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Twitter
twitter marketing
Create a Twitter Marketing Strategy that Rocks Ever
4:51 PM
There are many bloggers and brands
that just leap onto Twitter, setup an account and start tweeting. This
random approach is fine if you are a person that is doing tweeting for fun and
you want to share your rambling rantings to any Joe that wants to leap
into your stream and share sweet nothings.
Don’t be blinded by the shiny new Twitter
tool, it needs to be used wisely and if you put in place a planned strategy it
will deliver results that will delight and amaze.
The principles of a coherent
marketing strategy should not be discarded because social media mania has
turned your brain to mush. Twitter in the right hands with the right plan and
approach is a very sharp marketing tool.
Twitter is the Perfect Marketing Channel for Bloggers
Top bloggers have now realized that
Twitter is a very effective and highly leveraged social media marketing
platform to engage with a highly targeted audience and a channel that drives
traffic and adds to and enhances their current marketing.
Twitter provides you with a
potential audience of over 220 million but those that are interested in your
topic of choice will be a subset of that big number. Finding that audience
whether it be car lovers, or fashion tragics will be an important component of
your strategy as well as achieving goals that are included in your plans.
So Where do you Start?
There are some Twitter basics that
are vital when setting up your Twitter account
1. Create a Twitter account that has
the same name as your blog domain
2. Include a link to your blog in
your settings
3. Include your location
4. Upload a logo or photo that is
consistent with your blog branding
5. Include a Twitter background that
suits your brand image
6. Include a description in your
Twitter settings that include “key words” that are congruent with your blog
topic that Google will like.
So you have set up your account
which has the essentials completed, it’s now time to create a Twitter
marketing strategy.
Twitter Marketing Strategy Blueprint
1. Define Target Audience
Defining your target audience is the
foundation of any business marketing plan and strategy. Examples of a target
audience could be ‘Wine’ lovers, it could be females 18-30 who love ‘Fashion’
if you are a fashion blogger.
The target audience can be found on
Twitter using two tools that I have found to be effective.
1.
Twellow.com
This is the Twitter ’Yellow
Pages’ and you can find categories that match your target market such as ‘Wine’
and you can follow Twitter users in that category ranked by the largest number
of Twitter followers to the smallest within the application by
clicking “follow”
2.
Tweepi.com
This tool allows you to follow the
followers of other people on Twitter. This is very efficient because by
following a top blogger’s Twitter followers in your category you will
obtain followers who are pre-qualified.
Now you might be asking what is the
point of following people who don’t know you. Well there is a Twitter
etiquette that if someone follows you follow them back (this will vary in
percentage it might only be 20% but it is an unwritten rule that is still part
of the Twitter ecosystem idiosyncrasies).
When they follow you they will then
start seeing your Tweets in their Twitter stream and then they will see your
Twitter headline (taken from the title of your blog post) and link and be
tempted to click and be taken to your blog.
2. Determine Goals and Objectives
You need to decide what you are
trying to achieve with your Twitter channel. Some examples of the types of
goals you may want to achieve with your Twitter marketing campaign
- Increase traffic to the blog
- Enhance customer service
- Increase sales whether it is company products or blogger income from ebooks, speaking engagement, consulting or affiliate income.
- Engage with customers and potential prospects. Engagement includes conversations, getting them to click on your links in your tweet
- Grow Twitter followers
- Enhance and promote the brand
Goals Need to be Specific and Timely to Effective
What will success look like for
these goals?
- Will you be looking to increase followers by 10% per month
- Increase traffic to your blog by 5% per month with your Twitter marketing tactics
So putting specific metrics in place
for goals, allows you to gauge degrees of success or failure and allows you
monitor and adjust your tactics that you implement to achieve those goals.
3.
Design, Develop and Implement Tactics to Achieve Goals
Twitter marketing tactics are
designed to achieve the goals that you have set out in your strategy.
Here are some examples of Twitter
Marketing Tactics to match some goals for the blog. Two goals that are generic
for most Twitter marketing for bloggers is to grow Twitter followers and
increase traffic to your blog
Twitter
Marketing Tactics for Growing Your Twitter Followers
1. Add highly visible “Follow me on
Twitter” Buttons on the top right hand corner of the blog, in emails,
newsletters
2. Follow people in your category
using the Twitter “Yellow Pages” tool
Twellow.com and follow the followers of top bloggers in your
industry using the Tweepi.com tool
Twitter
Marketing Tactics for Increasing Traffic to the Blog
1. Automate tweeting of your best
posts on a regular basis using tools like SocialOomph.com (Professional
Edition. paid)
2. Send power Tweets that increase
engagement (hence traffic) by 400% by signing up to to Twylah.com and using
their “Power Tweet” feature
3. Use # (hash) tags in your tweets
to put your tweet into lists people are monitoring on their Twitter apps such
as TweetDeck or Hootsuite. For me they are tags such as #SocialMedia #Facebook
#SMM (Social Media Marketing)
Some
other Tactics
There are a range of other Twitter
marketing tactics you can implement to achieve a variety of goals.
1. Increase the Number of Twitter
Lists you are on. Twitter lists are where people put you on a list if they
think you are relevant to a topic they are interested in. If they think you are
relevant for blogging expertise they will put you on a list with the possible
title as an example “Blogger Experts”. In essence your list count will grow
from 2 core elements.
- Creating great content that educates and solves problems
- Being ubiquitous on the web and publishing your content to social media networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and Slideshare
2. Increasing engagement on Twitter
means having more conversations “one to one” either on the public channel (the
@ feature) or the private messaging feature of Twitter with “Direct Messages” .
These tactics could be activities such as
- Answer questions people ask you on Twitter
- Ask questions of your Twitter followers
- Recognize people on Twitter who retweet your blog posts often using #FollowFridays or #FF
These are just a few of the many
tactics you could implement
4. Monitoring and Measuring
Monitoring is not about hard core
metrics and is not specific or easy to measure as measuring as you need to be
checking for sentiment whether positive or negative. These are what you call
the subjective soft metrics that are subjective. Some Twitter tools for
managing your Twitter stream where you can monitor different lists, streams and
searches include Hootsuite.com and Tweetdeck.com
Monitoring
This is looking at the comments and
feedback you are receiving either publicly or privately on Twitter. These are
soft metrics and you will need to manually read and monitor this feedback to
ensure that the tone is positive and engaged. Check your @mentions regularly to
see what is being said.
Measuring
There are a few Twitter measuring
tools you should have in your toolbox that will give you the metrics you need
to measure your Twitter marketing success.
1. Google Analytics for Measuring Visits to your Blog (or Website)
Here I have used my Google Analytics
which has been set up for my blog site to measure how many hits for the last
month that Twitter has been the traffic source. This tool is free and can be
loaded onto your site by your developer
2. Tweet Counter
This keeps tabs on the number of
Twitter followers, people you are following and,tweets from hourly to six
monthly time ranges
There are other tools that can measure clicks on your links such as bit.ly that can provide analysis of what users in what countries are clicking on links from Twitter. For me it reveals interesting stats such as 59% of people clicking on my links are from the US!
5.
Modify, Rinse and Repeat
So monitor , measure then adapt,
test and keep testing. Twitter and other social media marketing strategies and
tactics are still new to the marketing ecosystem but the principles of
marketing still apply. Be prepared to experiment and be creative to find out
what works and what doesn’t.
What success have you had with your
Twitter marketing? I look forward to hearing your stories.
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