I was reminded of a great Facebook tip for driving more fans and engagement whilst watching a video hosted by Mari Smith recently.  It was her final tip that reminded me that this was something that I really don’t do enough of.  The tip came up again at the KLCK Bloggers Meet-up on Monday.  So what was this top tip?  It’s a simple as sharing your Facebook Page posts directly to Twitter and asking for feedback.  But how do you do this?

You can automate this process but I’ve just disconnected this feature for Spiderworking.com.  Why?  Well when I looked through my newsfeed I found that the posts looked automated, they often clashed with similar posts I was making on Twitter and it prevented me from personalising these tweets.  So today I’m going to show you how to link to a specific Facebook post manually. It’s really easy, it will bring you more engagement and as people have to ‘Like’ your page before commenting or posting it will also bring you more Fans.

1. Click the timestamp underneath the post you want to share

2. Copy the complete link from the address bar of your browser

3. Shorten the link by pasting it into a service such as www.bitly.com

4. Paste the link into a tweet asking for feedback

You can use this same method for finding a direct link to a specific tweet or Google+ post too.

It can be easy to get carried away with community size when we embark on a social media campaign.  How many Twitter followers do we have?  How many Facebook Likes? How many YouTube subscribers?  And community size is important, however it’s not the most important thing.

Building a valuable community takes time and although there are people out there who will attempt to sell you thousands of Facebook fans or Twitter followers, the relevance of these bought communities is often low.  Bought Facebook fans often have no interest in your product or service and come from outside your target market or geographical target.  As you are not relevant to them your updates will be or little interest so their value is virtually 0.

It is possible to be successful in social media without massive fan or follower numbers. Take a look at this recent case study from ‘Old Farm’ published on Bloggertone.  I’d even suggest that it’s possible to be successful in social media without having your own presence on Facebook or Twitter (although I don’t recommend this).  All you need to do is create compelling content that is easy to share.

Sharing is the lifeblood of social media, it is ultimately what will secure your success.

Here’s an example.  Your new Faeboook business page has 50 Likes.   You upload a photograph that is amusing, topical or of real interest to your 50 fans.  The average person has 130 friends on Faceboook  and it’s likely that some of those have similar interests to them.  If one fan shares your post it has not only reached your 50 fans but also that fans 130 friends .  Total reach = 180.  If 10 of your fans shared that would be 1,350.  And each time one of their friends shares it on, that’s another 130 people reached.  Now of course not all of your fan’s friends will see that update and some of their friends will already be fans of your page, but you get the idea.

The same formula can be applied to Twitter and even if you don’t have your own presence if you make your blog or website easy to share you still have the potential to reach social media users.

So how can encourage sharing?

Good content

It’s been a bit of a social media adage that ‘Content is King’.  For people to share your content you must have content and it has to be compelling to your target market.  Think about what information you have that they need and blog, or share your thoughts on Facebook or other networks.

The more relevant or topical that your content is the more likely your community is to share it.  For example the videos I create that attract the most views are tutorials on new social media features as they are released. Today I’m late blogging because I’ve been busy screen grabbing and talking people through the newest Facebook news feed updates.

If you become synonymous with good content then people are more likely to read and share your posts in the future.

Share buttons

If you have a blog make sure you’ve made it easy to share.  Adding Twitter or Facebook share buttons or plugins as well as something like ‘Add This’ means that your community can share your content with one click of a mouse.

Share content from others

Be generous with others and share good information, links and tips that they create.  When possible credit the original poster.  This will buy you good will and also establishes you as a generous person.  These qualities will give you social media Karma making people keen to share your content too.

Get to know people

It’s important to build relationships with members of your community.  Engage as often as you can and build a rapport with people.  Others are far more likely to share your content if they feel they know you.

Ask for the share

Today I saw a beautiful photograph on Google+ with the tag line ‘please share this if you like it’ so I did.  However if that user constantly asked for the share I’d be less inclined to do so.

Asking people to share or RT your content will spark people to do just that, there are some interesting statistics on how adding ‘Please RT’ at the end of a Tweet will increase your RT’s.  Asking too often is a mistake that lots of people make, eventually your followers will get annoyed and could stop sharing all together.

How do you encourage sharing?  What encourages you to share content? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

At some moment on Monday night I flipped.  I follow Chris Brogan on Twitter and Google+ and a tweet sprung onto my newsfeed.

“Starting to really dislike the 140 character limit after years of advocating it. Conversations are so choppy here.”

Before I give you my reaction a bit of background

I have to admit one of the things I’ve enjoyed about Google+ is watching it evolve, watching early adopters whose opinions I respect discussing the new network, and discovering how it works.  Chris Brogan for one hung up his keys at Facebook and moved lock stock and barrel over to G+.  These people were finding new ways that Google+ would work and sharing them with their followers.

After a while it became apparent that Google+ was not just a potential Facebook rival but also a Twitter rival, the stream was reminiscent of Twitter and you have the ability of following people who don’t follow you back.  There was nothing amazingly different about Google+ but it was taking the best bits of other social networks and improving them.  And therein lies G+’s strength.

With a massive user base that grew at a rate that must have struck panic into the heart of Mark Zukerberg I was beginning to think that perhaps it could eclipse Facebook and do so much faster than I’d originally anticipated. However this has yet to happen.  There are members all right but few are active and my feed is still dominated by a few power users.

When G+ was launched I avidly created content specifically for it, I routed out my best photos, made specific videos and found links just for sharing there.  To me if I was going to be a success with Google+  I’d have to discover what to post and how to differentiate what I was doing there to what I did on other networks.  My community and potential target market are very much ensconced on Facebook and Twitter so leaving them like Chris Brogan did wouldn’t work for me.

As time has passed I have posted less and less. I dip in everyday to have a look at what’s going on and sadly I now break my golden rule. “thou shalt not post the same content to Facebook and Google+”.

There are some people on there whose streams I find entertaining.  There are some great photographers and seeing photos in the timeline is definitely one thing that G+ has over Twitter.  There are also the social media peeps. Chris Brogan, Mari Smith.  They post great stuff and I love reading it but I hesitate before commenting.  Why?  Well firstly the volume of notifications.  Yes I can mute a post but really my trips to G+ are swift and stopping to mute stuff on the way seems unnecessary.  The notifications that someone else has responded to the post would be fine if there was a conversation going on but each commentator seems to act individually, they are communicating with the original poster but not me and not the others who have left comments.  This is how it works on Twitter but surely G+ gives us the platform to converse.  I myself am guilty of this.  I leave a comment based on the original post and the first few comments I see.  Real conversation can spring up on G+ but usually it’s on the content posted by less influential users.  I’ve participated in small scale conversations on both my own and other users posts.

I guess part of the reason for this is the curse of celebrity, Twitter has given us unpresidented access to celebrity and this has carried forward to Google+.  The problem being that Twitter is filtered so we don’t all see @replies of adoration aimed at high profile users, sadly on Google+ we do.

So with all those users I still see my feed dominated by celebrities or power users, I see some of my contacts struggling with G+ or like me just throwing the odd link up here and there.  It’s partly my fault, I’m not leading my community over to G+, I’m not encouraging them the way others there are and unless I, and people like me, make a better effort Google+ can not succeed.

So my reaction to Chris Brogans Tweet was

“@chrisbrogan G+ isn’t ready for the masses yet.. us with smaller communities are finding it harder.”

to which he responded

“@spiderworking – how so?”

As if to endorse the sentiment of his original tweet I’ve had to post over 800 words to explain my thoughts.

I’m not sure I disagree with Chris Brogan’s point of view as such I’m just not there yet and neither is my community.  It’s almost as if due to his loyal community base he’s been able to take the express train to Google+ adoption where as I’m still on the steam train, we stop more often on the way though and hopefully we’ll pick up passengers on route.

What are your thoughts on Google+?  Will you pledge like me to try harder? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Ruairí Browne is the Managing Director of Kro IT Solutions Limited; a software development company in Dublin. He has over 12 years’ experience working in web technologies and he counts some very well-known companies as his clients. In this guest blog post for Spiderworking,com he examines the part a traditional website has to play in the age of social media.

I have noticed an increasing number of businesses operating from social media only and eschewing a traditional website. It is not something I am against in principle – actually I think a good social media presence is a lot more useful and cost effective than a bad website. It is also technically very feasible – you can sell products directly from Facebook now with no major setup costs. However for serious business owners here are some reasons why I believe you should keep a website as the central hub of your online activity.

1) Watch the T&Cs

Facebook, Google Plus, and Twitter all have seemingly daft rules about competitions, promotion, and other aspects of being a respectable user of their site. If you break these rules you will often be banned without warning or any right to state your case. By using social media as a channel to send users back to your website where they can then enter competitions or purchase deals you are ensuring that you do not fall foul of these rules. You may also consider that some websites such as those related to breast feeding or alcohol may fall foul of American prudence on those subjects that would not be applicable in Ireland.

2) Fashions Change

A well-known Irish band that I worked with spent a lot of money on a social media campaign to launch themselves on MySpace and Bebo. They also had a website which could be maintained, managed, and edited by the band themselves. However they never really took to the website and decided to run all their promotions and competitions exclusively through social media. At one point they had a major fan base of over 100,000. I asked them once if they had email addresses for all these fans and they laughed at me and told me email was old school (man). That was all very well until all their fans moved to Facebook and they had to start again back at zero. If they had driven even a proportion of their traffic back to their website they could have captured their fans contact details there and when the band moved to Facebook they would at least have been able to inform people. As it happens the change in fashion more or less finished the band because the second time around they had all left their jobs and could not sustain a second long campaign back to popularity. I am not sure that Facebook is about to follow Bebo down the drain, but if it does (and let’s face it Google Plus would like it to) then are you ready to move with it? Also imagine that one day you wake up and all your followers are gone from your Facebook page due to some glitch. It could happen and if it does Facebook will issue a brief statement saying that some customers were affected and there is nothing we can do about it.

3)     Information is Powerful

Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and Google Plus are all great places to interact with your customers. However your website is owned by you and therefore a “hit” to your website is of great value to you. For starters you are on message right across the screen – you are not sharing your screen space with messages from the social media website or advertisements or anything else. Secondly you are capturing user data such as where they came from, what country they are in, what keywords they used to find you, etc. You essentially have control of the customer and it is up to you to lose them or make the sale. The same cannot be said with Facebook (or similar) where your customer is really Facebook’s customer and you have to compete for their attention. People picture Facebook as like a big shopping mall that attracts millions of visitors and allows you the privilege of selling to them. However remember that reality is that we are attracting millions of visitors to Facebook and then they are the ones that are trying to sell to those visitors. Think of the Arab guy in the market in Morocco. He comes out into the street with a monkey on his shoulder to attract attention and he tries to make you feel special by telling you he is Irish and his wife is Irish and his dog is Irish. All the time he is pushing you into his store. He knows that the market is a dangerous and fickle place where everyone wants a bit of you. If he can get you into his shop he has your undivided attention to try and make a sale. Facebook is like that market and you need to get people back to your website where you can get their undivided attention.

4)     Credibility

Users are not stupid. They know a Facebook page takes 3 minutes to create and that you can get 100 fans just by asking your friends. A website shows much more commitment. A website says that if I have a problem this person will still be here in a few months. This may not be accurate but it is going to be a factor in your customers mind. When e-commerce first took off the most successful shops were those with a brick and mortar presence backing them. Nowadays people expect that a social media presence will at least be backed by a website and if that in turn is backed up by a bricks and mortar operation then all the better.

5)     Value

Finally a web based business is worth money and can be sold. For all the reasons above and many more a business based solely on social media is of no value to an investor, bank manager, or buyer. Social media is also perceived [appropriately] to be about people. It is very rare that a small business has an effective social media presence that is not in reality based on one or two key personalities. Having a website behind your social media presence gives it a focus and a focal point that will make it easier for other personalities to take your place and continue to run your business.

You don’t have to look too far to see an example of a business run in the way I recommend. Spiderworking.com is a strong brand tied together by a good website. However Amanda is herself a brand on social media but she tends to filter most of her potential customers back to the Spiderworking.com website (after all where are you reading this blog post?). She is embracing social media fully but she is using it to strengthen and nourish her core business rather than as an end in itself.

I always picture a website as the trunk of a big solid oak tree. Social media is like a part of the root and branch system – it brings nourishment to the website and it allows the website to express itself. If a tree loses a branch or a root it will not die, but without many of them it will not live. There are many other roots and branches such as email, cold calling, marketing, advertising, and networking. They are all important but I suspect that right now social media is for a lot of businesses the one to concentrate on. Just don’t forget the basics – you need a good solid place to call home.

The title of this post is a bit of a misnomer after all blogging is social media. However I was inspired to write this series of blog posts by the KLCK Bloggers network in response to a presentation I gave at the last meeting.

Researching your ideas for blogs or gauging the opinion of others can be a long process.  Social media makes it easier.  Asking your social media communities for opinion and suggestions is a fantastic way to get new insights on what you are doing.  But what tools can you use?

Facebook Questions

The recently launched Facebook Questions tool always gets a great response.  The beauty of this tool is that you can ask the question on your own page but as people respond their friends see the question and are encouraged to respond giving it a larger reach than simply your own community and freinds.  There is also an option for respondents to add their own answers, suggesting answers you may not have thought of before.

Ask Twitter

Simply putting a question out on Twitter can provoke responses.  My recent call out for Facebook landing page examples returned lots of suggestions, some of which made it into my Bloggertone post.

Linkedin Answers

Linkedin is a huge mine of information and the Linkedin Answers tools allows you to get suggestions and answers from Linkedin users around the world even if you are not connected to them directly or through a group.  You will find Linkedin Answers by clicking ‘More’ on your Linkedin home page and selecting ‘Answers’ from the drop down menu.  Answers are categorised by topic.

Linkedin Groups

Linkedin groups are a fantastic resource to ask you question or monitor trends within your industries.  Again it gives you the opportunity to gather opinion from people outside your networks.

Quora

There’s been a lot of buzz around Quora this year.  It’s simply a questions and answers network but it’s very well used and has become a fantastic space to find out anything about everything.  Although mostly techie at the moment it is growing.  It can be used both to answer your own questions

Internet forums

Whatever industry you are in there will be a forum or message board for you.  Searching these out, joining them and becoming an active member can be a great resource for information.

What other social media do you use for research?  Do you have any tips and tricks to share?  If so let me know by leaving a comment below.

Over the last few weeks we’ve looked at how you can boost your Twitter profile using an Image, by completing your bio, by injecting your personality and by sharing.  This week we look at how to customise your profile and how conversation can help you build relationships.

5. Customise your profile

By customising both your colour scheme and background on Twitter you are enhancing your brand,  when people visit your profile page it should fit in with the rest of your web presence.    You can change the colouring of your sidebar and your text matching these to your website, Facebook page or logo.  Changing your background to a photograph, your logo or simply your brand colouring like @BeatriceWhelan again drives home your branding.

Taking it one step forward you can add some information to your background like @thechurch_ie.  It’s important to note however that depending on your screen resolution you may be able to view more or less of the background so if the information on your background is important; a phone number or a discount code make sure you add it to your bio as well.

6. Conversation

What makes you choose to follow someone on Facebook?  For me I click through to their profile, have a look at their bio and have a quick scan of their tweets.  If a lot of their tweets start with @ I know they are conversational.  Conversation and engagement are the life blood of Twitter.  Yes you can be successful if you don’t converse but it’s easier to build a following and become a part of the community if you do.  Engaging on Twitter gives you the opportunity to prove your expertise and learn from others.  It can get you noticed by people you want to connect with.  Whereas someone may not reciprocate a follow engaging them in conversation can make more of an impact on them.

Ken McGuire does this well on all of his accounts but @AnyGivenFood is a great example of someone who converses and stays on topic.  He not only joins in conversations with others but instigates conversations himself

Another great example is Carol Tallon @BuyersBrokersLtd, again plenty of conversation but all with a professional edge.

Do you have a number 7 or 8?  I’d love to hear what you think the most important ways are to improve your Twitter presence.  Maybe you disagree with my top 6.  Let me know by leaving a comment below.

Last week in part 1 we looked at how you can boost your Twitter profile by writing a great bio and by including a picture.  The tips I am going to share this week may seem like child’s play to many experienced Twitter users but they are things that are often overlooked.

3. Personality

As business owners we are constantly seeking our USP, what makes us different to our competitors?  What makes us stand out from the crowd?  For me, the one thing you always have over your competitors, the thing that makes you truly unique is you and your people.  In social media this is a massive asset, injecting personality and tone of voice into your tweets makes them uniquely yours.

One of my favorite Twitter accounts, spanning way back to the old days when I was blogging for Feelgood Organic Hampers is @KieranMurphy of Murphy’s Ice Cream.  There is personality in his tweets, somehow always related to ice cream and always making me hungry.

Bigger companies can have personality too.  Last week I showed you how Honda identified the people behind their tweets.  The Roger Smith Hotel (@RShotel) in New York City has become a bit of a social media celebrity of late and although they are being very creative with their marketing it’s still easy to find the personality tweets.

So how do you add personality to your tweets?  As children in school we are constantly told to write in a particular way, to make sure our grammer is correct.  We are encouraged to have a professional writing style.  The key to tweeting with personality is to throw all of these rules out the window.  Tweet as you would speak and the personality will flow in naturally.

4. Sharing is caring

If you are familiar with @chrisbrogan you may be aware of his strategy that you should spend 12 times longer talking about others than yourself.  Sharing is a massive part of what Twitter is about,  Re Tweeting others and sharing blog posts from others that are of interest to your target market is easy and valuable.  Not only does this provide you with great content to share with your target market but it also opens a way to connect with other Twitter users in your industry, provoking conversation and forging new relationships.  12:1 may seem excessive to some but however much you choose to share it should be a huge part of your Twitter strategy.

As well as sharing other people’s content you should make it easy for others to share your Tweets.  As you know tweets can be up to 140 characters long but if you want to maximise your Re-Tweet potential, especially amongst the more established Tweeters who still use the old fashioned RT method try and confine your tweets to 120 characters.  This allows space for a full RT.

Asking for a RT is a way to increase the number of shares you get but be aware not to use this tactic too often.  Asking for a RT of every post will just make you look like you are begging!  Sian’s wrote a good post on ReTweeting recently.

One of my favorite Irish business accounts for sharing is @GarrendennyLane, Lorna the owner is a keen blogger herself but constantly tweets links to other great design blogs.

To find content to share set up some Twitter lists of your favorite tweeters, the ones who create and share the best content.  This way it’s easy to discover good stuff to share.  Find some good blogs covering key areas of your industry and keep an eye on them

If you have any tips and tricks you’d like to share on using Twitter do let me know, leave a comment below as I’m always looking for great Tweeps to include in these posts.

Twitter is an immensely powerful network.  Compared to Facebook the user base is tiny and even with 175 million registered accounts only a fraction of those are thought to be active.  The community might be small compared to other networks but it is easier to reach your target market using Twitter and Twitter users tend to be more passionate, willing to share and converse with others.  Anyone who has got an @reply from a celebrity will understand how easy it can be to reach people usually innaccessible to them.  So how can you make the most of your Twitter presence?  Over the next few weeks I’ll be sharing my top tips.

1. Profile picture

There is nothing that makes you look as untrustworthy as the defalt Twitter profile image, people will assume that you don’t tweet or that you aren’t serious about tweeting, a lot of the spam on Twitter comes from a faceless account and as a business this is the last thing you want people to associate you with.   But what should the avatar be?  For business do you use a photograph of yourself or your logo?  To answer this you need to ask yourself a few questions.  Are you always going to be the person tweeting for your business?  Is your brand based on your persona? How important is your brand identity?

If you are not going to compose every tweet yourself posting a photograph is misleading, even some celebrities have fallen fowl of this, transparancy and trust are important in social media and any doubt of your authenticity can do you more damage than good.  If you are your brand including a profile picture of yourself is important, people will recognise you and associate you with the information you share – building trust.  Make sure it is a good professional photograph and one that is identifiably you.  A great example of this is @KrishnaDe who uses the same profile image on all of her social media channels.  It is unmistakably her and you would have no problem identifying her if she walked into a room.

If your brand identity is important to you use your logo on Twitter.  I use my logo for Spiderworking.com as I want people to to recognise the brand, I use it consistently in one form or another on all of my social media.  I also want to seperate business from pleasure, @spiderworking is all about business, if I want to talk about anything non business related I use my personal account @hamperlady. At the moment I am the only person tweeting for @spiderworking I hope in the future other employees will join the conversation… don’t worry I’ll let you know if and when this happens.

A great example of how this can work is @CuriousWines, as featured last week.  They use their logo on their account but both @curiousmatt and @curiousmike use photographs on their personal twitter profiles.

2. Bio

Twitter gives you a 160 character bio to introduce yourself on Twitter, bare in mind that this is one of the things people are going to focus on when they choose whether to follow you or not.  Again you need to consider who is going to be tweeting on behalf of the company.  Is it just you?  Are there two of you or are there multiple tweeters?

If you alone are tweeting for your business or if you share with just one other person try and be as personal as you can in your profile.  Of course you should talk about what you do, your business but try and add a bit of personality too.  @Umnumnum_cork and @ladyumbrellaltd do this really well.

If you have multiple tweeters for your business using your bio to identify who is who can be a great way to instill confidence in your followers.  @Toyota have five people contributing to their account, they use their bio to list each one including their individual twitter accounts and the initials they will use to sign off their tweets.

Next week we’ll be back with part two but in the mean time if you have any words of wisdom to share let us know in the comment box below.  I’m still looking for tip number six so I’d appreciate any help you can give!

This week I asked people on Facebook and on Twitter for examples of small businesses using Twitter really well.  It is hard to define what using Twitter really well means and as I trawled through many accounts I found myself confused about what I meant by the term.  There are lots of Social Media agencies similar to myself with good accounts but I wanted to steer away from those.  I wanted to find real businesses that were doing something creative.

What I discovered was probably what I already knew.  Twitter isn’t neccesarily the place to be creative, the accounts I picked are all very much personality based.  People who seem passionate about what they are doing. People you would trust if you needed to buy their product or service.

Here is my top three choices from the suggestions I got and why I think they work:

@CuriousWines

What I like

They have a chatty tone, all the tweets are written in their own tone of voice, this adds legitimacy to their account, there can be no doubt you are dealing with real people.

They are chatty!  Aside from the chatty tone of voice they are chatty, you can tell instantly by the amount of @replies when you look at their profile.  This noted they are always on topic, there is hardly a tweet to be found that isn’t about wine although there is the odd bit of banter with customers.  The key to the two brothers keeping this account so on topic is that each has a personal account @curiousmike @curiousmatt giving us the opportunity to get to know them better if we wish.

Passionate – When you read through their timeline it becomes clear that they don’t just sell wine, they enjoy it.

Customer service – Curious wines deal with customer queries through their Twitter account making customers feeling valued.

@MoneyAdviserie

What I like

Great info – Bob Quinn, the man behind Money Advisor posts great info about finances targeted at those of us who may not understand the financial landscape.  Some links go to his blog but he shares content from across the Internet relating to finance.

Personal – Although the tone isn’t as chatty as that of curious wines we wouldn’t expect it to be.  Bob is a money advisor so his more serious tone fits perfectly.  It is still personal however, there is a personality to the tweets and even the odd non money related post.  This gives us the impression that Bob is trustworthy.

Conversation / expertise – Lots of @replies when you browse his stream, a lot of these seem to be conversations with other professionals and showcase his knowledge proving him to be an expert in his field.

@ChaptersBooks

What I liked

Completely on message – there is no tweet on their timeline that isn’t about books or writers.  This has to be a must follow account for any avid reader or book lover in Ireland.

Selling – There is no doubt that Chapters want to sell more books and sell them via Twitter, however it isn’t heavy handed, announcements of the latest arrivals and links to book reviews don’t overpower the Twitter account and serve as good information for anyone waiting for a release or looking for the next book to read.

Personality – Although we can’t tell if it’s just one or many person tweeting for Chapters there is some personality injected into tweets.  They all adopt the same tone of voice (chatty) although not as distinct as curious wines.  Some tweets are amusing commentary on book related topics.

Customer care – Chapters are able to respond to customer queries and make recommendations via their Twitter account

These three examples have two things in common, personality and conversation, however Twitter accounts don’t have to be interactive to work. The Irish Times, RTE News, and Social Media Ireland don’t interact but simply provide people with information and news. The advantage of interaction is that we are often told that people like to buy from people they know, so being conversational and connecting with your customer via Twitter can be hugely effective.

Do you agree or disagree?  What do you think makes a great tweeter?  Is there someone doing it better than any of these?  I’d love to hear your thoughts so do leave a comment below.

From reading this blog you may think that I am a Facebook fanatic.  And you may be right!  However I do believe Twitter is an amazing marketing tool.  As with all networking strategy is key so this week I I’m sharing my pick of Twitter marketing tools.

Tweriod

For those of you who follow the Spiderworking.com Facebook page you will know that Tweriod was featured this week as the ‘Monday Morning Cool Tool’.

Knowing when your followers are online will help you target them more accurately.  You can discover this with trial and error, sending out tweets at different times of the day and measuring which get the most click thrus but Tweriod makes it a lot easier.  Tweriod analyses the behaviour of your Twitter followers providing you with a report telling you when they are most active online.  With this data you can make sure you are tweeting when the most people are there to see them.

This is a great tool but I wouldn’t recommend tweeting exclusively at optimum times, Tweriod isn’t able to distinguish between influential or brand advocate tweeters and regular followers and you don’t want to loose an already captive audience.  However if you discover that the majority of your followers are online at a time that you don’t usually tweet you can easily adjust your Twitter behavior to accommodate them.

Hootsuite

As regular blog readers may have noticed I’m a massive advocate of Hootsuite (affiliate link).  Hootsuite allows you to manage your Twitter account but it also has lots of great marketing features.

1. Once you have used Tweriod to discover when your followers are online you can schedule your Tweets using Hootsuite and target them at these optimum times.
2. Using the search function you can target potential customers and find new people to follow.  To find out more about this feature have a look at my video: How to find customers on Twitter using Hootsuite.
3. You can measure the effectiveness of your Tweets by counting click thrus from the inbuilt link shortener.
4. Finally you can use the ‘old fashioned’ RT method at the click of a button ensuring that those you are ReTweeting never miss a mention.

Bit.ly

Bit.ly is probably the most popular link shortening service on the social web.  Link shorteners allow you to take a really long web link and make it small, the advantage being that you can add it to a tweet and still have plenty of your 140 characters left for comment.  If you are not a Hootsuite convert yet Bit.ly is a great alternative to the inbuilt Ow.ly.  It integrates easily with lots of other social media tools including TweetDeck.  Just like Hootsuite it allows you to see how many click thrus a specific shortened link gets. You can also customise links to make them more memorable, very handy when sharing a link verbally.

Klout

Who are your most influential followers?  Who is most likely to get content shared or get links clicked? Klout measures the reach and amplification of each Twitter user and gives them a score.  You can check out your own Klout score as well as that of any Twitter user.  It’s a great research tool and an interesting way to benchmark yourself against you competitors.

The real benefit of Klout is that you can determine who from your brand advocates has the widest reach on Twitter.  What can you do to reward them for sharing your content and how can you encourage them to share more?  Don’t leave people with low Klout scores behind though, these could be the influencers of the future.

Some of these suggestions may seem a little cold but it is important to have a strategy and know how to measure your efforts.  I believe as long as you are transparent, human and yourself there is no harm using a few tools to assist you to market efficiently on Twitter.  Do you agree? Do you have a Twitter tool that you can’t live without?  I’d love to hear what you think so please do leave a comment below.

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