Twittering For Twitter
Twittering For The Sake Of Twittering…
Chuck D, from Public Enemy, has a line in one of their songs where he says he doesn’t rhyme for the sake of riddling. Chuck was alluding to the fact that there was so much more to his rhymes than mere riddles. I feel the same way about my Twittering. I don’t Twitter for the sake of Twittering! (arms folded) I do it for the sake of Google!
I sometimes speak with people who just don’t get Twitter. They don’t see the need, the cause or what the fuss is about. If you’re only looking at it from a social medium, you probably feel the same.
I evolved from Myspace marketing to Twitter marketing back 2007/08. Facebook was still calling itself the college social media and statistics then said Facebook members didn’t click ads. As a marketer, I need people to click ads, so Facebook wasn’t my first choice. My first few months on Twitter was about connecting with old Myspace Friends and my Gmail contact list. I was able to briefly keep up with friend’s timelines. Then I started following more and more people.
On Twitter, unless you’re Charlie Sheen, the fastest way to get followers is to follow others. There are tools that help you follow people based upon interest, geography etc. I even automate the follow back with a rotating messaging task.
The more people you follow the faster your timeline becomes as more of the people you’re following are Twittering. Follow?
My Myspace “get as many friends as you can” mentality led me to use automation and software to increase my followers and from that point we grew to more than 60 niche Twitter accounts. My thought process is that it’s better to have 3000 followers in a specific niche than 100,000+ followers in one account with numerous non concentrated interests. We now have over 100,000 Twitter followers in niche accounts from weight loss, health, finance, real estate, music, entertainment, and a dozen other niches. No, you can’t do this overnight, however you must start somewhere.
Every website that we manage has it’s own Twitter page! It’s own broadcaster. Since most of our websites are WordPress this means plugins are available that Twitter and Post and also Post and Twitter. Why? What I learned early about Twitter is that Google loves Twitter. Twitter is your open network to broadcast to the search engine world! It’s like yelling out of your door in the mornings and having the world hear you. Tell Mr. Chuck that’s Louder Than A Bomb! That’s what Twitter can do for your marketing messages. How?
Search engines pay attention to links/websites that get attention from other links of authority. Twitter is one of the top 20 websites in the world and that equates to authority. Twitter is one of your friends for Link Juice.
Use Twitter properly and you will find yourself ranking on the first page of Google for various niche targeted links. But twitter is not the easiest to navigate using their website. In order to make the most out of Twitter, you need to use 3rd party tools and there’s several that I use.
My absolute favorite is Hootsuite. Web based Hootsuite is my dashboard of must have monitoring tools. I have mouse click access to all of my Twitter and Facebook accounts in one central location. The functional dashboard allows access to my multiple timelines, mentions, sent tweets, direct messages and other valuable metrics. I can Tweet from one and ReTweet from multiple accounts at the same time. A built in ping service and scheduler helps to synchronize multiple social media. The url shortener is great in a pinch.
Hootsuite is free for 1 Twitter account but the real power is in managing multiple niche specifics Twitter accounts. Hootsuite is $5.95 per month and a tax write off if you’re doing it right.
Over time, I will disclose additional Twitter applications that we use to automate our Twitter marketing.
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