Twitter is a wildly popular microblogging service. It involves writing Tweets, which are short updates of a maximum of 140 characters that tell your followers what you are up to. Although your Tweets are technically supposed to answer the question, "What are you doing?" Twitter has moved far beyond that. Tweets are used to share stories, link to photos, promote content, break news, and a whole lot more. Twitter has also become an incredibly important tool for social media marketing professionals. Here are 12 ways in which Twitter can be used in your social media marketing campaign.
1. Sharing Links to Items of Interest
As soon as you read something online that you think is interesting, it is easy to share it on Twitter with all of your followers. Twitter is highly effective in this manner because it is such a quick way to be able to reach a large group of people. You can also get a lot of great ideas for blog posts from Twitter since many new ideas and stories are floating around that haven’t even made it to the blogosphere and definitely not to mainstream media.
2. Building Your Network
Using Twitter is a great way to build your network because it allows you to find and follow people with similar interests. You can use Steeple to find people who live in your geographical area. You can also use other tools that help you find new people to follow based upon who your Twitter friends follow.
3. Build Relationships within Your Current Network
People in different networks often use Twitter to connect with their contacts instantly rather than using instant messaging for that purpose. Furthermore, many people use Twitter to connect with their network during events like conferences.
4. Re-Distributing Content from Your Blog or Website
Twitter can be used to redistribute content from your blog or website. However, you should take care to do this thoughtfully since many of your Twitter followers may already read your blog. For that reason, you may want to avoid using a blog plug-in that automatically Tweets your posts. Your best bet is to Tweet your content manually and customize each Tweet so it doesn't get old.
5. Get Involved in Live Tweeting Events
Twitter launched at SXSW last year, catapulting microblogging conferences to fame. Live Tweeting events are great because they are a form of citizen journalism that allow you to connect with several new people in your niche while making active and valuable contributions to current discussions in your community.
6. Pitching Stories to Journalists on Twitter
You can send a direct message to a journalist who is following you on Twitter to pitch a story idea.
7. Communicating with Your Team
You can use Twitter as a company intranet that connects all of your employees. Twitter can be particularly useful in this regard if you have a virtual business with employees in different geographical locations. You can set your updates to private for security reasons. Anytime you are working on group projects, you can stay in touch with your team members using Twitter.
8. Brand Monitoring
Stay up to date with any mentions of your business on Twitter. If there is anything negative, you will be able to counter it quickly. You can also use Twitter as a way to receive feedback from your customers and improve your business. Just ask your followers to give their opinion on something. For example, if you designed a new website, ask your followers what they think about it and get their constructive criticisms so you can make your site design even better.
9. Acquire More Votes on Social Media Websites
If you have submitted a story to Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, or any other social voting website, tweet a link to that submission to try to score more votes from your followers. If your followers like what they see, they are sure to vote for your content.
10. Hiring People
Looking for a programmer, designer, or writer? Whatever type of professional you seek, try finding them on Twitter. Simply send your followers a tweet telling them you are looking for someone for a job. They can either recommend someone to you or offer themselves for the job. Using Twitter in this way is ideal for finding qualified freelancers. It is much more convenient than putting out a classified ad.
11. Build Your Personal Brand
When you use Twitter to talk about things as mundane as what you ate for breakfast or how you are going to sleep early tonight, you make your followers feel like you are casual and approachable. Even those running a company that has a cold, corporate brand image could create more appeal and build a unique personal brand using Twitter.
12. Streamline Electronic Communications
When you use Twitter, you’re likely to find yourself using IM, email, and other electronic communication methods less. Twitter not only provides public chatting through Tweets, it also allows you to send direct messages. Twitter will help you streamline your electronic communications, allowing you to scale back online.
How come everybody nowadays is an SEO Expert?
Let's face it; not a day goes by where we don't see someone offering their services as a Search Engine Optimization specialist. The strange thing is however, many of the people offering such services on the various forums tend to have no runs on the board themselves.
Of course, I'm not saying there aren't a great deal of reputable internet marketing services out there, but they are becoming increasingly outnumbered by those with little or no background at all, and it is these people and their companies which are highly unlikely to ever produce satisfactory results for their clients
Perhaps one should bear in mind that there is no difference between investing your money in internet marketing, and investing your money in a regular market. In both cases you need to measure your results just as you need to target the correct audience. For example, you wouldn't even consider wasting your money by advertising your product or your service in a newspaper that is completely irrelevant to your target market. Advertising is done for one purpose and one purpose only, and that is to bring in a return on your investment, irrespective of whether the advertising is done online or offline.
Why You Should Avoid the Amateurs
Essentially, you need to bear in mind that while any Tom, Dick, and Harry can learn about search engine optimization, it takes several years of dedication, practice, and careful analysis, in order to fully understand the different techniques, and how to apply different techniques to different types of business.
The bottom line is; a SEO campaign is in fact a highly intensive process that starts out with intense keyword research in order to establish which keywords are the most likely to produce maximum results for a website. Once the ideal keywords have been established, it can be incredibly tempting to simply spread them around on your website and hope for the best. However, in most cases you'll find that the most popular keywords also have the most competition.
As such, why bother targeting particular key words, irrespective of how popular they are, if there's virtually no chance they are going to help in terms of ranking? In fact, you could end up waiting for several months before the major search engines start recognizing your website.
On the other hand, a specialist who is highly skilled in internet marketing will be aware of which relevant keywords and keyword phrases will help to improve a website's ranking. Likewise, a true professional will also know where the keywords and keyword phrases should be placed on a website in order for them to have the maximum amount of impact, without being penalized for keyword stuffing.
Onsite optimization of keywords is notoriously time consuming if it's being done properly. But if your goal is to give a website a boost in search engine ranking, then this optimization process needs to be continued off-site as well. Here again, a competent SEO professional will know exactly how to go about implementing a successful link building campaign, including article marketing, submittíng articles to directories, taking advantage of several social networking sites, and also social book marking.
Furthermore, because a professional SEO specialist appreciates the importance of being able to get a good return on investment, they will also make use of Analytics tools in order to track conversions and monitor the success of an internet marketing campaign. Bear in mind, that these tools are essential in order to fine tune any good SEO campaign.
Steer Clear of Internet Marketing Fraudsters
Unfortunately, but also to be expected, the internet is full of undesirable people who focus entirely on targeting honorable businesses by means of providing them with false promises regarding guaranteed results. These people will more often than not guarantee that they will get your website to the top of the search rankings by using specific keywords. However, in most cases, they simply use keywords which are so rarely used, they show at the top of search rankings simply because they have no competition - no one uses them.
Obviously, if no one is ever typing that keyword into the search box, then why waste money on it? One of the easiest ways to determine whether or not an internet marketing expert is in fact legitimate, is that the legitimate ones don't ever provide any guarantees with regards to getting you in the top spot on search results. This is because they know that no one can guarantee such results due to a number of reasons, such as algorithms which change continuously.
How to Avoid the Wrong Internet Marketing Service
First and foremost, you need to ask the right questions:
1. You need to determine how long the company has been involved with Internet marketing.
2. You should ask to see testimonials from past clients.
3. You should search online for their services. In fact, you should attempt to find their website by using keywords and keyword phrases which are relevant to the services they provide. Obviously, if you fail to find them on the first page of Google search results, then your alarm bells should start ringing. For example, if you were considering using the services of Sunshine Coast Internet Marketing Company, you could do a search for Sunshine Coast Internet marketing, internet marketing Sunshine Coast, etc.
The most important thing of all is that you acknowledge the fact that going with the wrong internet marketing company can end up costing you a considerable amount of money for nothing. On the other hand, if you choose to use the services of a reputable company, you can almost be certain that your website will end up ranking much higher than it did before.
