Twitter Marketing Plan 101

Target your twitter followers and build up your community.

You have signed up for twitter, so now what? In this post I would like to share some of the tools and strategies I found to be useful in building your business Twitter presence and reach a 100 targeted followers in about two months.

Build Your Community

• Invite your friends by importing your connections
• Use tweetlater to automatically follow your new followers
• Find your clients on Twitter and follow them
• Search for contacts or companies you lost connection with but still have in your CRM database
• Follow your competitors. This will help you get ideas and keep yourself updated with what is going on in the market
• Use TwittGrid to search for keywords related to your target market. This will help you not only build your community but also get to your specific target market.
• Use TwittGrid search to update on the latest trending topics

• Use TwitterGrid search to find out what people are talking about

• Use Twilert to get your search results automatically sent to you daily.

Build Your Content

• Use twitterfeed to integrate your blog, facebook and linkedIn content using RSS.
• Use tweetlater to create automated scheduled tweets. You can come up with a list of tips or topics for your tweets in the beginning of the month and schedule them to post.
• Use tweetlater to set your automated welcome response. Make it a nice personal welcome instead of a sales pitch.
• Don’t tweet on your own, eventually you’ll run out of things to say.Get people in your company to join the tweeting. Each one of them has valuable knowledge to share.
  
  Step 3: Measure Your Results

• Community growth – you will soon find that as you tweet valuable information, your followers’ number will grow.
• Influence growth - Twitalayzer is a tool which evaluates your activity on relative influence, signal-to-noise ratio, generosity, velocity, clout, and other useful measures of success in social media.
• Response rate – Just like an email marketing campaign, count the number of responses you got right after your tweets. If you posted a video on YouTube or a link to your website, count the number of unique visitors.
  
  

Businesses today realize that Twitter is a big part of the social media family. However, some marketers are still concerned about having to constantly update their Twitter account with new information. The smart approach would be to use Twitter’s automated applications. Leverage your existing content which you have already invested in. Use Twitter as another channel to send out your message and be everywhere your clients are.

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How To Integrate Your Blog With Twitter Video

One of the great things about Twitter is that it has many automated tools that help you leverage existing content by re-using it in a new channel.

Twitterfeed is an application that integrates RSS feeds with Twitter. Once you set up your RSS feeds, your twitter will automatically display and tweet updates that were posted on your blog. This is a great tool for twitter beginners since there is no need to create any new content just yet. You can use your articles, blog, youtube videos channel or any other content that you have with RSS feed.

1. Sign up for twitterfeed and login using your open ID account. If you don’t have an open ID, sign up for one. It may take a while to sign up for open ID but you only have to do it once. Be sure to check first, you might already have open ID if you are using the services in this link.

I used “my Vidoop” service. When you sign up for open ID, you will be requested to choose 3 images from categories (like - flowers, houses, trees). Those same categories will be used for identification every time you log into open ID while changing the specific images (small tree/large tree). So don’t worry about remembering the activation code, just remember the categories. When you sign in to open ID, you will be asked for a password. Type in the LETTERS that are correlated with your image categories.

2. Activation code - The first time you sign in to twitterfeed , the system will send you an email notification with a code to activate your browser . Plug in the code and continue.

3. We are IN!

4. Go to “my feeds” and create a new feed.

5. Fill in your user name and password. I found that it is easier to just use your twitter login details. Plug in your RSS address by copying and pasting. Remember – you’re RSS feed is not the same as the link to your blog.

6. To find your RSS feed – go to the right side of your internet address bar. Look for the RSS icon (Orange with rounded white stripes) and press it. Choose “automated RSS”. The internet address on your bar should be changed to the RSS feed. Copy and paste this to Twitterfeed.

7. Customize - The hard part is over. Now you just have to customize your RSS update interval time and set up any prefix to your posts. I find it helpful to add prefix like: “new blog post” or “new video” according to the RSS channel.

8. That’s it! You can add up to 5 RSS feeds to every account. Go test it.

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Social Media - Survey Results

The expansion of marketing into the Internet landscape and the rapid adaptive waves of social networking into that niche brought marketers to realize there is great power in social media “word of mouth” marketing.

But the question remains - How can you use social media marketing for your business effectively?

I was part of a Marketing Research class team in the University of California Berkeley Extension’s Marketing Certificate Program. Our team launched a Social Media Marketing Survey and performed extensive marketing research to support the results. In this post I will summarize our key findings as well as share the relevant data we found.

The short version answer to the former question is –
Social media is a good tool for brand promotion, for community growth and for initial marketing research. The top three channels that are used are: Facebook, blogs & YouTube. Blogs are the ones that are considered as generating the most business followed by videos. (Channel use is different between B2B and B2C).

Investment in social media varies by business type and size. Small businesses invest less in social media channels vs. medium and large businesses. B2Bs invest more than B2Cs in paid advertising although research shows that the trend will be rising in 2009. ROI remains unclear, especially in ‘hard business’ categories. Part of the reason is that social media is a new field for marketers; most respondents said they have being using it for less than two years.


Our Survey and Sources -

We got 65 completed surveys and 27 partial surveys. The survey demographics ranged to different industries with 21% respondents from Art, Entertainment & Recreation Industry, 21% from Information industry (Internet, Telecommunication), 12% Hightech, 10% PR and Marketing.

Since our sample was relatively small, we performed extenssive data minning to back up our survey results. One of the sources we used was Marketing Sherpa Social Media Benchmark Guid for 2009, Which Sampled 1,186 marketing proffecionals. You can see a complete list of our sources attached at the end of this post.

Social media as a two way communication approach

We asked people what is the closest definition to social media. The majority of survey takers (51/83 = 61.44%) believe that social media is a two way communication approach aimed at sharing information and creating discussion. Meaning, more businesses understand that social media is not just another advertising tool. In order to make it effective, you have to be willing to share your knowledge. The knowledge you share should be valuable to others and not just a summary of what is already known to them.

Social Media is good for Brand Promotion

We asked people what they think social media is good for. They answered Brand awareness and Brand perception. Then we asked them what growth did their company actually experienced as a direct result of social media marketing. The answers were: growth in Brand awareness and Customer engagement. According to Awareness survey the main reasons why organizations use social media are to increase their brand promotion, customer engagement and driving marketing programs.


Social media is good for initial marketing research

Use social media to get a pulse of the market trends and improve your business accordingly.

We asked “Did you make any changes due to feedback received from social media? “ more than 50% of respondents said they did, another 25% said they are considering making changes.

We asked “Where do you receive the most client feedback from, is it from social media channels or from traditional marketing channels?” 39% said traditional channels are their main source of feedback Vs 24% for social media channels. 20% are unsure and the rest said the proportion is similar to both.

B2Bs are ahead when it comes to implementing social media.

Interestingly, when we broke down the former question results by business type we found that B2Bs are ahead when it comes to implementing social media. 37% of B2Bs said they receive their feedback more from social media channels VS only 9% in B2Cs. When we analyzed the “I am not sure about the proportion” answers we found that 29% of those who answered “Im not sure about the proportions” were B2Cs VS only 5% of B2Bs.

ROI Remains Unclear, especially in “hard business” categories

We noticed that the categories we call the “soft” categories of social media” (Brand Awareness, Community growth, Customers engagement, and Consumers loyalty) ranked high on growth while the “hard business” categories (Profit and Sales) ranked low. Also, more people answered “I don’t know” in the “hard business” categories than in the “soft” ones. These results suggest that people are not sure about how to measure social media marketing effectiveness in categories like sales and profit and they seem to have better understanding of the intangible benefits.

We asked people: “What percentage of your marketing budget goes towards social media channels? “ (This includes any fees you pay for advertising in social media, for creating and maintaining your media channels and for creating the content in case it did not exist prior to your social media presence)Then we asked “What percentage of your business comes from social media channels?” The results were: an average of 20% out of the marketing budget goes to social media investment in channels Vs an average of 16% for return.

The survey results show that the ROI is negative. However, we received a lot of “I don’t know” answers and we got a very low response rate for this specific question. We believe that the main reason is that social media is a relatively new field. Most of survey respondents said they have been using social media for 2 years or less. It is also may be too early to measure the return since companies are just now establishing their social presence. The return may take a while to show.

According to Marketing Sherpa Social Media Benchmark Report for 2009: The top two categories for marketing budget increase in 2009 are social media (networks & blogs) with an increase of 48% and emailing to house lists, an increase of 48%. They also found that social media marketing (SMM) budgets range in 2009 are: more than $100,000 for enterprise-class businesses, $10,000 - $99,000 for medium businesses and under $10,000 for small. Costs such as salaries, consultant fees, in-house graphic work and perhaps in-house IT application programming are taken into effect.

The top three channels professionals are using for their business are: Facebook, Blog, YouTube. Blogs are considered to generate the most business.

According to the Institute for Public Relations and a study released in 2007 by Katie Delahaye Paine, a blog is created about once every two seconds and new videoa are posted to YouTube with more frequency. We asked people “Which channel generates the most business for you?” and also - “What kind of content do you use for your social media channels?” The answers indicated people are using blogs the most. We believe that blogs serves as the main source of content which then feeds the rest of the channels. It is a good place to start with when establishing your social media presence.

Who investment in SMM?

Paid advertising is utilized more in B2C than B2B. 73% of respondents do not use paid advertising. 67% of those who do are B2Cs. Small businesses invest less in social media then medium or large businesses respectively. When asked How much do you invest in SMM (as a % of your marketing budget)? The majority of small business said they invest between 0-1%, medium business said 1-5% and large said 1-5% and more than 5%.

For the full report, source list and researchers bios download the attached PDF document (scroll down to download).

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How To Create A Business Facebook Page

Creating a Facebook Page is an important part of establishing your brand presence in the social media channels. Blog remains King when it comes to being your main source for content and it is used to feed the other social media channels. In this post I will explain how to create a business facebook page. The video attached was created before facebook changed their page layout but the idea is still the same. I am working on an updated version.

1. Sign up for facebook using a real email address. You must have a personal profile before you could create a page.

2. Go to "Advertising" on the bottom of the page and choose "pages", "create a page" . Complete your business category and business name. Make sure that spelling is correct and that you have included relevant key words. Those are the only fields that can not be changed after you start your page.

3. Update basic information - The first step would be to fill in some basic information and upload your logo. Facebook can accept images with up to 200w by 600h pixels. You can either click on the box you want to edit or go to "edit page".

* Your page will remain hidden until you decide to publish it so feel free to experiment with your formatting.

4. Edit application boxes - The standard page will give you basic application boxes to choose from. You can delete boxes you don't like, move some of the boxes around and add more boxes. To add more boxes go to "browse more application" in the edit page section.

5. Add content to your page - articles, events, blogs, youtube videos, pictures and other links. Almost every function or content type has a relevant application box. Go on other pages through Facebook search box and see how others used their boxes. Here are some examples:

Articles - you can copy and paste an article into the "note" box or take the link and post it on the wall or in your links box.

Blog - add "my blog application" to your page and paste your blog's URL to it.

RSS feeds - Add RSS connect application to your page. Then add your feeds using the RSS address.

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