Social Media postings (usually in the form of a stream of updates) provide a wonderful means of branding, increasing search engine ranking (SEO), growing a network of backlinks, and continuously increasing traffic (both repeat and unique visitors) to your blog or website. Used properly, you can leverage social media to your tremendous advantage. Due to its naturally-viral nature through sharing tools, re-posting, re-tweeting, bookmarking and the like, the more interesting your social media stream, the larger your prospective audience and the depth and breadth of your market penetration. Entrepreneurial enterprises are building their social media followings and referral empires through optimizing their utilization of social media.
There are two basic types of social media. There are interactive forums (such as postings and commentary on Facebook, LinkedIn, LiveJournal and countless others, and there are broadcast bullhorns, such as Twitter and its aspiring competitors. Twitter, and these latter "announcement" media are the most efficent means of getting viral attention through the attraction of followers and through their clicking on the hyperlinks which you insert in your 140-character updates. All of your updates during the course of a 24-hour period constitute your "Tweet Stream." A good Tweet Stream, or a group of good Tweet Streams (even better) is a crucial tool for developing a potent inbound marketing campaign.
Here are some pointers for optimizing your Twitter campaigns, for producing the most magnetic and viral tweet status updates, and for developing the most effective Twitter Campaigns. Follow these general rules and be assured of success. Fail to follow these rules and your efforts will be wasted. Here's a great "working list" for Twitter and other 'broadcast bullhorn' social media outlets:
1. Write every tweet as if you were writing a news release headline or announcement. The first five words are crucial. Arouse curiosity, ask questions, post alerts, stimulate controversy in the smallest number of words possible;
2. Include a call to action (i.e., visit [hyperlink]) and a sense of urgency ("before they're gone"). The objective is to get your blog article, video presentation, audio presentation or website visited, or your document downloaded and read;
3. Use url-shortening services such as bit.ly, tinyurl, is.gd or one of the others to conserve characters in your tweets. Try to customize your shortened url to spell out an interesting acronym or word which is catchy, as opposed to a random set of computer-generated letters and numbers.
4. In generating your Tweet Stream, utilize a "pipe and post" device like Twitterfeed in order to add other interesting and authoritative RSS feeds (preferably from PR6 - PR-9 rated sources) relating to your target audience other than your own material. Your stream will become a more diverse and interesting source of information -- a sort of newscast relating to your target audience's interests if you enrich the value of your stream in this manner;
5. If you have clever sense of humor, simple puns, wordplay and other attention-getters will help make your tweets stand out from others. If you don't have a sense of humor, please completely ignore this and more on to number 6, which follows;
6. Don't advertise - inform, educate and provide editorial content and links to editorial content;
7. Try to follow others with large followings of their own;
9. Try to purge the list of twitters that you follow who do not follow you back, reciprocally within 5 days, and send thank you notes to the parties who choose to follow you;
10. You might (heck, you should) use TweetAdder or a similar program in order to run a number of simultaneous separate Twitter Campaigns in an automated fashion;
11. You should not post more than an average of one tweet per hour, to a maximum of 20 tweets per day. Excessive tweets will lose you followers, while anemic Tweet Streams of less than 5 tweets per day are seldom followed;
12. In any given Twitter Feed, your postings should generally represent (by number of tweets) anywhere from a minimum of 10% to a maximum of 25% of your own original status updates, with the balance being blended, high-quality RSS feeds to fill in the difference;
13. Try to reserve a catchy, interesting name for each of your Twitter Accounts. Don't be too sophisticated -- you'll get the tail of your title cut off (ouch!). Use 'text talk' (abbreviated terms) to title your Tweet account. For example, three of my favorites are http://twitter.com/Capital4Biz and http://twitter.com/Braintenance, and http://twitter.com/RadioDAZZ. While I use http://twitter.com/douglascastle for postings from all of my professional media, it isn't catchy -- people don't realize the quality of the content because the title is not subject- or topic-oriented.
14. Use hashtags with the greatest possible subject focus relating to your tweets -- not your brand. Try for the shortest words possible (to conserve characters), but do make them count.
15. Try to limit the number of hashtags at the end of your tweets to three, with the most important and relevant being positioned first. Too many hashtags trivialize your Tweets.
Now come and blow your Twitter Trumpet, oh Gabriel. Sound those bullhorns!
Douglas E Castle [http://aboutDouglasCastle.blogspot.com]
http://Braintenance.blogspot.com
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