social media marketing

Sarah Worsham / Dec 4, 2008

Top Tools for Business Twittering

Once you’ve decided to use Twitter for your business, using the right tools can make the entire experience much easier and more rewarding. Here are some of the top tools that I use. If you have others, please share them in the comments. Since Twittering is exploding in use, I expect more tools to be developed and to add to this list in the future.

TweetDeck – Businesses typically have a lot of followers on Twitter (or should) and usually have a large number of people they are following (following people who follow you is a good way to connect). This can mean a large number of updates which can be difficult to scan through for the important content. TweetDeck makes it easy to monitor groups of Twitterers, keywords, and get a quick keyword cloud for what’s hot. For more info, see our review of TweetDeck.
TweetScan – TweetScan lets you set up searches for keywords so you can monitor what is being said about your company, products, and in your industry. Monitor those searches through email, rss or on their website.
TwitScoop – similar to TweetScan, TwitScoop lets you search for various keywords, but also gives you some graphs to see when the keywords have been popular over the past 6 hours, day or 3 days. While, TwitScoop does not have rss or email capabilities like TweetScan, you can get a nice visual representation of trending for a keyword so I consider them complementary tools.
TwitterFeed – If you’re actively participating in the online community, you are sharing links to content other than your own – probably on many different social networks. Twitterfeed allows you to automate Twittering about those links from any social network that has a rss feed. Right now we’re using Twitterfeed to automatically tweet our blog posts and our delicious posts.
Twellow – Twitter is a wide open frontier and it can be difficult to find people who you should be following in your industry. Twellow gives you a listing of Twitterers divided up by industry and subject area. You should consider adding your own business Twitter username if it isn’t already there.
SocialToo – Following everyone who follows you can get tiring. SocialToo automates that process, send a direct message to each person you follow, and also gives you the ability to send surveys out through Twitter.

(pic by batega @ Flickr CC)

Technorati Tags: twitter, social networks, social media, internet marketing, social media marketing, social media strategy, internet business strategy

Sarah Worsham / Dec 3, 2008

Treat Social Networks like Online Dating

Now you may or may not have dated recently, but we all have had experience with someone who comes on too strongly or is self-centered. Let’s say you are at a bar and someone approaches you with the following:

I’m new in town. Can you give me directions to your place? I can drive us there in my hot new bmw.

Even delivered as a joke, statements like that will probably put you in a negative frame of mind towards deliverer. What if, instead, they said something like:

Hi. How are you doing today?

Polite and seems interested in someone other than themselves. The difference between two alternatives seems pretty obvious, but we see similar approaches in social networking (or even regular networking). Here’s some comments I’ve gotten on various social networking sites:

Great to see you here! I invite you to stop by my profile, sign my guestbook and check out my blogs! and while you’re there please add me to your list of friends 🙂 I look forward to networking with you.

I’m not trying to sell you anything, but here are my areas of expertise: ____, ____, ____

I don’t know about you, but those types of introductions are real turn offs. Information about yourself and your business should be in your profile. If someone wants more information about what you do, they’ll look it up. If you want to explore the network to find connections, don’t carpet bomb the place with what are essentially advertisements. Take a few minutes to find people who might make a good connection and leave a more personal comment asking about their business, blog or website. Read discussion posts, help people out and learn more about people from what they post. If you think of social networking like dating, by being more personable and polite, I think you’ll find much more effective contacts and not annoy everyone.

Do you have any social networking horror stories you’d like to share? Please do in the comments section below.

(photo by Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com @ Flickr CC)

Technorati Tags: social networks, social media, internet marketing, social media marketing, social media strategy, internet business strategy

Sarah Worsham / Dec 1, 2008

TwitScoop for News & Business Intelligence

Want to know what’s hot on Twitter right now? TwitScoop gives you a quick snapshot of the top words in a tag cloud that updates every 20 seconds. Hover over any of the words to get a view of the last 5 tweets with that word highlighted. Click on a word to get a graph of its usage over the past 6 hours, day or 3 days. If you see an interesting tag cloud, click the “Tweet this cloud” button to save a snapshot of the page, with the option to send a link to Twitter (its kind of like freezing time). Here’s a link to the snapshot I saved of the twitter cloud. A widget is also available to add the hot trends tag cloud to your blog or website. Or subscribe to TwitScoop on Twitter to be updated with links to top events.

For more in depth results, choose a keyword or username to search for. Twitscoop will give you an overview of the tweets which you can click on to get more details – the last 20 tweets with the keyword highlighted and a graph of the usage over the past 6 hours, day or 3 days. If there are new results, Twitscoop will periodically update the page with a reminder to refresh to see new results (which doesn’t interupt your current research). Click the “Tweet these results” button to save your results, giving you a link or an option to send a link to Twitter. For examples, this is a link to the results for “social” that I just investigated.

TwitScoop is good tool to get a quick view of what’s going on or for research into what has been said about a certain topic (if it was within 3 days). Unlike TweetScan, there isn’t an RSS feed to subscribe to results for periodic updates, but TwitScoop’s graphing capabilities can give you good information of how a topic is trending.

Technorati Tags: twitter, social networks, social media, internet marketing, social media marketing, social media strategy, internet business strategy

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