Three Tips, Three Tools for Twitter

Using Twitter in a marketing campaign can be time-consuming, but it becomes positively burdensome when you don’t know where to find the tools that let you measure your impact and tailor your message to your needs. The tools are out there, either available for free or for fee. But marketers need some central place they can go to find them—a Twitter version of an iTunes App Store.

And thus the birth last year of OneForty.com, the brainchild of CEO, co-founder and Twitter business expert Laura Fitton, perhaps better known as @Pistachio. With the second edition of her book “Twitter for Dummies” now available on Amazon, Promo and Chief Marketer asked her for three tips for would-be brand tweeters and three basic tools marketers should have when getting started in the channel:

1. You need the right tools

Listening to your audience is that crucial first step before you start engaging on Twitter. What are they saying about your brand, your competitors, your topic, or your industry? Even once you are fully immersed in the space, monitoring and replying to mentions of your brand is a huge part of being a brand on Twitter.

Twitter.com offers a search function over at Search.Twitter.com, but there are tons of applications out there to help you monitor multiple search terms all at once. In addition, there are apps like CoTweet that allow multiple users to run one Twitter account. This means your marketing team can work together to run your company’s Twitter account using the right application.

Twitter can seem daunting, but Twitter apps can actually help you run things more efficiently. My company oneforty is the Twitter app store and we have more than 3,000 applications in our directly. When you join Twitter, feel free to send us an @reply –we’re @oneforty– and we’ll help answer any questions you have.

2. Watch what you Tweet

Whatever you Tweet is put out there forever. Tweets can be deleted from the timeline on Twitter.com, but they cannot be actually erased; anything you Tweet will still be indexed on search engines and available on Twitter Search. As a professional, you are not only representing your personal brand, but you are also representing your company’s or client’s brand. Be conscious of what you say. Some people have actually lost their jobs over irresponsible Tweets. Most recently, CNN International fired senior editor Octavia Nasr for Tweeting that she was sad to hear that Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, a Hezbollah leader, had died. With only 140 characters, it’s easy to be misunderstood. Use your best judgement!

3. Be YOU but make it about THEM

All that “watch what you Tweet” stuff said, being YOU is what really wins on Twitter. Influential Tweeters have a strong voice. Take a position and link to stuff – funny, smart, harsh, controversial – you feel strongly about. This is a powerful medium. Be you.

In social media circles, there’s been a lot of talk about influence lately. I’ve found that the most well-respected, most influential Tweeters that have the largest followings are the ones that pay attention to others. They send tons of @replies and they share great content. If someone asks a question, they offer a response. This goes for you and your brand.

I see a lot of people who think the path to influence on Twitter is through self-promotion. I see it’s just the opposite: I think I got to 60,000 followers by making it about other people. My Twitter background isn’t a picture of me; it’s a promotion of charity:water. I wrote a book and created a business to help people learn about Twitter. I Tweeted about stuff I cared about, I was who I was, and now I’m where I am today. I see many so-called “social media gurus” and some of the candidates in the MTV TJ contest literally asking for followers and making their whole Twitter presence very “me, me, me.” I highly encourage you to steer away from that for yourself and for your brand. Make it about your customers and make it about your friends. Eventually, Twitter will make those two one and the same.

Here are 5 great tools for intermediate marketers.

Want more tools? See the marketing, advertising, business, monitoring and analytics tabs on
www.oneforty.com or check out these business tools:

1. Tweetlevel – Tweetlevel is an analytics app developed by Edleman that measures a Tweeter’s importance, producing a score based on popularity, engagement, influence and trust.

2. Radian 6 – Radian 6 provides a social media monitoring platform for marketing, communications and customer service professionals.

3. Tweet Beep – Keep track of conversations about you and your products! Tweet Beep sends you alerts whenever someone mentions your brand. You can even keep track of who’s tweeting your website or blog, even if they use a shortened URL (like bit.ly or tinyurl.com) It’s like Google Analytics for Twitter.

4. CoTweet – Multiple users can contribute to one Twitter account, so this is a great option if your company is using Twitter. The Search Pad and Saved Search feature are awesome for monitoring keywords and mentions on Twitter. Also allows you to toggle between multiple accounts, for instance, if you have a personal and company account.

5. TweetDeck – Tweetdeck is a desktop client that allows you to work between multiple accounts. It also allows you to send updates to Facebook. A great feature of Tweetdeck are the columns. If you are following many people, this is a God-send and a great way to help you organize your stream. It’s also a great way for you to follow Twitter chats like #journchat, #blogchat, etc.

Laura Fitton is co-founder and CEO of http://www.OneForty.com, an online clearinghouse for free and paid Twitter utilities and toolkits. She tweets under the name @pistachio and is the author of “Twitter for Dummies”, recently updated.