Smart Marketing with Twitter

As I mentioned before, I was rather reluctant to join Twitter. After using it for a few days I realized that the seeds of resistance had been planted by the media’s portrayal of the web ap. It became such a buzz word that I started to get suspicious. Asking someone in polite conversation if they are on Twitter became as ubiquitous as saying , “Let’s do lunch.”  I should have known not to pay attention to the media because, like the boss who always uses sports metaphors to motivate all of his employees including the women in the room, they just don’t get it (the media as well as the sports metaphor using boss).

For my own education, I wanted to take some time to learn how to use Twitter to effectively market a product or service. I found dozens of videos on Youtube on using Twitter for marketing. Some of them were rather long winded and hard to sit through. Another I found was way too frenetic for my taste, but maybe I’m just old…er.

Not surprisingly O’Reilly had the best video for content (and it was easy to watch and listen to):

The actual presentation is about 30 minutes long, though there’s a lot of interesting and useful Q&A during the remaining half an hour of the presentation.

For marketing… you can’t just build a Twitter account and expect people to find it or listen to you automatically, you’ve got to grow your followers. I’ve found four ways to link in to folks who might be interested in your product. I’ll probably find even more the longer I use the tool.

1. Complete searches for key words relating to your product. When you post use these key words in your posts.  Don’t forget to name your product or service. Save the searches so you can continually find people who might be interested in what you make or do.
2. I think if you’re going to effectively market things like online courses you can’t just can just post links to ads for the course. As someone pointed out, people get bored with ads and they can sniff them out pretty fast. Its’ better to post interesting notes/posts/links to things as well as links to your stuff. You want people to continue to follow you for your conversation and insight as well as your product.
3. Join a Twitter group such as  Twibe or other Twitter group. You can keep your tweets focused on communities and groups that might actually be interested in your product or service.
4. You can use Twitter to do market reseach in your own field by searching for what your competitors are doing.

Okay… so now I understand what Twitter is all about

Image originally from the Morguefile. Click to view the original

I’ll admit the idea of telling people what you were doing at any given moment did not appeal to the side of me that adores my privacy. Also, being involved in conversations with others that absobed so much chatter didn’t spark the curiosity of that extremely methodical part of me.

Yet the side of me that has come to appreciate “Stream of Consciousness” really gets it.

But after first joining Twitter I can see what people like about it.

A few tricks I learned quickly to reduce the noise factor on twitter:

• The more followers/followees you have the faster the pace of the conversation. It’s good to search for conversations using “key words.” You can also save the chat
• You can easily save tweets you like by clicking the “Star” or favorites option.
• Just accept that you’re not going to get every piece of information being shared. Twitter is pretty ephemeral and it embodies that life of ephemerality characteristic of some aspects of “Internet life.”
• Make comments even ones that appear to have no point every now and then.
• If you’re sharing something cool include the link (be forewarned… if the link is too long you may not be able to share it. Hopefully, web developers out there whose pages require long urls are noting this. Or the twitter people might be able to develop a feature that allows you to associate links to text so you don’t go over the 140 character limit).
• Addressing someone directly requires including their Twitter ID (ie. @nlkilkenny) in your tweet or post.
• If you must, you can search through the archive of a saved search. Depending on the volume of a conversation you may be searching for sometime till you get to the beginning.

I’ve actually learned a lot this weekend on Twitter. Sorry to go off on a tangent, but I get this way when I learn a good deal of new and fascinating stuff.  I saved a search for Arduino technologies because I’ve very interested in learning how to make clothing and knitwear use electronic features using the Arduino Lilypad.

Arduino Lilypad

Can you imagine having a purse that’s hooked up to your cellphone so that it blinks a certain way when different people call? I’d also like to make some kind of garment (even just wristbands) for my brother that plays different sounds. He’s a musician that tries to bring traditional and non-traditional sounds and instruments together: OO-Ray.  I was searching through Make.com’s site and found some very fascinating applications with Arduino tech including this Fabric Synthesizer. What a wonderful way to showcase ingeniuity and creativity.

Art and textiles meet electronics and music