Category: Social Media Magic Tricks

Today I spoke to Terri Brooks with the Social Media T Room about integrating Twitter into Your Business Model. We covered the three basic business models used on Twitter and some contingency planning tools to keep your business account secure.

The primary model on Twitter is the One User One Account model. This is the most “respected” model where you spend most of your time (your Twitter time that is) tweeting live, responding to others, Retweeting others comments and general relationship building. It is this model to which you’ll read about most.

To make this happen, go to twitter.com and set-up a Twitter account. Done.

The second model I call the Broadcast Model and would consider this a tool most closely related to advertising on radio. Basically, a Broadcast Model Twitter account is an autopilot account that both auto-follows and auto-tweets messages.

What makes this better than radio is the ability to follow people who use specific keywords. In radio you try and align your target audience with the kind of radio station they’re listening to. Very unscientific. Suppose you could build a Twitter list of 10,000 people who’ve mentioned wine, and 6,000 of them follow you back. That’d be a great start for a company in the wine industry.

I started using this for my Twitter Problems account and it gets retweeted more than anything else I do. Useful?

To make this happen you have two basic steps. Get a Twitterfeed account and follow the instructions there. This is the service that will auto-tweet news and information related to your industry.

Finally, the third basic model for business Twitter accounts is multi-user account. I’m going to break this into two separate purposes.

twitter.com/predfans uses the first purpose brilliantly. Suppose you want to tweet about the Predators Hockey team a lot but know that many of your followers are going to be turned off by this. Using a service like retweetbot.com, you can tweet directly to predfans and ONLY people who follow Predfans will see that tweet. This would be great for a conference. People interested in the Predators or in your conference could then follow one account and see all the relevant tweets.

Cotweet.com specializes in this as well. They want you to have one Twitter account for your business. But that one account shows Tweets from multiple people in the company. For instance if you’re the local Zoo, the dolphin handler could be a tweeter, the guy who scoops the elephant dung could tweet and the marketing guy could tweet. But the public would only have to follow the one zoo account to see all those tweets.

To make this happen, check out retweetbot.com and cotweet.com. All the necessary instructions are there.

So what do you think? Which kind do you prefer? Do you see the benefits and drawbacks from each?

The name you pick for your Facebook group or Fan Page is critical to its success. If subscribing to groups and becoming fans of pages were a private thing, and no one knew that you did so – titles would probably not be as important. But on Facebook – becoming a fan or joining a group is a way to communicate to others what you like – and who you are.

Look at the Facebook Group called “I Went to Bellevue East High School” – there’s no real content value there. In fact all the posts are “Hey, I went there too and I went to X elementary school”. But,  what if that was the Facebook Group name of the school you went to? Would you click on it?

Compare that to a Facebook Group named “My Favorite Place to Take Kids on Vacation Is. . .”. This is one of the most content rich, user generated Facebook Pages. There’s no spam, and users give great tips on places to take their kids on vacation. Awesome resource.

But if you think about the Buying Process, as we’ve talked so many times about, people don’t necessarily come to Facebook for content. You’re at Facebook to connect, write on people’s walls and show people pictures and tidbits about you. Having the title “My Favorite Place To Take Kids on Vacation Is. . .” on your Facebook wall doesn’t say anything about you. Maybe it tells people you have kids, but it doesn’t tell people what your favorite place is. The only reason you’d join that group is if you were actually looking for that kind of information.

Let’s look at the numbers. The Facebook group with the title that speaks volumes about who you are by showing people where you came from drew 486 people in a matter of three weeks. The heavily promoted Kids on Vacation site garnered 200 people in 9 months.

Aside from choosing a shocking title like “I Will Quit Facebook If They Start Charging Us”, choose a title that speaks volumes about the person who joins it.

Think about this. . . People talk about going to Legoland on the Taking Kids on Vacation group. It’s a great place to learn about it, but the Legoland California fan page has 2,016 people and the Legoland Billund site has over 5,900.

Would you rather tell your Facebook friends “I have kids” or “I’ve been to Legoland California and it rocks”? Tell me which group you’d join.

The Value of Twitter is the ease by which you can create an audience of people interested in your products, your niche or your business. Here’s a short discussion on how to do that.

How to use Twitter For Business. Here’s a short video I made about the usefulness of Twitter in terms of driving traffic to your company site.

What is Twitter, exactly? Twitter is the ‘status line’ you find on Facebook and on MySpace – but taken to whole new level. Right now you’re pretty much using the status line to be funny, make snide remarks, or just to tell everyone that you’ve just gotten back from the grocery store. All these things are good when you’re just interacting with friends and family.

Continue reading “What is Twitter and How Do You Use It?”