Twitter Tips From TWTRCON
The Twitter conference known as TWTRCON made its way to New York yesterday, and coexisted with the DMA’s Digital Marketing Days. I spent a good portion of my day there yesterday, pretty much to see if i have this whole Twitter thing figured out. Here’s some tips I picked up from some of the speakers, tips that will hopefully make us all a little more Twitterific:
Use unique links if you’re directing your followers to a Website, says Marla Erwin, Interactive Art Director, Whole Foods Market. This should be a given tactic in all online marketing, but is often ignored. This will help you determine the impact and interest in your tweets.
If you have multiple tweeters, set up a director of Twitter Accounts on your Website. That idea also came from Erwin. Here’s what Whole Foods has on its site. With more than 300 accounts, Whole Foods could easily confuse its audience without a directory.
Start an account even if you’re not ready to tweet, says the guest who is just known as @bpterry (and is the author of the BPGlobalPR feed that’s kept America amused during the oil spill crisis). He saw an opportunity to raise awareness and ran with it, pretty much because there was no Twitter account for BP’s public relations).
Like all new channels, start slowly, says Bert DuMars, Vice President E-Business and Interactive Marketing, Newell Rubbermaid. There’s a lot of nuances you may not immediately understand from how to speak with your audience to how to build your community.
Hoping to get followers? Don’t be boring. Whole Foods’ Erwin says the best way to get followers is to post information that is valuable to your audience, and is also interesting.
Also, don’t just react and respond to negative feedback. Erwin says you should respond to compliments, even if it’s just a quick “thank you.” The simplest way to find out what people are tweeting about you is to search Twitter for your screen name with the “@” in front of it.
If you are a person who is tweeting (as opposed to a corporation that is tweeting), be your own tweeter. Martha Stewart may be the busiest person on the planet, but she still does her own tweeting (if she can’t Twitter on her own, she will call her techie, Eliad, and dictate a tweet for him to post). “To not write your own tweet is not making proper use of the medium,” Stewart says.
Limit yourself, this can be addicting. Stewart has only one rule for Twitter, and that is to only tweet for five minutes a day (Maybe that’s a rule we should all follow).
