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Tweeple are Twitter People.

Twitter users and members are referred to as ‘tweeple and their favourite form of communication are ‘tweets‘.

Retweets are tweets that have been re-sent, so that your followers can see them.

Read more about Twitter in our Guide to Business Tweeting.

To tweet or not to tweet?

This is the first in a series of posts on Social Media and their relevance for Online Marketing.

What is Twitter?

Twitter is a micro-blogging site, where you have 140 chars to add real-time messages which are publicly available for viewing. Users ‘follow’ other people and then their followers ‘tweets’ appear on their Twitter Home page, as they are written. The limitation on space makes it very conversational in nature.

What’s Twitter all about?

So, it’s about conversation and sharing, rather than advertising or selling. It’s about engagement in a personal way, and it also offers opportunities for brands to follow what others are saying about them and to respond.

Is it useful for you?

Twitter could be useful in the following ways if your customers and industry are users:

• marketing your business with a greater online profile for your brand
• engaging with customers
• engaging with potential customers
• engaging with your business community
• accessing resources (the latest research, for example)
• SEO – real-time Twitter feeds to Google’s search results pages

Getting started

Twitter.com is the place to start. Twitter itself has resources on the site to help the novice and FAQ sections that cover most troublesome questions.

The first thing you need to ask yourself is do you want to use a personal profile with a photo (or avatar ), or a business profile with a branded logo.

Depending on your business, either may be appropriate. However, if your brand identity is important, then choose a logo and a profile name which is either that of your brand or close to it. For business, you are primarily using Twitter to engage with people on behalf of your company and your reputation is also important here. What you tweet represents the company. Also, it’s common now to add a ‘follow me on Twitter ID’ to business cards and email signatures.

Common terms

@                :           precedes a Twitter ID to identify a username and is used when replying

RT              :          retweet

#hashtag :         similar to other web tags but with a ‘#’ in front of the word. They can be used anywhere in the tweet,  and are used to identify tweets about a particular topic across Twitter, making it easier to find in search eg. bizcamp Dublin has the hashtag #bizcampdublin. Conferences and events in particular rely on them to track the conversation both before and after.

See our Weekly Web Word ‘tweeple’ for more.

Reputation Management

Aim to build a reputation as a trusted and relevant source of information. At the same time you can have personality, ask questions and engage people. Using it to push a marketing message will alienate followers. Or tweeting for the sake of  tweeting, ‘hello’ for example, will also alienate a lot of people.

How to find people to follow

Find out who’s tweeting in your space and who you want to follow by using Twitter Search on your keywords, search.twitter.com

Other useful search tips are:

“internet marketing” near:“dublin” containing the exact phrase “internet marketing” and sent near “dublin”.

seo filter:links containing “seo” and linking to URLs.

traffic ? containing “traffic” and asking a question.

Or, you can search on Google:

To search for ‘digital marketing’ in the title of profiles of Twitter users:

intitle:”digital marketing * on twitter” site:twitter.com

to search for a ‘seo consultant’ in the bio text of Twitter profiles

intext:”bio * seo consultant” site:twitter.com

You can also search by ‘location’ instead of ‘bio’.

Or, you can use www.twellow.com to search by category

SEO

Google are using Twitter real-time search as a feed for search results. If you’re contributing to the conversation on a trending subject then you may be returned in Google’s search results. All good for your SEO.

Tools

URL  shorteners are used to shorten the URLs for links so that the 140 chars of your tweet are not taken.

bit.ly

Tinyurl.com

short.ie – with this one you can customize the URL yourself – perfect for tweet links more meaningful and very useful for your Facebook Business Page if you don’t yet have 25 ‘likes’.

You can also register with Tweetscan.com to get alerts.

Metrics

You can see from your Google Analytics just how many referrals you are getting from Twitter.

Twitter Trends

Twitter itself is currently beta-testing it’s new Twitter Business Center functionality. This will provide for a specifically Business account (currently only an individual can be verified on Twitter) and allows for basic info on the business to be entered. There is a new feature whereby the business can accept direct messages from individuals who are not following them. This has implications for customer service businesses where they can get direct feedback from customers and will need to be able to address it and manage it. Read more at http://mashable.com/2010/05/10/twitter-business-center-toolkit/

Finally

Be humourous. Be informative. Be relevant. And build authority.

Twitter processed 1.76bn tweets in April. This is 47% increase from the number of tweets in January this year

[source: royal.pingdom.com, May 2010]

105 million registered users on Twitter globally

[source:
mediatel.co.uk/newsline/2010/04/15/twitter-goes-public-with-user-numbers/,April 2010]