I‘m not going to detail the basics of creating your Twitter account.Go to www.twitter.com and follow the simple instructions.This takes about five minutes of time.We will come back to many of these elements to show how you can make them more effective for marketing purposes.For now, use your real name, a brief 160 character bio, including a link to your website and add a real photo.When completed, you can go to www.Twitter.com and log on to your account. Type into the box, “What are you doing?” any brief message.Click Submit and you have made your first Tweet.
Here are some basic concept you will be using on Twitter.
Tweet—when you write and submit a message less than 140 characters is called a Tweet.
Follow—when you add someone to your list of people you are following on Twitter.Your Tweet show up on their home page.
Handle—Your Twitter name @alhanzal.This is like your URL on Twitter.
Replies—when aperson directly replies to you at your handle.@alhanzal nice job, etc.Usually this is done to engage another person in a conversation.
Retweet—taking someone’s Tweet or other materials and passing it on to others.This is a great way to share content with Twitter followers.
DM—this is a message sent directly to another person on Twitter.They must be following you to use the DM function.It is a way of keeping a message private.
Hashtags—by putting the # before a message, it’s a way of tagging the message much like tags on a blog.So it might look like #small business marketing and by using this you can search for all small business marketing Tweets.
A month ago, Oprah sent out her first tweet on Twitter. In the space of three days, she had 300,000 followers. Twitter has official become an American icon! In an interesting article, Kenneth Yu talks about how you can use the Oprah effect to help your marketing. I had have taken some excerpts (click here for complete article http://tinyurl.com/cq84nq) from his article for this post. Enjoy and prosper and Tweet!
If you are on Twitter, your world just got bigger!
As you know, Oprah is one of the most influential people on earth. Love her or hate her, her endorsements have turned otherwise obscure books into New York Times best-sellers; she is the reason why The Secret is the world-wide phenomenon it is today as opposed to a niche viral video. And now, Oprah endorses Twitter above Facebook and Myspace and all the other social media.
It doesn’t take a detective to know that whatever Oprah endorses becomes successful. We can already see the spike she’s caused; over 1.5 million more users were added on Twitter because of her arrival. Now you have a fresh audience on Twitter. Twitter’s grown immensely over the last year (1000%) and it’s probably going to grow another 1000% in the next few months because of the Oprah endorsement.
The right demographics are using Twitter
The second point is the acceleration of a trend that’s already growing on Twitter, namely that the older demographics are the first to get on board the Twitter wagon. The 25-35 year-olds and the 45-60 year olds are by far the biggest users of Twitter right now, as opposed to teenagers or kids. The Oprah audience is largely of this demographic as well.
This demographic has money, is eager to do business, and have the disposable income that marketers and businesses covet.
It’s not a fact ignored by many corporations either, because tons of brands are getting on Twitter. Although Twitter has one seventh or one-eighth of the audience of Facebook, there are more businesses on Twitter than there are on Facebook already.
You Know what people want
Oprah now has what is probably the most effective channel of knowing what people are thinking of or about at the moment. Remember that I’ve said before that Google is good for what people are searching for at the moment, while Twitter is good for what people are thinking of at the moment.
As you may know when it comes to marketing research and focus groups, a lot of focus groups don’t really work simply because people in that kind of setting will give an answer they think you want to hear as opposed to what they really think. On Twitter, it’s uncensored and spontaneous; you get a true feel for your market’s demographic and you can craft marketing angles one after the other to create really excellent response results.
Dominate a marketing channel
It’s easier now to dominate a certain channel of marketing for a particular niche as opposed to dominating the niche itself (unless of course the niche is really small and is at its beginning stages). We’ve reached a point where nearly any and every niche is crowded.
What you can do is be an authority in a specific marketing niche. And because of the newness of Twitter and because of the pioneering aspect of Twitter you can go on Twitter now and be the expert in your field for that particular channel. Because of Twitter’s mainstream acceptance, when you position yourself as a Twitter expert, you have a large inbuilt list of buyers and prospects that you can reach out to that will see you as an authority, as the channel expert in your field on Twitter.
