabling users to connect with friends and companies and stay current with constant streams of information. With over 200 millions users generating 190 million tweets a day, Twitter has become a great resource for businesses to engage with consumers.

So, what can you possibly say in 140 characters or less to help your business expand and increase traffic to your website? Well, Blogstrategies.com, Mashable and ChrisBrogan.com have identified a few tactics businesses should keep in mind while Tweeting.

 

Here are the top 10 you should check out:

1. Hashtags: You should familarize yourself with this symbol (i.e., #) and make it your friend. Put this hashtag in front of a keyword or your company website and Twitter will convert these hashtagged words into searchable keywords. What does this mean for you? Anyone searching for something can find all tweets containing your hashtagged word in a single location, thus making it easier for them to find your tweets even if they’re not one of your followers. Search the database for hashtagged questions pertaining to your business or topics of your expertise and connect with these followers. You’ll find you not only do you have more readers, but possibly more customers as well.

2. Engage with your followers: Simply sending out tweets and not responding to your followers will get you nowhere. It’s important to respond to those that tweet at you and answer any questions they might have. Each time you interact with your followers, make sure it’s a personalized message. No one wants to feel like they’re receiving a mass tweet. If they feel your message is sincere and they like what you have to offer, the chances of them retweeting your information is even greater, thus ultimately exposing your business to more followers.

 

3. Combine your platforms: Make it easier on yourself by synchronizing your Twitter account with all of your other social platforms. You can do so by associating your Twitter account with the RSS feed of your company website, Facebook page or blog. By doing so, every time you make an update it appears across all of your platforms, meaning you only have to make one update at a time. Sounds efficient, right?

4. Update your profile: Although most of your followers are only reading your tweets and not your bio, it’s important to have a profile in place that’s up-to-date and professional. Think of it as an extension of your brand. Potential new followers and customers will be checking out your profile to see what you’re about before hitting the golden “Follow” button.

5. The power of a list: This Twitter feature has helped companies gain followers and spread their knowledge to a larger audience. A Twitter list is somewhat similar to a Facebook group. Basically a compilation of followers, grouped together for whatever reason you come up with. You can use these lists to your advantage by promoting and rewarding customers. How? Try creating a list comprised of all your valued customers and reward those on the list with a 20% off coupon or free gift with purchase. Lists can also help your business internally. By creating a list of all employees and those that tweet on your behalf, it’s an easy way to manage these tweeters and aggregate accounts. Once you’ve created your list make sure people know about it by adding it to a list directory such as Listorious.

6. Keep track: It’s important to track your followers and identify whose really paying attention to your tweets. You can do so by tracking retweets, clicks, messages and hashtag mentions. This will give you the opportunity to engage with your loyal followers and maintain these relationships.

7. Ask questions: Get feedback from your followers by asking the right questions. Find out what you’re doing right, what you need to work on and what they want more of. This shows not only that you’re listening, but can provide you with valuable insights about your followers and consumers.

8. Tweet about others: You don’t always need to talk about yourself and your company. It’s important to integrate other’s ideas and links into your tweets. Retweet what your followers have tweeted, share their links and let your followers know what you find interesting about a particular tweet. This lets your followers know that you’re human and are interested in what they have to say as well. Not to mention it’s a great way to build and expand your community.

 

9. Promoted tweets: This is a new feature of Twitter that enables businesses to speak to a larger audience, even those that don’t follow them. How does it work? First, send a tweet to your followers and then promote that tweet. The promoted tweet then appears as content in search results, so those looking for something pertaining to your tag will see it in the search engine. Twitter offers these promoted tweets on a cost-per-engagement basis, meaning you only pay when users retweet, reply or clicks on your tweet.

 

10. Customer Service: Best Buy is a great example of how to use Twitter to provide real-time customer service. Create an account in which users can tweet questions about products or services to you directly and tag the answers with a hashtag back to your company website. This allows you to interact with your consumers and provide them with something of value. Best Buy is leading the ranks with over 2,900 employees on board to answer questions and have responded to over 38,000 inquiring tweets. You could be next.

What are some of your favorite tips on using Twitter? Did we miss any you think we should add? If so, let us know in the comments section below. While you’re down there, how ’bout Re-Tweeting this post for us!

Posted by Rebecca Wilson, marketing analyst for the 60 Second Marketer.

CategoryAdvertising, Marketing Techniques, Marketing Tips, Social Media, Twitter | Comment7 Comments »

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