Archive for the ‘Microblogging’ Category

Todd Wasserman at Mashable presents 5 Proven Twitter Marketing Strategies. This helpful post is part of the Social Media 101 Series. If you’re looking to leverage the power of Twitter to market your organization, you’ll want to give this a look. Here are the 5 strategies:

1. Use Promoted Trends or Promoted Tweets to Publicize an Event
2. Build the Brand with Promoted Accounts
3. Use Your Hashtags
4. Counterprogram
5. Follow Through

Social media guru Chris Brogan writes about how to Take a Twitter Audit to gauge how effective your microblogging efforts are for marketing. If you’re using Twitter to build community and engage an audience, you’ll want to check out these helpful tips. Here are the first five:

1. Look at your last 20 tweets. How many were @ replies? How many were retweets of other people’s work?
2. In your last 20 tweets, how many promote your own work versus pointing towards others’ ideas?
3. Do you have at least one ongoing Twitter search going? (use http://search.twitter.com to set one up.
4. Are the tweets you hope will be retweeted under 120 characters so people can retweet them?
5. Of the people you follow, how many are “influential” in some way, how many are potentially good for referrals, how many are just celebrities?

Charlene Kingston at the Social Media Examiner suggests 4 Tips to Maximize Your Twitter Marketing. If you’re looking for ways to leverage the power of Twitter for marketing and promotional purposes you’ll want to check out this quick post.

• #1: Define your business goals and objectives
• #2: Create your conversation strategy
• #3: Organize your community with Twitter Lists
• #4: Keep expanding your Twitter community

Audrey Watters at O’Reilly Radar checks in on How the Library of Congress is Building the Twitter Archive. Just over one year ago, the LOC announced that it would be archiving all public tweets since Twitter’s inception in 2006. At the time, Twitter users were generating 50 million tweets per day, a number which has increased to about 140 million tweets per day.

“This requires a significant technological undertaking on the part of the library in order to build the infrastructure necessary to handle inquiries, and specifically to handle the sorts of inquiries that researchers are clamoring for. Anderson and Johnston say that a cross-departmental team has been assembled at the library, and they’re actively taking input from researchers to find out exactly what their needs for the material may be. Expectations also need to be set about exactly what the search parameters will be — this is a high-bandwidth, high-computing-power undertaking after all.”

Janet Aronica at the Social Media Examiner gathers a list of the Top 5 Twitter Tools for Social Media Community Managers. There’s plenty to learn from in this helpful post which offers the following five recommendations:

• #1: Schedule your tweets more efficiently
• #2: Create easy and interesting content for your community
• #3: Make social media listening easier
• #4: Keep up with social media news
• #5: Measure your progress

Meghan Peters at Mashable explains How To: Use HootSuite as a Marketing Tool. To prepare for this helpful article, Peters spoke with Dave Olson, marketing director at HootSuite, for a primer on using the platform for social media marketing. Here are his four recommendations:

• Secure Team Setup
• Track Campaigns and Engage Daily
• Measure Success
• Get Help and Give Feedback

Gabrielle Conde at Copyblogger has put together The Ultimate Guide to Twitter Marketing. This mega-guide to using the popular microblogging tool for promotion and marketing contains 100 resources which are organized into the following sections:

• What is Twitter?
• Setting up your Twitter account
• New twitter users start here
• What’s up with the whole #hashtag thing?
• Twitter vocabulary
• Why you need to be on Twitter
• Big companies are doing it …
• The government is doing it too …
• What you need to know
• What the heck is a retweet and how do I do it?
• The Twitter mindset
• How to get Twitter followers
• Brand management on Twitter
• Lean, mean Twitter marketing strategies
• Prospecting on Twitter
• Craft eye-catching Twitter headlines
• Managing Twitter
• Twitter security
• Twitter social proof
• Avoid being an annoying twit
• Don’t stop there

Looking for inspiration to make your tweets more engaging? Check out this concise post by Erica Swallow at Mashable which suggests 5 Quick Ways to Liven Up Your Twitter Stream. Here are her 5 suggestions, be sure and read the full post for further explanation!:

1. Get Visual
2. Get Physical
3. Get Personal
4. Get Inspired
5. Get Smart

Saikat Basu at MakeUseOf recommends 5 Sources For Special Symbols To Spice Up Your Online Chat & Messaging. One of my personal favorites, Twitterkeys made the list along with four others which seem like great resources for finding characters to paste into your tweets, status updates, and messages online.

Kristi Hines at the Social Media Examiner recommends 4 Useful Twitter Automation Tools and How to Use Them. This is an excellent post which walks you through exactly how to use these tools to automate your tweets and messages. It also discusses the pros and cons of each as well as best practices. These are the tools covered:

1. Twitterfeed
2. Social Oomph
3. Tweet Old Post
4. HootSuite

Adam Werbach, author of Strategy for Sustainability: A Business Manifesto and the Chief Sustainability Officer for global agency Saatchi & Saatchi, creates The Bare Bones Guide to Twitter for The Atlantic. This quick guide will help you get up and running with the popular microblogging application through 16 useful tips. Here are the first five:

1. Twitter is a giant conversation
2. Set up a SHORT Twitter handle
3. Use an application like TweetDeck (our choice), Hootsuite, Seesmic or a mobile client if you tweet from your phone
4. Tweet often
5. Tweet regularly

I am thrilled and honored to share that “The Tech Set” book series has been named the winner of the ALA’s 2011 Greenwood Publishing Group Award for the Best Book in Library Literature!!! Congrats to all the incredibly talented authors and the wonderful folks at Neal-Schuman. This was an amazing project to be a part of!!!

Stephanie Sammons at the Social Media Examiner offers a quick guide to How to Use LinkedIn With Twitter for Better Networking. If you have profiles on both of these social media websites, you might already know that they are integrating through an application called Tweets which “can help you keep tabs on the Twitter updates from your LinkedIn connections”. This useful guide is broken down into the following sections:

• Add Your Twitter Account to Your LinkedIn Profile
• Install the LinkedIn Tweets Application
• How to Utilize the Tweets Application to Build Social Influence
• #1: Identify and follow all of your LinkedIn connections on Twitter within the Tweets application
• #2: Create a dynamic Twitter list of your LinkedIn connections
• #3: Look for engagement and promotional opportunities through LinkedIn Tweets

Jeff Young at The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Wired Campus blog reports on an ‘Embedded Librarian’ on Twitter. A reference librarian at Baylor University was assigned to a media-studies course in which she monitored class discussions via Twitter and responded to questions, suggested research resources, and more.

“At the start of each class session, the professor, Gardner Campbell, asked the 11 students to open their laptops, fire up Twitter, and say hello to their librarian, who was following the discussion from her office. During the hourlong class, the librarian, Ellen Hampton Filgo, would do what she refers to as “library jazz,” looking at the questions and comments posed by students, responding with suggestions of links or books, and anticipating what else might be helpful that students might not have known to ask.”

Aliza Sherman at GigaOm discusses 10 Twitter Features You Might Be Missing. These are all valuable features that are easily overlooked. I discovered that many on this list were new to me, especially the Keyboard Shortcuts. Here’s the complete list:

1. Who to follow
2. Twitter for business
3. Advertising on Twitter
4. Searches
5. Twitter Tales
6. Lists
7. Twitter widgets
8. “Follow Me” buttons
9. The Tweet button
10. Keyboard shortcuts