Consider these Twitter best practice tips when developing your Twitter strategy:

Make sure that your page is branded
Business Twitter profiles should look different than Twitter profiles that are owned by individuals. Twitter allows you to customize your profile, so it’s important to take advantage of this and incorporate the company logo and branded color schemes. Make it obvious who is tweeting. Utilize the description space and add a company description that includes keywords and always include a link back to your website.

Incorporate hashtags
Many businesses don’t fully understand what hashtags are or how to use them so they miss out on this opportunity. Hashtags (#) designate an important keyword within the content. It helps people search within Twitter. If you’re still confused, see how others in the industry are using hashtags and search for hashtags within Twitter to see what comes up. Some businesses even create their own hashtag surrounding a product launch or an event in order to generate buzz and awareness.

Follow others
You never want to just start following people at random, but a good way to earn followers in Twitter is to follow others. Do some research and look for influential people in your industry or in related industries. If they have similar interests they will be more likely to follow you back and pay attention to what you have to say.

Re-tweet
The purpose of social media is to be social and share with one another. Think of Twitter as a community. If you want to be a good community member you can’t only focus on yourself. In order to get people to care about you and share your content, you have to be willing to do the same for them. If someone posts something great, re-tweet it to your audience and add your own introduction.

Link to a mobile friendly site
Many people are accessing Twitter today from a mobile device while on the go. A common Twitter strategy is to share links that point back to your website or blog. If you are going to do so, it’s important to make sure that the content being shared is mobile friendly and able to quickly load on a mobile browser. People are looking for information quickly. If they click on a link that isn’t mobile friendly, they may not even read it.

Check analytics
Check your website analytics to see what content is generating visitors to your site from Twitter. Once you see what works and what doesn’t you can make changes to your Twitter content sharing strategy.

The post How to Use Twitter Effectively appeared first on AddMe Blog.

1. Be Polite

Sometimes, fans will use Twitter to tell you about their bad experience with your store, brand, or business. Say a fan of a chain pizza places an order on Friday night; the pizza arrives 15 minutes late and covered with the wrong toppings to boot. The fan might tweet it, and loop you in with an @ symbol. When you find the tweet Monday morning, remember your manners. When your company commits a blunder, apologize and offer to make it better. Entering into flame wars just makes everything worse.

2. Tamp Down Hashtags

A few hashtags (or #hashtags) are fun and practical; they allow your content to be found through user search submission. But making up your own hashtags–like #teamjacob4life–and then using four in a post will irritate followers. Keep hashtags lean to keep your followers.

3. Spread the Love

How often you tweet is up to you; however, if you out-tweet everyone in your Twitter feed, especially for promotion, you risk irritating and alienating readers. If you have a lot to say, use a tweet scheduler to schedule one or more tweets a day. And take the time to make sure your tweets are interesting and informative.

There are times when you might be tweeting a lot (and using #hashtags). Say you’re holding or attending a conference. You’ll be tweeting updates for colleagues and users who weren’t able to come, and using the conference-approved hashtag, plus one or two of your own. In this case, send a warning tweet the day of the conference so users won’t get irritated when your tweets take over their feed.

4. Don’t Overshare

On a personal account, it’s fine to post a picture of yourself in that new outfit you bought, complain about your stomach flu, and tell all those juicy details to your pals. But on a business feed, you need to stay professional.

5. Grammar Matters

Again, what you do with your personal feed is your business. When writing on behalf of your company, correct grammar and spelling gives you an authoritative look. Would you buy a tech gadget from someone who tweeted “iPads 4 sale 2day”?

When you join Twitter, look for website promotion and marketing specialists to follow. Pay attention to how (and what) they tweet as a best practice.

The post Twitter Rules for Business Success appeared first on AddMe Blog.

Sure, it’s a great source of news, it helps me keep up-to-date with search industry trends plus I get a good insight into what my piers think on certain topics.

Apart from this I’ve failed to get a massive amount of value out of twitter, that is up until now!

In the past couple of weeks I upgraded my mobile contract and in the same breath received a bill for my mobile phone, which was nothing less than MASSIVE! In my fluster to login and see what was happening with the account I forgot my password thus I was soon locked from the system. This meant I was unable to check my online bills and pay them (I was fine with the later).

I called the billing and the support department and they were of NO help what so ever, it was similar to calling a PC support department “have you restarted your computer” that kind of stuff.

After a couple of days with no help what so ever I resorted to social media, firstly my personal Facebook account status update “Matt is not happy with his phone bill” to which I received responses from friends and family. Thanks for the help guys though not what I was looking for.

At this point the penny dropped, I wonder if a tweet in the carriers direction would help?

So a simple tweet at the carrier and within the space of a couple of hours I had a response and they were looking into the issue. The next day I had a call from the person who responded from my tweet (it even sounded like this person was in the same country as me). The social media team member then helped me resolve all my issues and sent me on my way, a very happy camper.

So, what does this mean?

1. Twitter IS a valuable support tool
2. Twitter gives the customer access deep within a company
3. Twitter is a highly cost effective CRM tool

The post New Found Love Of Twitter And My Mobile Carrier appeared first on AddMe Blog.

The post got me thinking, how quick is Google and are they really THAT active with picking up Tweets, so I tested this out.

1. I first tweet about our Broken Link Checker tool
2. I waited a couple of minutes
3. I then searched for “broken links” (keeping in mind you need to search for the latest results)

Here are the results; you can see for yourself I received top position in Google for “broken links” after tweeting 2 minutes prior.

Before we all run off and start tweeting about this that and everything else, at a rate of one tweet a second keep in mind these valuable points:

• Tweet quality content, good content that your followers will enjoy and get value from.
• Make sure you include the link back to your site for “more information”
• Regular tweets; it’s a combination of quality and quantity. If you have the quality then tell people, on the other hand don’t waste their time with relative tweets.
• Use keywords in your tweet that will attract traffic.

Now go forth and tweet

The post Tweet To The Top Of Google appeared first on AddMe Blog.

One of the most interesting and valuable things about Twitter is
the real time data available. You can see within seconds what is
popular around the global twitter network, giving you an instant snap
shot of current trends and topics around the world.
Great, but what if you want the trends in your own country, region or city? How do you drill down?

This brings me to Trendsmap!

I was hunting for some real time twitter stats the other night and came across Trendsmap a combination of popular Twitter topics and Google maps
.
Basically, it breaks down tweets and twitter trends, highlighting the areas of the globe where these topics are popular. The larger the cloud word the more popular the topic is, VERY COOL!
The usual zoom in and out features are available with a flick of the mouse wheel. Some other quick navigation elements such as “My City” and “My Region” should make for quick navigation to your locale although it does not appear to work that way just yet, shame.

Click on a topic and you will see a dialog box showing you real time tweets about the topic from people in the selected region (mine was Halloween in Los Angeles).  Drill down by topic or location by clicking on the these within the dialog box. Topping off the visual twitter fest is a 7 day trend graph for the topic.

Click the play button in the above video to find out more detail on how this cool tool works.

Although the tool still appears to be a little buggy, it is a great one to have bookmarked, it helps you keep up to date not only of real time twitter topic, but also giving you local twitter knowledge and trends, definitely handy for any online marketer.

The post Twitter + Google Maps = Trendsmap appeared first on AddMe Blog.

There is good news for you. If you are not Wal-Mart and you make some mistakes there is a chance many won’t notice. Twitter is quickly growing into a gargantuan online player and with growth like this comes clutter. Clutter could be the buffer for you if something doesn’t go according to plan. Don’t worry because you are not alone.

If you think you are worried about what to say or not to say there is a good probability that most of your audience and/or competitors feel the same way. Most businesses need some time experimenting with different approaches before they find the one that works best for them. This usually takes some time because you really won’t know how it works until you build up your followers. They are the ones that will respond to your actions so you must first build up your follower list in order to really see how your efforts will react to changes. There are many different approaches to take with Twitter and you will most likely find your groove eventually. Iin the interim you can try some of these approaches. Dropping blog links from a company blog are great ways to generate curious visitors. Each time your company writes a blog post simply take the blog post link and place it into Twitter. It is good to usually accompany the link with the title of the post because Twitter changes the URL and many people won’t click on a link if they don’t know where they are going to go. Mixing up your approach is very healthy. Some days dropping a link to your blog post, other days you can post a link to a funny story and some days just taking a picture of something at the office and sharing it with your Twitter friends is a great way for them to see that you are also a human and not just a business. As you perform various techniques don’t be worried about sending the wrong message. As long as your message is nothing horrific nobody is going to scold you for it. You will most likely just not generate any decent traffic to your website from that particular effort.

You could also find your competitors Twitter accounts and take a look at what type of posts they leave. I would not recommend copying anyone’s approach but you can get some ideas and pointers on where to start with you’re Twitter marketing campaign. If you want highly targeted followers you can try following some of your competitor’s followers and some will see you are following them and reciprocate. The important thing is to not get frustrated and take your time. Twitter is not mastered over night. Try different approaches and see how well they work for you before making new changes and you will see Twitter helping you grow your business no time.

About Nick Stamoulis
Nick Stamoulis is a search marketing veteran who is the President and founder of the Search Engine Marketing Firm, Brick Marketing.

The post New to Twitter? Don’t be Scared there is Room for Everyone appeared first on AddMe Blog.

What is a URL Shortening Service? Good question:

They shorten long URL’s making them engaging and easier to work with, really?!

So why do would I want to shorten a URL in the first place? Firstly, if I link to a long unsightly URL within HTML then I could do this via text aka “hyper link” making it appear more orderly. Secondly if I am sending an email, writing documents or on twitter, it optimizes space and makes things look much cleaner.

After a bit of thought I realized, there must be something more to it, what other bits of Internet traffic gold could I get out of these services?

Since I placed myself on the twitter bandwagon I’ve been using a URL shortening service http://is.gd. I’ve always wished I could see how many of my twitter URL’s are getting clicked, which would give me a greater understanding of what I should be venting and sharing (as I do like the sound of my own voice).

This got me thinking……..

1.
Imagine the traffic that these guys are putting through, each time
someone clicks on a shortened URL’s the click will go from the
shortening servers through to the final URL. A popular URL shortening
service would be channeling thousands of clicks at any given second =
TRAFFIC TRAFFIC TRAFFIC!

2. What about all the extra data they
are capturing? These services would store some great information about
what sites are popular and where they are clicking. I’m sure there
would be plenty of Competitive Intelligence guys out there that would
pay serious cash for this info.

3. Visitor tracking – some of
these services let you preview the page before you land on it (one of
the reasons for this is to limit abuse). OK, let’s say a visitor
previewed the page though never landed on it! I’m sure there is data to
extract from these stats, bounce rates etc?

After reviewing various URL shortening services to see what Internet gold I can get (thanks to mashable urlshortening services and seomoz the benefits and pitfalls of url shorteners). I’ve decided to opt for http://bit.ly/ since they provide more thorough analytics.

These guys are free, provide a pretty cool service, it is jam packed full of graphs, and is simple to use.

What
I like is when you login you’re greeted with a clean interface that is
easy to understand, bang straight in front of you is the URL field,
whack in the URL and click shorten .. DONE!

Taking the next step
and getting a little smarter you can then post this directly to your
twitter account and within minutes you get some data to flick through.
The cool thing about these guys is they provide relatively quick
reporting on traffic. Within a few seconds of posting I can see people
in Canada, UK and USA are clicking on my posts. Very satisfying -
people actually read my tweets!

At a glance you can also see which shortened URL has received the most clicks, handy.

Other features include:

Sharing Your URL
Sharing the shortened URL via other means i.e. email, gmail (which last time I looked was email?) and Facebook.

URL Meta Data
They
provide info about the URL, most importantly the Meta data. I’m not
entirely sure why they include this as these shorten URL’s are not
exactly SEO friendly but hey – I LIKE IT!

My question is, where
can they go from here? Can they capture more data and use this to
measure demographics and provide specific CI data? What other analytics
are possible?

In the past I was skeptical about URL shortening services, but I am sold on http://bit.ly. They have become my partner in twitter in a really “short” time.

The post URL Shortening Services appeared first on AddMe Blog.