Twitter

Five tips for better tweeting

February 13, 2010 By Mark Tosczak Leave a Comment

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.

Filed Under: Microblogging, Online marketing, Social media Tagged With: Twitter

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

February 10, 2010 By Mark Tosczak Leave a Comment

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.

Filed Under: Microblogging, networking, Online marketing, Personal branding, Social media Tagged With: Twitter

Eight tips for writing shorter tweets

May 26, 2009 By Mark Tosczak 1 Comment

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.

Filed Under: Microblogging, Social media, Writing Tagged With: Twitter

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

December 5, 2008 By Mark Tosczak Leave a Comment

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.

Filed Under: Email, Marketing & public relations, Microblogging, Online marketing, Social media, Technology Tagged With: privacy, Snipr, TinyURL, Twitter

What I learned experimenting with automated tweets

December 4, 2008 By Mark Tosczak 16 Comments

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.)

Filed Under: Microblogging, Popular, Social media Tagged With: TweetLater, Twitter

30 ways businesses can use Twitter to boost their bottom line

November 17, 2008 By Mark Tosczak Leave a Comment

Many marketers and small business owners are trying to figure out how they can use Twitter to increase sales and profits. While there are some well known examples, such as Zappos and Comcast, of businesses using Twitter effectively, lots of people are still struggling with how they might use Twitter and other microblogging services to increase their business.

So, here is a list of ideas. Some of these are very specific to certain types of businesses, while others are more general.

Twitter for listening and learning:

Ask for feedback on your customer service.
Solicit ideas from customers about new products and services to add.
Ask for advice on business strategy.
Ask for help identifying needed business resources – the name of a good accountant, for example.
Use Twitter’s search function to find people already talking about your business, then join that conversation.
Use Twitter’s search function to find people already talking about your industry, then join those conversations.
Remind people you’re open to getting and answering questions about your business via Twitter.
Keep tabs on your competititors by following their tweets.

Twitter for direct marketing and advertising:

For restaurants, Tweet the lunch/dinner/daily specials or soup of the day.
Publish links to news releases.
Run a contest – ask people to submit their best 140-character review of your business or run a trivia contest. Give away real prizes.
For retailers, announce sales and specials.
Announce new locations.
Announce special holiday hours or special events (such a midnight sale).
Offer followers something free – a special Twitter-only coupon, free advice, a free product or service.
Tell followers what the lines are like right now at your business – helps customers decide whether to shop now or later.
Notify people of special ads or coupons in the newspaper or somewhere else.

Twitter for public relations and branding:

Say thank you to your customers and your community.
Publish links to news coverage about your company.
Publish links to news coverage about your industry.
Publish brief announcements, such as new hires, about your company.
Point followers to new posts on your company blog.
Tweet about unusual happenings – if your business closes unexpectedly because of a power outage or severe weather, for example.
Publish content to other social media networks (such as YouTube videos or Flickr images) and then use Twitter to direct people there.
Use your Tweets to support your favorite local charity – this builds good will, enhances your reputation and helps your favorite charity.

Twitter for networking and sales:

Remind people they can schedule appointments by sending you a direct message via Twitter.
Twitter industry events and conferences live while you’re attending.
Use Twitter to gather people for impromptu get-togethers at industry conferences.
Answer sales questions from prospects and customers.
Use Twitter’s direct message feature to keep customers updated about the status of their orders.

I’m sure there are lots of other creative ways businesses and business professionals are using Twitter. Please leave your ideas in the comments below.

Technorati Tags: Twitter, microblogging, marketing, socialmedia

Filed Under: Online marketing, Social media Tagged With: Twitter

Five tips for using social media productively

November 10, 2008 By Mark Tosczak 4 Comments

One question (and complaint) that I hear from people who aren’t active using social media online (or who limit themselves to one or two sites) is “Where do you find the time for all that?” That’s a fair question. Being online does take up time, and sites such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, the millions of blogs out there, they can call consumer a huge amount of time if you’re not careful.

However, you can use these sites and still be productive. Here are some tips on how.

1. Subscribe to your own RSS feeds. Many social networking sites offer RSS feeds of at least part of their content. That means you can subscribe to your friends’ status updates in Facebook or LinkedIn and get those right in your RSS reader. Why do this? If you’re like me your RSS reader is already a major source of incoming content and you monitor it every day. Subscrbing to RSS feeds means you can find out about those updates without going to the site. To participate or see you replies, you’re still going to have to visit those sites, but monitoring the RSS feed allows you to quickly scan what’s going on and choose what conversations you might want to get involved in.

Take-away action: Look for the RSS icon in your browser window or on the web page and decide which feeds it makes sense to subscribe to.

2. Set your account options so you get notifications via email. Social media sites will typically have account settings that allow you to be notified of things like connection requests via email. By setting those up you can ensure you don’t miss important notifications because you didn’t go to the site. Again, I’m assuming that even on days when you don’t have time to visit social networking sites you’re still checking your email.

Take-away action: Go check your account settings and turn on email notifications.

3. Update more than one social media at a time. There are a number of applications and services out there that allow you to update more than one social media service at a time. I use ping.fm and I have an account with, though I haven’t yet experimented with, hellotxt.tcom. That means I can update Twitter, LinkedIn and other services at the same time, assuming I want to give them the same update message. This also allows me to update these sites without actually visiting them all. Because these are web-based services I can use them from whatever computer I might be working on, at home or at work. One word of warning about these: Different sites impose different length limits on your status updates, so a full 140-character update for Twitter will be cut off on LinkedIn because that site has a shorter status message field.

Take-away action: Set up an account with one of the update services and start using it.

4. Measure the value of your updates. The key to effective social networking is to provide value. If you’re like me and you tend to send out a lot of links, then you might want to use a URL-shortening service such as BudURL or SnipURL that allows you to track click-throughs on your links. These allow you to see how many people are actually clicking through on your links. If nobody is, then it’s probably a safe bet that the links you’re offering don’t have much value for the people in your network, which may mean its time to do something different.

Take-away action: Set up an account with a URL-shortening service and put the link on your browser toolbar so it’s always available.

5. Decide on your key services and be diligent. Finally, it is true that you can’t do everything, and there are far too many social media sites out there to be active on all of them — even if you use every productivity tip in the book. So I recommend you choose a handful that are likely to be useful or fun and concentrate on those. That may mean that you choose LinkedIn over MySpace, for example, unless you’re involved in music in which case MySpace might be a better choice. Devote a little bit of time – maybe just 5 or 10 minutes a day – to checking each of your target sites and doing something there, even if it’s just leaving a comment for an acquaintance or reviewing status changes.

Take-away action: Decide on three to five targeted social media services to start with and try to be active in some way most days on each of those sites.

Have more tips on how to use social media productively and still have a life? Leave them in the comments below so everyone can learn.

Filed Under: Productivity, Social media Tagged With: budurl, Facebook, hellotxt.com, LinkedIn, MySpace, ping.fm, snipurl, Twitter

Why I'm becoming more promiscuous online

July 31, 2008 By Mark Tosczak 4 Comments

Are you conservative, friendly, open or promiscuous?

People use social media sites to network online in different ways, and you can classify them in roughly four categories.

Conservative: If you’re a conservative networker online, you’ll connect only to people you know in real life. It might even be just the people you know well and like.

Friendly: You’ll connect to people you know or have at least met in real life, even if it was only on a conference call, regardless of how well you know them.

Open: You’ll connect to anybody you’ve had some sort of contact with, online or off, even if the contact was as limited as following their tweets (or them following yours).

Promiscuous: You’ll connect to anybody, even complete strangers. You’re always looking for an excuse to send that invitation to link, always willing to accept one.

Ex-conservative becoming more promiscuous

Over time, I’ve progressed from the conservative end of this spectrum to promiscuous. Why? Because it’s on that wide-open end of the spectrum that online social networking is so powerful.

Here’s what I mean. On the conservative end of the scale, where you’re connected to a relatively small number of people who you already know pretty well, social networking sites such as LinkedIn or Facebook aren’t that much more useful than Microsoft Outlook. They give you a way to keep in touch electronically with people you already know, but that’s about it.

But as you make your online network wider and deeper, it becomes more and more difficult, and eventually impossible, to have the kind of personal relationship with each individual that you had when you were conservative. The connections in these broader networks are looser, the personal communication increasingly infrequent, the relationships weaker. But they are still connections, still relationships.

You can send out your status updates, pass along a useful link, maybe ask a question. Most of the people in your loose network may not pay a lot of attention, most of the time, but your status update — your ping to your network — is a way of maintaining at least a weak connection, but without being intrusive. Everyone is opted in. Anybody can opt out.

Sites like LinkedIn and Facebook, Twitter, our blogs and the rest of the social media universe allow you to maintain more relationships at a greater distance, something that wouldn’t be practical for most of us offline.

Why would you want to maintain these weak relationships? Because when you need something (like a job), or want to know something (like an obscure piece of technical information) or have an idea you want to spread (maybe about the value of social networks and ‘weak’ relationships), you can tug the strings in your network and get more feedback than you ever could in your conservative real world network. Even though those connections are weak, if you ask the network for help, at least some people will respond.

So I’m becoming more promiscuous online. Want to follow me on Twitter? Go here. Want to connect to me on LinkedIn? I welcome it, find me here. Feel like friending me on Facebook? I’m friendly – go for it.

What about you? Are you a conservative networker online, or a prolific and promiscuous connector? Tell us about your online networking style, and why you’ve chosen that style, in the comments below.

Update: I’ve tweaked my approach just a bit. Please check out this post about my approach to Facebook. (Feb. 14, 2010)

Filed Under: Career, networking, Social media Tagged With: Facebook, LinkedIn, networking, Twitter

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