Live from PubCon South: The Twitter and Microblogging Revolution

Here I thought I knew a thing or two about Twitter, and then I came to this session!! The session was given by Jon Henshaw of Raven Internet Marketing Tools, Dan Zarrella, a social and viral media consultant, Lee Odden of TopRank, and David Snyder of Search & Social. The session covered many great tools to use with Twitter and strategy and tactics around using Twitter for business.

Jon Henshaw

Jon gave pointers on how to get started with Twitter. He mentioned the tool Twitority to find friends. You can also follow RSS feeds from Twitter Search to find people who tweet about your subject.

He does not recommend "pimping" yourself or your company right off the bat. Develop relationships first. Don't overfollow too quickly! He suggested Twimailer which gives you more information when someone follows you, like their number of followers, their interests, etc. so you can decide off the bat if you want to follow them back.

Some interesting facts:
Twitter users are most active on Wednesdays
Monday and Wednesday are the best day of the week to get retweets.
The best time to tweet to get retweets is between 5am-4pm.
Twitter users are most engaged during 8am-4pm.

Use keywords and hashtags in your twitter posts and keep most tweets non-promotional. No one wants to follow you if you only promote yourself.

He highly recommended TweetDeck for following tweets. He also recommended Friend or Follow, a tool that lets you put in your username to see who is following you back. SocialToo also gives some valuable info. HootSuite allows you to SCHEDULE tweets. Splitweet keeps track of tweets. TweetStalk allows you to follow someone without technically following them in Twitter.

Lee Odden

Lee started off by sharing some stats about Twitter- it has grown by over 964.5% in a year. It is starting to encroach on traditional search tools, like Google Blog Search. Lee covered the many benefits of using Twitter, many of which are related to public relations and brand.

Lee discussed a social media roadmap, looking at audience, objectives, strategy, tactics and measurement in determining a social media plan. He showed that Twitter outdrives traffic directed to their blog at TopRank over other tactics, like StumbleUpon and other methods. It's also helped with getting covered by reporters.

Some tools Lee endorsed:
Twhirl and TweetDeck
TwitterFon for iPhone
search.twitter.com
Twitturly.com (track retweets) and backtweets.com/top-links
Cli.gs and bit.ly for URL shortening and analytics
twellow.com and twibs.com -Twitter directories
twitter.pbwiki.com - a wiki of applications for Twitter

Dan Zarrella

Rules to get Retweets:
Leave room for people to put in RT to retweet you
Don't put the @ as the first symbol
Give credit
Try to keep the original tweet as much the same as possible

70% of all retweets contain a link- it's a great way to promote content! More followers = more retweets, but it's not as strong of a correlation as you might expect. The most retweeted words include: you (how YOU can do something), post, blog, new blog post, please retweet, etc. Asking for a retweet does work, but don't do it every time.

How tos and instructional content, news, warnings, freebies, etc. When you ask for a retweet with using the word "please," you're more likely to get a retweet. The more something is retweeted, the more likely it will be retweeted again.

Also be sure to display tweet-it buttons so that readers of content can easily Tweet the blog post or content.

David Snyder

Last up was Dave Snyder who told us how to "pimp Twitter for money" -what we all want to know! Dave coverd a case study about The Book Bank Foundation, where they increased brand awareness and generated leads. Don't use followers as your core metric - that's not true measurement. It's about viral communication. They raised $20,000 in two months via Twitter use.

How did he do it? First they seeded with power users on subjects that were relative, like homelessness. He stressed solid content creation. Defintely monitor and measure. Dave uses TweetLater, which is a Twitter management service. Dave says you should definitely track retweets.

Dave's main rules:
Have a game plan
You get what you give
Be consistent

Seed Newsvine

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