twitter

Sarah Worsham / Jul 14, 2009

Use Twitterfeed to Automate Sending Feeds to Twitter

You have a blog and you want your posts to automatically be tweeted without having to remember to do it. Or you’re reading articles on Google Reader and you’d like to have interesting ones sent automatically to Twitter. Twitterfeed takes any RSS feed and automatically sends new posts to Twitter for you. But you’ll have quite a bit of control over how the feed works…

Sarah Worsham / Apr 30, 2009

9 Ways to Lose Business Using Twitter

Companies and inviduals alike have been flocking to Twitter. Many companies are using Twitter to enage their customers in meaningful conversations, helping with support issues and questions, and gathering feedback to improve their products and services. But some companies are just using Twitter as another broadcast medium, which can actually be harmful. When using Twitter for business here’s what you shouldn’t do:

Talk only about your company and products – Twitter is a social media for having conversations (that means two-way communication).
Ignore what people are saying about you – Twitter gives your customers a voice. Pay attention to what they’re saying.
Fail to Respond – For very large companies with many followers, it can be difficult to respond to every request, but you should try as hard as possible.
Talk about inappropriate subjects – This happens most often when personal and business subjects mix, but it could also be talking about controversial subjects. Just keep in mind that whatever you say is out there for everyone to see.
Sell to followers – Obviously some self-promotion is fine, but it should not be the main use of your Twitter account. And you shouldn’t direct message every follower with links to your product or promotions.
Ask for contacts – If people are interested in your products or services, they’ll contact you. If you provide useful and helpful information, people will start to follow you. People are very protective of their coworkers, friends and family, so don’t violate their trust.
Ask people to promote your stuff – If they find what you say valuable enough, they’ll tell others. Asking for a rt occasionally may be ok, but constantly bugging people to promote you will just annoy them.
Don’t do anything constructive with feedback – Your customers are offering feedback because they care (if they didn’t, they wouldn’t bother). If you don’t do anything useful with the feedback, they’ll stop giving it and it’ll be much more difficult to satisfy them.
Take more than you give – If you fail to offer useful and helpful information, offer support and wisdom, and give information, your customers will stop listening and go elsewhere.

I think a lot of it comes down to acting the same on Twitter as you would in person.

(photo by hansvandenberg30)

Technorati tags: social media, brand, social networking, business, marketing strategy, marketing

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Sarah Worsham / Apr 20, 2009

Tr.im – Twitter Stats You Need

In my effort to find or create the perfect Twitter utility, I’ve been experimenting with various url shorteners to see what kind of statistics they can give me. Today I started playing with Tr.im and, so far, I’m pretty happy with the results. One of my requirements is that it work with Twitterfeed, which I use to send RSS feeds directly to my Twitter account. What I’m looking for in terms of statistics is how many clicks each url gets, and then an overview of clicks for all links.

Tr.im isn’t quite my perfect Twitter stats service, but it’s the best I’ve seen so far (other than getting some 503, service unavailable errors, which may be related to Twitter issues). I’m able to see the clicks on up to 15 tweets – or tr.immed urls, as they call them – from the dashboard, along with aggregated country information for those tweets.

The exciting part is when you drill down into one of your tweets. From the summary you can see the breakdown of humans vs. bots for the clicks (at least in their estimate), along with more detailed information about each of the human visitors, including location, operating system, client/web browser, and how long ago they clicked. On the timelines page, you can get a visual representation of when clicks happened for the first 72 hours (or at least you should, but it wasn’t working for me). Referrers will give you known websites that are referring to the url. Agents shows a breakdown of visitor browsers and operating systems (platforms) and the locations page will give you a breakdown of click location, similar to the summary (although now it includes bots).

Tr.im, which is part of the Nambu network (a twitter client, currently for Mac and iphone), also offers some additional features, including a Firefox extention, a Mac dashboard widget, bookmarklets, and ubiquity scripts. For Mac users, the dashboard widget is a really nice addition which frees up a tab in your web browser. I’ve only been using Tr.im for a few hours, so we’ll see how it handles my tweets throughout the day – and whether something better catches my eye.

Technorati tags: social media, twitter, business, trim, marketing

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