Mark Tosczak's Blog» Microblogging

Five tips for better tweeting

Mark Tosczak — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 11:17:35 +0000

Of all the social networks I’m a part of, Twitter is probably the one that gets most of my attention right now. I arrange meetings and phone calls through it, meet new people and reconnect with old friends, have fielded new business requests and reached out to journalists and other influencers. It is truly a powerful tool.

After sending more than 2,300 tweets, here are five tips that I think are likely to make your Twitter experience better for you and for the people following you.

1. Shout out. If you’re sharing someone’s blog post, take an extra minute to find the writer’s Twitter ID and then give that person credit in your tweet. The writer will appreciate knowing that you’re sharing his or her post, and you may get an opportunity to start a conversation with someone new.

2. Leave enough room for people to RT. I am still surprised by how few people pay attention to this, but it’s important if you want people to RT you. Don’t use 140 characters, aim for 120 or so.

3. Use a Twitter client. I like Hootsuite, and Tweetdeck for a close second, on a computer. On my Blackberry I’m using Ubertwitter. But you can use whatever you like (there are lots of options listed here). Most Twitter clients simply provide a better, richer experience than Twitter by itself does.

4. Be consistent, at least somewhat. Better to show up, at least for a tweet or two, on most days, than to be absent for days or weeks at a time. A little day-to-day consistency goes a long way in building up real relationships online.

5. List yourself in Twitter directories. There are a number of directories, such as Twibes and Twello, and you have a better chance of finding people with similar interests (and being found by them) if you list yourself in these directories. Search Google for Twitter directories or start with the list here.

Have some other tips? Please share your favorite Twitter tricks, tips and tactics in the comments.

How to get people (or at least me) to follow you back on Twitter

Mark Tosczak — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 10:42:20 +0000

I’ve recently been bumping up against the follower limits that hit when you start following 2,000 or more people on Twitter. As I understand it, once you’re following 2,000 or more, Twitter limits the maximum number of people you can follow to the number of people who follow you plus roughly 10 percent. So if you’re following 1,999 people and 1,800 people are following you — no problem. But once you’re following 2,000 people, you can’t follow any more because 1,800 plus 10 percent is equal to 1,980. To follow more, you’ve got to have more people following you. I don’t know if that 10 percent figure is precise, but it seems to be in the right place.

What that has meant is that some folks recently followed me that I couldn’t follow back, at least immediately, until my follower numbers were higher. So I started to work through this barrier by identifying Twitter accounts I could unfollow, freeing up spots for new followers. I also have been looking more selectively at the accounts following me before deciding to follow them or not.

I am basically inclined, out of courtesy and to open up the opportunities for meeting new people and having new interactions, to follow back anyone who follows me (I’m @marktzk on Twitter). But I am not following back everyone. Here are some of the reasons I might not be following you back (and if a lot of people are not following you back, chances are this applies to them, too).

1. You don’t tweet in English. Sorry, I’m monolingual. I’m not proud of it, and I would like someday to gain fluency in a second language, but it’s not happening right now. If I can’t understand what you’re saying, there’s not much point in following you.

2. There are a lot of affiliate links or ads in your tweet stream. I don’t mind you occasionally trying to make a buck through Twitter, but please do it occasionally, not frequently, and do it in a way that seems to fit in organically with whoever you are and whatever you tweet about it.

3. All your tweets are links to news and other web items. Sharing is good. Doing nothing but broadcasting stuff — basically hooking your Twitter account up to an RSS feed — is not so good. I’m looking for interaction and real human beings.

4. All your tweets are about you. Doing nothing but promoting your blog posts or nothing but making random comments about your life is just not that interesting. Those are both fine to include as part of your tweet stream, but I am looking for some evidence that if I follow you we might have a chance to interact at some point.

5. You don’t converse. Based on looking at your tweet stream, you never @reply or have conversations, you don’t retweet and you don’t seem to interact with others. All of your tweets are one way. Increasingly, I look to Twitter for interaction, sharing and at least the possibility of new relationships. In other words, if all I see is the behavior in numbers 2, 3 and 4 above.

6. You haven’t tweeted recently, or you only tweet rarely (once a week or less). Again, in my eyes this makes it less likely that we’ll have a chance to interact, so this is not good.

7. You’re account looks like it was set up to spam people. You don’t have a picture in your profile, there’s no link to someplace (a LinkedIn profile, at least?), or you have few or no tweets yet you’re following a lot of people. This makes you look like a spammer in the making, and I won’t go there.

On the other hand, the following things make more more likely to follow you.

1. You converse with people online. I’m looking for @replys, retweets and the like in your tweet stream. If I see them, no matter what else, I am much more likely to follow you back. Obviously, as you can tell from above, this is a big one for me.

2. You are (or could be) a part of my community offline. That might mean you live close to me (in the same state), or you work in the same industry (PR/marketing) or you have something in common with me that’s apparent in your bio or tweet stream (you’re a writer a or you share an alma mater with me, for example). Also, if I already know you in real life, than there’s a very good chance I’ll follow you.

3. You have retweeted or #FF’d me. Hey, I’m a sucker for flattery and attention, just like anybody else. So long as it doesn’t look you’re doing this purely for spammy reasons, I’m much more inclined to follow you if you do this. It’s just plain old reciprocity, one of the fundamental drivers of human social behavior.

4. You’ve replied to something I tweeted. Even if I wasn’t following you, you replied to something I tweeted. Maybe to comment on it, add something helpful or just say ‘thanks for tweeting that link.’ Whatever the case, this kind of personal communication lets me know that you’re into Twitter as a conversation platform, and that there’s a good possibility we’ll be able to interact.

I don’t have hard and fast rules about who I follow or don’t follow. But these are the factors, positive and minus, that usually go into my decision. How do you decide who to follow on Twitter? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

12 things to do when you don't feel like blogging

Mark Tosczak — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 12:05:47 +0000

Don't resort to cat blogging. (Photo source: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1244985)

This is another one of my occasional posts on what to do when you don’t feel like blogging.

1. Update your bio/about page. If you’ve been doing this for any length of time, chances are it’s out of date. You should also make sure that you’re including everything there that’s going to help reinforce your brand and (if it’s a personal blog) establish your authority and expertise.

2. Develop a list of non-content tweaks to improve your blog. Chances are, you’ve got a widget or a plug-in you’ve been meaning to add to your blog, or a design tweak that you haven’t gotten around to. If you’re not going to create new content (the most important thing you can do), then figure out what else you could do to improve your blog.

3. Make one (or more) of your list of non-content improvements. If you already have a list of potential blog improvements, or you’ve made one, now is the time to start implementing those. Decide which is most important, and implement that.

4. Add more social media sites to your Ping.fm account. Ping.fm is a cool service that allows you to send updates to all sorts of social media, chat and social bookmarking sites at once. That makes it easy, when you publish a new post, to spread it to all sorts of networks. You still have to sign up for individual accounts at these sites, but Ping.fm automates the process of posting to some or all of them at once. Hint: You can also tie Ping.fm into your Hootsuite account, so Hootsuite updates it — if that makes sense for you.

5. Create a notebook with all the important records related to your blog. If you’re not keeping track of all your passwords, business records and other information related to your blogging and social media activity, it’s easy to find yourself hitting that “I’ve forgotten my password” link too often. I use 3×5 cards in a little plastic box (about $2 from an office supply store) to keep track of this information.

6. Brainstorm ideas for the next time you do blog. Sometimes taking the pressure off yourself of actually writing a full blog post can be freeing, and you may find new ideas flowing.

7. Leave smart, relevant comments on other blog posts. If you’re like me, you’re already blogging, keeping up with social media networks and digesting a torrent of incoming email, RSS feeds, ebooks and paper books. Commenting is something you probably don’t do as often as you should. Blogs with CommentLuv installed or that use Do Follow links can be particularly helpful for SEO purposes.

8. Check out other blogs in your niche, and figure out how to get a guest post on one of them. Guest posting can boost your search engine visibility, bring you new readers and give more credibility to your reputation and brand. Step one is to figure out where you’d like to guest post.

9. Look at your blog with a browser you don’t normally use and fix any design problems that show up. If you habitually use one browser (I recommend Firefox), you might be surprised what it looks like in Internet Explorer (various versions), Apple’s Safari, Google’s Chrome or the Opera browser (all of these, except Internet Explorer, come in versions for both Mac and Windows machines). You might also want to consider making your site better for mobile browsers. Here’s a set of WordPress plug-ins to help you do that.

10. Do something totally different to get inspired. Exercise, visit a museum, play with your children or read a thriller. Sometimes your brain needs a rest or a change of direction.

11. Proofread old posts. You’d be surprised at how many grammar and spelling errors could be hiding in old posts. Go read some of that older content and fix any mistakes. After the Deadline is a WordPress plugin (there’s also a Firefox add-on version) to help you find and correct those errors.

12. Blog anyway. If you’ve committed to posting regularly, don’t let your feelings (which are probably temporary) dictate your actions. If you’re feeling blocked, read my post on eight ways to overcome writer’s block.

What do you do when you just don’t feel like blogging? Leave your tips in the comments.

Four easy tips for making your business card and email signature more social

Mark Tosczak — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 11:15:54 +0000

Is your business card social media savvy? (Photo by blary54 at stock.xchng - http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1022838)

So you’re a social media maven. You tweet, you blog, you have accounts on all the major social media sites, and a few of the minor ones, too. You know how Digg works, understand URL shorteners and subscribe to a bunch of RSS feeds from social media rock stars like Chris Brogan and probloggers like Darren Rowse.

But, do your business card and email signature reflect these facts? Or are they mired in the ’90s, when a fax number was just as important as an email address?

Here are some ideas to bring these two common identity tools up to date:

1. Add the address for the social media service you use most commonly. For me, that’s Twitter (@marktzk, in case you want to follow me).

2. Instead of a company web address, how about a blog web address? This may not be feasible if you are part of a company and have a business card and email signature that follow a standard, prescribed format. But if you are self-employed, have personal business cards and use a personal email account, why not add the blog address to those?

Tip: You can get free business cards at VistaPrint and Bizcard.com.

3. You may be writing brilliant, useful content on your blog, but are you letting people know? How about adding the three most recent blog posts you’ve written under your email signature? If that seems strange or too narcissistic, it’s certainly not any worse than the quotes and song lyrics I see regularly in email sigs. Firefox add-on WiseStamp can help you do this for your free webmail (i.e. Gmail, Yahoo, etc.) accounts.

4. Are you promoting a free offer on your blog to get people to sign up for your email newsletter? For instance, perhaps your offering a free report or PDF when people join your email list. Consider putting this on the back of your business card or, again, in your email signature. (While we’re at it — is this information included in your major social media profiles? Some people who review these profiles will probbly be interested in your email list.)

I’m sure there are other things you could do with your business card and email signature to make them more social. What are your ideas? Please share them in the comments below.

The secrets of finding and sharing great content online

Mark Tosczak — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 11:30:44 +0000

What are you sharing? (Image by jzlomek via stock.xchng - http://www.sxc.hu/photo/254271)

One of the primary activities on social media sites is content sharing. Through Facebook, Twitter and other sites, people pass around content they find interesting, entertaining and useful. Content sharing is the fuel for a lot of social media activity. A shared video or blog post can often become the basis for a conversation about that content. If one of your goals online is to build a reputation for expertise in some subject, content sharing is a great way to do that. By sharing links to content about, for example, investing, you position yourself as someone who knows a lot about that topic.

I get a lot of positive comments about the quality and quantity of content I share online. I think it’s been a major factor in the reputation I (think) I’ve built online, as well as the number of followers I have on Twitter (though I am no A-lister — yet). And I think a lot of people are a baffled by how I’m able to consistently share a steady stream of useful, interesting content. So here’s a little tutorial on my “secrets” of effective content sharing.

1. Establish a steady incoming stream of material to review for possible sharing.

Subscribe to blogs and news sites in your niche using an RSS reader such as Google Reader. If you are having trouble finding these sites, check out Alltop. Chances are, it has a pretty good list in your niche.

Subscribe to email newsletters in your niche. Many of the sites you subscribed to will also have email newsletters. Subscribe to those. You may want to use a separate email account (such as a free Yahoo or Gmail account) if you’re worried about your main email inbox being overrun. Some sites will offer more original content via email than they do via RSS.

Blatant self promotion: I offer both an RSS feed and an email subscription — over there on the right side of the page. The email subscription gets you all the blog posts as they’re published, plus additional “bonus” content — extra articles and tips, resource links, free guides and special offers.

Establish Google searches for key terms in your niche. If you have a really broad niche (such as investing or social media or exercise), you may want to keep your search terms narrow and specific, otherwise you’ll get a lot of the same links that you have coming in via the blogs and news sites. If you have a Google account (which I recommend, to access Big G’s many useful and free services), you can get these alerts via email or via RSS feed; choose whichever you find easier to manage.

2. Filter the incoming material for possible sharing.

If you follow the steps above, you will have a lot more material than you’ll actually want to share. Sharing, let’s say, 3-10 useful links a day is good. Sharing 50 will just overwhelm people. Don’t share everything you find. Instead, filter. When you filter — choosing the best content to pass along to your community — you add value.

I recommend filtering in batches, once or twice a day. I usually do this in the morning. What you want to do is pick out the best stuff to share. Here’s my quick-and-dirty two-step algorithm for filtering material quickly.

Look at the headline or summary. Does it appeal to you? Does it seem interesting, entertaining or useful? Does it seem like it would be relevant to your community? Is it new and interesting? If so, click on the link and open that up in a separate tab in your browser.
Once you’ve gotten a bunch of tabs opened up, review the material. Again, apply the criteria form Step 1. Pick the best 3-10 (depending on what you think is the ideal daily number for you and your community). Close the tabs for the links you’re NOT going to share.

3. Automate your sharing.

I automate most of my sharing. I do this because I want to reserve my limited “live” time on social media sites for responding and conversation, not pushing out links. There are lots of tools that allow you to schedule social media updates ahead of time. The one I’m now using that I like best is Hootsuite.

Hootsuite is an online app, so it’s available on any computer I have a web browser open on. There’s also an iPhone app version, though I haven’t tried it yet. In addition to scheduling, Hootsuite will also push updates to Facebook and LinkedIn, two of my other primary social media sites. And Hootsuite will integrate with Ping.fm, which in turn can push updates out to dozens of different social sites an status updates. I also like Hootsuite because it has a built-in URL shortener and has click-through tracking built in — useful for measuring how valuable people are finding your updates.

I usually space out my content sharing updates throughout the day, rather than doing a lot at one time. So, for example, I might schedule one at 9 a.m., another at 10:30 a.m., another at noon, another at 2 p.m. and a final one at 4 p.m. I think this allows me more opportunities to get in front of more people in my community, as different people are checking out social sites at different times during the day. However, if you’ve done this and have had a better experience bunching a lot of updates together, I’d be interested in hearing about it.

4. Check in during the day.

Log in to your social sites periodically during the day to respond to and participate to any conversation or reaction that might spring up around your shared content. This could be as simple as thanking people who are retweeting one of your tweets, to weighing in on a conversation that breaks out on Facebook about a link you’ve shared.

5. Measure your results.

If you’re doing this for primarily personal reasons, this may be less important to you. But if you are using this for any kind of social media marketing activity, you’ll want to measure how effective your content sharing activities are. I would like at three primary measurements here:

How many people clicked through your link to actually look at the content? As I mentioned above, one of the reasons I like Hootsuite is that it has this functionality built in. However, other URL shorteners also offer this.
How many people shared the content you’re sharing? For example, on Twitter how many people retweeted it? This is a sign that people found your content engaging enough to share with their own communities.
How much of a conversation sprung up around your content sharing? How many people responded or made a comment about it? How long did those conversations last (how many back and forths).

Those are my “secrets” to effective content sharing online. What do you think? Do you have more tips on sharing content? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

Most useful online marketing posts of 2009

Mark Tosczak — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 11:54:16 +0000

I wish I could say I’d written a bunch of these, but I didn’t. Nonetheless, Who’s Blogging What, a newsletter that rounds up the best in online marketing, has a great list of online marketing posts. There are 25 posts in each of five categories – social media, search marketing, user experience, email marketing and web analytics.

Want “Tips to Get People to Join Your Facebook Fan Page?” It’s there.

How about “Nine Effective Tips for a Better Landing Page?” It’s there, too.

Or “15 Best Places for Designers to Get Free Stock Photos Online?” Yep, it’s there, also.

And much, much more. For what it’s worth, Who’s Blogging What counts as one of my best finds this year, even though it’s been around for years. It’s one of those ideas that makes me slap my forehead and say ‘why didn’t I think of that.’ I didn’t, but fortunately someone else did.

Check out the list of the most useful online marketing posts of 2009.

Three tips for better live tweeting

Mark Tosczak — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 12:19:17 +0000

In the last two weeks, I’ve live tweeted at two different events. One was a public relations seminar, where I was one of several people in the audience live tweeting. The other was a charity event where I was the only one tweeting, and I was doing it under the auspices of the organization that was holding the event. I realized afterward that there were several things I could have done to make the live tweeting a little easier on myself and a little better for anyone following me.

So with that in mind, and also keeping in mind what went right, here are a three tips for better live tweeting.

1. Be prepared with hardware and software back-ups in case something goes wrong. In my case I had a laptop with a wireless broadband card, plus multiple browsers and a desktop Twitter client (Tweetdeck) all ready to go. In addition, I had my Blackberry, which has two Twitter clients (TwitterBerry and UberTwitter) on it. As it turns out, there were no problems with hardware, software or Internet access, but if there had been I was prepared.

2. Research speakers ahead of time. Have their names close at hand (so you can spell them correctly), and find out if they have Twitter handles, blogs or websites you may want to reference.

3. If you’re taking the lead on live tweeting, figure out what you’re going to use as the hashtag. If others are, figure out what the common hashtag will be or suggest one.

I’m sure I’ve only scratched the surface here. What other things can you do to make live tweeting better, both for you and your followers? Leave a comment with your tip.

Eight tips for writing shorter tweets

Mark Tosczak — Tue, 26 May 2009 11:00:07 +0000

Twitter, the microblogging sensation that is all the rage – at least among marketers and social media aficionados – requires a considerable economy of phrasing. Fitting a useful thought into 140 characters, including a URL, can be tough sometimes. And if you want your tweet to be retweeted – spread by your followers – than you’re better off making it even shorter, like maybe 120 characters.

To that end, here are a few tips on how to tighten your tweets:

Cut unnecessary words – fillers, redundancies and words that don’t add anything, for example. If you put an opinion in Twitter, you don’t need to say “I think” – we assume that’s why you tweeted it unless you’re attributing it to someone else.
Choose shorter words over longer – “about” instead of “approximately,” for example.
Eliminate unnecessary punctuation. Do you really need those quote marks to emphasize something? Probably not. Do you need the extra “:” that Twitter adds in retweets? Again, probably not.
Use contractions (ex. “didn’t” for “did not”) and acronyms, though judiciously. Don’t sacrifice clarity for conciseness.
Make use of symbols – %, &, etc. – liberally.
Substitute punctuation for conjunctions. For example, a comma in place of an “and.”
Incorporate hashtags as part of the tweet, instead of putting it on the end. For example, “#PR pros will find this useful …”
Revise, revise, revise. It’s amazing how often, just as I think I’ve boiled a thought down to its essence, one more revision allows me to tighten it even more. Focus on your core thought or message.

That’s it. Follow these guidelines consistently and you’ll end up with shorter tweets that are more retweetable. If you have more ideas about how to shorten the length of your tweets, please add mention them in the comments.

Six links on social media, content marketing and online public relations

Mark Tosczak — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 11:24:10 +0000

I’ve found several interesting blog posts, articles and other links in the last few days and thought I’d clear them out with a blog post.

Guy Kawasaki has a good, but somewhat controversial post, about “How to use Twitter as a twool.”
If you have a blog or other content site, and you’re using an email newsletter as part of your outreach, Problogger Darren Rowse has some great ideas about how to use your email newsletter and an autoresponder to drive even more traffic to your web site.
Think social media is just for big brands with big budgets or dot-come type companies? Think again. A pest control company has adopted social media strategies as a significant, long-term component to its marketing.
The New York Times asks if new data mining technologies will track us across the Internet and through our mobile communications and ultimately erode our privacy. Might notions about privacy be redefined for the next generation?
Amazon tries “user-generated public relations.” Is this really new, or just old-school PR techniques applied online?
ReadWriteWeb says we should stop using TinyURL on microblogging services such as Twitter. I agree – I’m using snipr.com.

What I learned experimenting with automated tweets

Mark Tosczak — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 10:38:30 +0000

Recently, I spent a few days experimenting with a Twitter automation service, TweetLater. If you’ve ever followed someone on Twitter and then immediately had them follow you back or gotten a message that said something like “Thanks for following me, check out my web site at ….”, chances are you’ve been on the receiving end of an automated tweet. (Although, people can and do send these sorts of messages manually.)

Some people are truly offended by these sorts of automated tweets, and some will even unfollow you if you use them. I have received them, and continue to receive them sometimes when I follow new people, and they don’t bother me. My goal with TweetLater was to see what impact it would have on the people following me and whether it would drive more traffic to this blog. Here’s what I found, after using it over a period of three days.

Effect on followers
Using TweetLater, I sent automatic welcome messages to almost 50 new followers over the course of about three days. Three people expressed some sort of discernible unhappiness with those messages, as far as I could tell. Usually that took the form of a reply, a direct message back to me or a tweet expressing their dislike with automatic welcome messages. One or two people unfollowed me. To their credit, when I engaged a couple of these people, they were willing to have a conversation about their decisions. I didn’t try to change any minds, I just wanted to know what was motivating them. Did they dislike the fact that it was an automatic tweet, without human involvement, and thus impersonal? Did they dislike the fact that my welcome message asked them to visit my blog? In general, they disliked both. This small group of people viewed automated tweets as a form of spam.

So there was some negative feedback, though it involved a relatively small percentage of the people who got automated messages from me.

Effect on traffic to blog
Did the automated tweets drive new traffic to my blog? Well, yes, but not as much as I would have expected. And it had no discernible affect on the number of subscribers to MarkTzk.com. According to my Google Analytics numbers, I got just four visits from Twitter during the period of my little experiment. That’s one-third the level of traffic I got from organic search via Google over those three days (yes, I know, my traffic numbers are very small; I am not an A-lister). There were a few direct visits during that time, some of which may be attributable to Twitter, as people may have seen my tweet on their mobile device or through a desktop Twitter app and come via that route, and Google may not have recorded the precise source of traffic. But even counting those visits, most of my automated direct messages did not seem to generate new visits to my site.

Arguably, in the “negative reaction vs. increased traffic” trade-off, I got more new traffic from this practice. But it was a very small margin, and I tend to think it’s probably not worth even the very limited negative reaction automated tweets can create. I should also note that several people responded to my automated tweets with positive thank you messages, and a few opened up short dialogues with me that were, very positive. So not everybody views automated tweets as spam.

My takeaways
I do think services like TweetLater can be useful, but I think you’ve got to be pretty clear first why you’re on Twitter and what your goals are with your Twitter account. If you mean your tweets to represent you as a person and you want to build meaningful relationships, then automated tweets are probably not a good choice. If, on the other hand, you just want to automate your Twitter activity or drive traffic to a site, then this may be a good thing to do. If you choose that, though, you’ll have to accept that some people will respond very negatively, and often publicly, to your practice. (I’ll have another post about etiquette on Twitter and other social media sites in the future.)

To be really effective in driving traffic to your blog, I think you would have to spend some time experimenting with what exactly your auto-welcome message says and optimizing that. You would also have to optimize whatever landing page you send new followers to.

Some people send auto-welcome messages that don’t contain links. These thank people for following and may have a friendly message such as “I look forward to getting a chance to network with you. Please let me know if I can help you in any way.” Though that’s less pushy than sending a link, I’m not sure it really accomplishes much if there’s no human being behind it to start a dialogue.

The bottom line: If you use an automated Twitter service of some kind, be very clear about your goals with it and be prepared for at least some negative reaction.

(p.s. If you’re interested, I’m @marktzk on Twitter.)