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TwitterCounter – Stats for Your Tweets

twittercounterEver wish you could get stats on your Twitter feed like you can with Google Analytics for your website and RSS feed? TwitterCounter shows you your number of followers by day for the previous week, month or 3 months, including average growth and future growth estimations.  By installing their TwitterRemote widget on your blog or website you can see which Twitter users recently visited.  The widget is fully customizable and is very similar to widgets such as MyBlogLog. A little badge which updates with your number of followers on Twitter is also available.

TwitterCounter has thought a lot about promoting its own services – just about everything has a link so you can tweet the results.  Also available is a paid featured spot as the example account on the homepage and linked to throughout the site.

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Twitter Tip – Automate Tweets with Twitterfeed

twitterfeedThe point of Twitter is to have a conversation, but it also nice to send out useful information to your followers – perhaps links of interest or a link when you post to your blog. Twitterfeed allows you to use RSS feeds to automatically send links to your Twitter account.  Just add the RSS feed from your blog to Twitterfeed and you will automatically tweet the blog title with a link whenever you add a new post.

Once you have an account you can add any RSS feed and tell Twitterfeed how often you want it to post items from your feed (every 30m, every hour, etc) and how many items to post (1-5).  Twitterfeed will only post new items, so don’t worry about posting redundant content.  Once you add a feed it may take a few minutes for Twitterfeed to pick it up.

Twitterfeed can also be used to post directly to identi.ca and custom laconica installations. Using Twitterfeed in conjunction with Ping.fm or HelloTxt you can also post to any sites those services support.

Here at Sazbean, we use Twitterfeed to automatically tweet our blog posts and links we add to delicious.

If you use Twitterfeed, we’d love to hear how in the comments.

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Empower Your Employees to Help Your Customers

customerdantaylorYesterday Jason Falls over at Social Media Explorer wrote a post about whether brands were playing favorites on social media.  The problem is that many customers have problems, but often it seems that people who are influencers – who have a popular blog or twitter feed – will get responses from companies that normal people can’t seem to get through normal customer support channels.  I commented that right now many of the people monitoring social media at companies are higher up and actually have the power to fix problems.

Why is this exactly? Why do people have to complain on Twitter or their blog or to their influencer friends to get their problems solved?  Most of us have had an experience with a customer support system where the employee had to follow a script and wasn’t allowed to make any kind of decision. You usually have to try to get up to a manager or another department and even then there’s no guarantee that you’ll get any kind of decision.

What would happen if you allowed your customer support employees to make decisions?  You’d have to provide them with some guidelines, obviously, but what if they could actually help your customers? Many years ago I used to work a few hours a week at Bed, Bath & Beyond (ok, mostly for the discount).  They allowed their employees to give up to a 5% discount to any customer for any reason (usually having to do with a flaw in the merchandise).  Do you know how happy it makes a customer when they come up to you to show you a flaw in a product, ready for a fight, and you just give them a 5% discount without arguing?  How many of those customers were repeat customers?  I’d imagine quite a few.  I’m sure BBB made up the 5% discount with increased sales from happy customers.

All the employees at your company will influence your brand and reputation.  If you give them the power to make decisions that help customers, it will only help your company in the long run.

(photo by dan taylor @ FlickrCC)

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