The Top 10 Uses for Twitter

I was late to jump on the Twitter bandwagon. To be honest, I didn't understand why anyone would want to post text message style updates to a blog format for other people to read. A former boss of mine convinced me to try it out before I wrote it off and thanks to him I was immediately hooked.

For a period of around 6 months, I was tweeting several times a day. At first is was all the regular boring stuff like "I'm hungry" or "Watching day time television, I heart Maury" ok so the last statement was a lie but I was another one of those useless twiple (twitter people) that babbled on about nothing until I started following people who actually had something to say. I felt bad that I didn't have anything to say so I stopped talking about what I was eating for lunch and started talking about design and movies and sharing opinions/information on topics that other people might find relevant. That opened up my world and I wanted to explore more uses for this blub-blog phenomenon.

So without further ado and in no particular order, here's the list:

1. Breaking News
Because of Twitter's constant stream of information, it's practically a news wire. Reliable and questionable sources alike post "news" from around the globe on a 24hr basis, in some instances a big story may break on Twitter before the anchors behind the desk at CNN even get a flash. Realizing this Twitter actually has a thread set up just for getting the latest news. If you like to be in the International-Know then you may have hit the jackpot.
 
2. Link Sharing
This was one of my favorite parts of Twitter. Since I followed a lot of designers, they were always sharing links to their latest work, good inspiration places or just free stuff. It can take a lot of time to root out good, free, design resources online, but with someone practically spoon feeding it to me, I had more time to focus on work and my blog. Even if you aren't in the market for information, link sharing can benefit your business by driving traffic to your site.


3. Corporate Communication
One of the companies I follow on my twitter account is Popeye's chicken. I know it sounds silly but they're one of the few national chains who are using Twitter effectively as a means of corporate communication. They engage customers in "conversation" and announce special deals online that are too time sensitive for an email or similar campaign.


4. Trend Alerts
In case you aren't all that familiar with Twitter, there's something called a Trending Topic that indicates what most people are talking about right that moment. People who's jobs depend on "keeping their finger on the pulse" of something or other can and usually do make good use of this feature. Anything from which person most people are considering casting their vote for on American Idol to World Series favorites can be found within the millions of tiny posts happening every second on Twitter.


5. Networking
Connecting to people and having them connect to you is what networking is all about. Twitter makes it easy for you to link up with potential customers, clients or business partners and see what's going on in their world. Making yourself more involved can pay off...big time. 

6. Creating Specialty Communities
 If you like gardening, you can follow a bunch of accomplished gardeners, a local greenhouse, a plant nursery, and an organic seed company if you wish to create your own little news feed of things relevant to you. Twitter allows you to personalize lots of mini news feeds for all your different interests.

7. Job Pulse
Finding a new line of work or hiring a new employee with Twitter has become so popular that instead of just searching for the tag #jobs an entirely separate search engine has been created to help jobseekers find gainful employment.


8. Personal Branding
One of the things that creatives do well is personal branding. Writers, photographers and designers are all using twitter to stay in touch, share their work and promote their personal brand. Everything from the way they write their tweets to the profile background speaks volumes. If you are your business, hype you, and let Twitter do all the heavy lifting.

9. Live from New York It's....
Twitter has the ability to provide great play by play action, whether its a football game or a conference. Because of its brief and immediate nature--and the fact you can tweet from your phone--live "simulcast" accounts of events can be given with ease.

10. Sell
After my journey of self discovery with Twitter, I finally found its best use for me--selling. I design a line of Anime inspired Tshirts and since most of my followers were interested in the same things, I started posting links to my Zazzle Store for people to check out my new creations. It actually boosted my sales a bit and it didn't cost me a penny.

After all the nice things I've said about Twitter, I should add that I logged in just a few days ago for the first time in almost two months. Which brings me to my next point, if you decided to use Twitter for a business reason, don't follow my example, you have to make a continuous schedule and stick to it. To have an abandoned and dilapidated twitter account connected with your business speaks volumes, negative, negative volumes.

Additional Reading (Articles are from 2007-2009 at the hieght of Twitter popularity)

The Top 5 Ways Smart People Use Twitter

17 Ways You Can Use Twitter: A Guide for Beginners, Marketers and Business Owners

Top 10 Uses of Twitter

 

How to Use Craigslist Right, in My Opinion

My first foray into guerilla marketing started a few months ago when I picked up an awesome little book by Jay Conrad Levinson. I read a lot about his thoughts and practices but never actually put his good advice to use until I started my sign shop. Mr. Levinson is a big cheerleader for classified ads and acknowledges the growing popularity of online classified ads as a money saving alternative. By far, Craigslist is the most popular online classified site, but navigating the spam laden beast to get any true value from it takes some doing. This post is to share some of what I've experienced in hopes of saving you some time and effort.

Intro to Craigslist
"Craigslist is a centralized network of online communities, featuring free online classified advertisements – with sections devoted to jobs, housing, personals, for sale, services, community, gigs, résumés, and discussion forums."--Wikipedia
Its very similar to the Sunday classifieds that run in your local paper, only there is no cost for most listings and the viewer ship of craigslist pages is in the hundreds of thousands--even millions in some cases. Check out the Factsheet for more about Craigslist.org.

Writing Your Ad
Classified ads are meant to be brief by nature so get to the point. If you are a dog groomer, make "dog groomer" your post title not something like "Time to Love Fido Back". When looking through listings, people scan for pre-determined keywords in their brain. Make your title 7 words or less and frank.

The first line of your ad is where you engage. If some one is reading your ad, that means they clicked the link. If they clicked the link, you can be fairly sure that they are interested in what you're selling. Now you can talk to them:

• Briefly explain your business or service
• Pick three or fewer points to highlight (i.e. no minimum order, same day delivery, etc.)
• Provide contact information and business hours
• Make a call to action (i.e. call now for a free quote)

Choosing Your Category
Craigslist has 11 main categories. The ones you will be most likely to post in are "service offered" and "for sale." You have to choose your sub-categories wisely as Craigslist reminds its users to "Please post to a single geographic area and category only -- cross-posting to multiple cities or categories is not allowed." The categories are pretty self explanatory, but you can always use Craigslist Help if you have questions. However, the easiest way to determine if your ad belongs is to read some of the others in the category you're thinking about posting in. It will also help you to determine what makes a good ad and what makes a bad one.

Measuring Results
I post in 7 different categories on Craigslist. Since I've only been at this a month, I'm still in the process of collecting accurate measurements on which categories bring me the most real traffic (as opposed to SPAM). One of the most accurate ways to find out where you're ad is doing the most good is variation. I only post ads about banners in the "skilled trade services" category. Ads about coroplast yard signs are listed in "general", ect. When I check my messages I look at what the person is asking for. So far, my banner ad in "skilled trade services" is working the best. You can adapt this approach to fit your situation even if you don't have varying products to sell. If you offer a different incentive in each ad (i.e. free consultation, 5% first order, ect.) you can track the successfulness of your ad just as easily.

Beware... SPAM!
SPAM is still a big part of the internet and, unfortunately, a big part of Craigslist. While the site does take precautions to help cut down on fake posts and web bot solicitations of posters it does still happen. I get around 5-7 SPAM emails per post. The most common are people emailing me links to other sites where I can "post my item for sale" or scammers trying to get me to agree to bad money order transactions. I never click any link sent in a Craigslist email, it could be a Pandora's box. I also spot scammers with a few easy flags:

1. Misspellings
2. Poor grammar like the writer is not a native English speaker
3. False greetings like "hello ma'am/sir"
4. Short messages saying they are "interested in my item" but give no other detail or information

The good news is you won't get a lot of these messages. They normally only message you once and when you don't respond, they go looking for another patsy. I only post 3 ads a day once a week. That's 15-21 fake messages and most of them are caught by my junk mail folder before I even get them. For around every 5 fakes, I get 1real inquiry. That inquiry is worth it.

Making Your Winners Work
Now that you've written a great ad and measured the results from your posting schedule, you need to ramp it up. Right now I post once a week. Once I weed out less successful categories I can post more often in the categories that work for me. Be aware though, that a once a day post is the most you can do for a single ad, so have two or three versions written up. It will keep your message fresh and help cut down on redundancy on Craigslist.

Does "Like" Equate to Increased Sales?

Facebook is gaining popularity as an advertising/marketing medium. Lots of businesses big and small are creating corporate fan pages and groups. I, of course, have a Facebook account for personal use but not one for my freelancing business. Why? Because, while Facebook is totally awesome it doesn't work for everyone. I'll be working on a short post called "You might not need Facebook if..." but right now we're talking about the infamous "Like " button.

For those of you who may not be familiar with the way this whole thing works, aside from personal pages, people can create group pages and fan pages. It used to be that if you wanted to join a fan page you would click the "Become a Fan" button. Not anymore. If you want to join a fan page, you now click the "Like" button. When you "like" a page, you are added to the column of other people who "like" this particular thing--similar to being a fan, but with one major difference. This little switch enables Facebook to offer targeted advertising to corporations because they keep meticulous notes on everything each Facebooker "likes." Facebook then packages all the people that "like" something as a potential sales pool, but how many people buy just because they "like" something?

There are lots of other blogs with lots of theories about how to calculate ROI on Facebook. I'll list some links at the end, but this article is about a misconception that I keep running into: Like=Increased Sales.


4 of my friends "like" Wal-Mart
Most people shop at Wal-Mart because of convenience, or the perceived value, so it was no surprise to me that 4 of my Facebook friends had joined the store's page. At my last count 1,173,430 "like" Wal-Mart.  

We all know that more than a million people shop at Wal-Mart. I'm sure lots of them are not on Facebook for whatever reason but if Facebook has over 400 million active users shouldn't they have a share larger than .003? The explanation is simple, an Absence of Users--a company's popularity can never be fully represented by it's fan page. People may shop there but not join the page because of apathy, ignorance, or "whatever." I shop at Wal-Mart, there's one right up the street from my house, but am I on their fan page? Nope. Why? I'm one of the "whatever" people, I just didn't care.

I'm a Fan of World Market
I decided to "like" World Market because its a specialty store. They commonly post specials and sales as well as new products to their Facebook page. They aren't close to my house and I don't shop there unless I need something so their Facebook posts alert me to items/events I might not have otherwise known about. Do I always buy? No. But that's no different from the same risk you take with mailers and email newsletters--however, some people don't see it that way. False ROI--beware of micro marketers that give you a hard number for increase in sales based on your "likes." Without detailed tracking, you won't be able to tell the difference between fans that are making regular purchases not influenced by your Facebook effort and ones that truly represent an increase that couldn't have been possible without it.


Likers that Like to "Like"
Its hard to get a good estimate of actual "likes" because of something I call the Inflatable Pool--people will "like" something their friends "like" even if they have no real feeling about it one way or the other. These people inflate your fan lists making you think that you have more potential customers than you really do. They don't represent any sort of sale, let alone a sales increase. Keep in mind how easy it is to click "like." Its not the same as signing up for a membership or joining a loyalty club--there's paper work and occasionally a fee, so if they do it, they want it, and are interested enough in it to go the extra mile.

The bottom line? It's great if people "like" you but its important to know who your real customers are.

Additional Reading

• Measuring ROI with Facebook & Twitter
• Measuring your Facebook ROI [PowerPoint]