A dozen Twitter tips for 2010

The ‘cool, shiny new thing’ that sent marketers crazy in 2009 was Twitter. (This year, it’s mobile apps by the way.) Why? Because although Twitter launched in 2006, it exploded into the mainstream in late 2008/early 2009. And brands were champing to get a piece of that action.

Having just spent three days at Search Engine Strategies London, Twitter is still clocking up a lot of mentions from SEOs and businesses, etc, who worry about how best to involve with it. Well, you'll see a rise in this engagement, especially now that it is being crawled by Google for real-time search results and because marketers are realising the value of a recommendation on Twitter.

So rather than regurgitate whole speeches, here’s what SEOs and marketing types from SES London are saying about Twitter for 2010 – at least in the sessions I attended:

1 Real-time search: be wary of the value of Twitter
230 million pieces of content are published per day by user. 40% of searches have a real-time component. Potential $40 billion market. But:

  • 90% content is created by 10% of the people (Source: Harvard Business Review)
  • 74% of Twitter content is produced by 5% of the users.
  • Is 5% really representative of everybody?

Aaron Kahlow opening keynote: Is Social Media the Future of Search

2 How McDonald’s operate their Twitter

CoTweet allows people within organisations to use the same Twitter account – as used by McDonald’s.

Aaron Kahlow opening keynote: Is Social Media the Future of Search

3 Should you spend time and money on Twitter?

Who is my audience? Are they on Twitter, if not don’t spend (time) there.

Aaron Kahlow opening keynote: Is Social Media the Future of Search

4 Has Twitter peaked?

Twitter is not accelerating as fast now, it has peaked on the growth rates. The vast majority have less than 5 users.

Rand Fishkin, Social Media Best Practices for Marketers Inside the Brand

5 Can Twitter drive traffic and sales?

Social network profiles (including Google Profile) drive traffic. Active Twitter users, Dell, also reported in excess of $3m in sales in 2009. Its Twitter is essentially just a promo shop, eg, 15% off at any Dell Outlet – which leads to direct click-thu sales.

Rand Fishkin, Social Media Best Practices for Marketers Inside the Brand

6 What are the biggest problems for marketers using Twitter?

Analytics, KPIs, how does it impact the bottom line. Also, getting followers in the market you are going after.

Mike Lewis, Business Tweeting: I think Twitter is working, but I can't prove it!

7 How many Twitter accounts to set up?

One brand Twitter stream can include: PR, service, sales, crisis, recruitment, product.

Mike Lewis, Business Tweeting

8 What’s the ROI of Twitter?

ROI of Twitter = traffic to site, buzz, inbound links for SEO, reduced service costs, leads, sales. (All trackable ROI.)

Mike Lewis, Business Tweeting

9 Twitter – trend towards automation

Fact – individuals are adopting Twitter, but what about brands? Great thing about Twitter is that brands can connect one to one. But there is a trend of moving towards automation.

Mike Lewis, Business Tweeting

10 Check your bounce rate from Twitter traffic

When analysing your online stats, compare traffic from different sources. Eg, from blogs, it usually has high context, expectancy is there, users know what they want to see, and spend more time on site. Twitter – may generate high traffic but can also have a high bounce because it lacks space to create context.

Matthew Bailey, Introduction to Search Engine Optimisation

11 Twitter 101 for brands

  • Don’t overthink it, be personable
  • Share info/links
  • Listen
  • Use hashtags to organise and search
  • Twitterlists are useful if you are following hundreds and want to discover new people
  • Tweetdeck – organises your Twitter use
  • Scheduling tweets – Future Tweets – good for client use

Lisa Myers, Social Media 101

12 Tools for monitoring social media

Free Social Monitoring Tools:

  • www.socialmention.com
  • www.tweetbeep.com
  • www.tweepmeme.com
  • www.klout.com
  • www.blogpulse.com

Paid Monitoring Tools:

  • www.trackur.com
  • www.radian6.com

Lisa Myers, Social Media 101

Find your social media champions – but how?

Rand Fishkin, CEO & Co-Founder of SEOmoz.org, hit the nail on the head for me when he said: 'Find a social champion!'

Speaking on Social Media Best Practices for Marketers Inside the Brand at Search Engines Strategies London marketing day on Monday, he said, ‘You need someone in the weeds, someone who gets it in the same way as the kids do who spend 5% of their lives on Facebook.’

This was is his favourite stat by the way: If you’re under 25 and live in US, 5% of all the time you spend alive is spent on Facebook.

Rand admitted it was illegal to hire by age, but also shrugged – by implication those deep in the weeds of internet culture will be recruited. [UPDATE: see comments for his further take on this.]

Which slightly annoys me, being deeper in the weeds than all my teen nieces put together and not half as deep in as many friends in their 30s and 40s.

Yet it is also true that it can be totally time-sucking for commercial digital or social media hirers to feedback to those who ‘don’t get it’. This goes back to an earlier post on my sub-editors' blog called Journalist, train thyself! Online needs you… desperately! [Out of interest, training budget seemed to be on the up at the Search Engine Strategies conference, for some anyway.]

And when looking to hire or commission someone as an SEO writer, a breadth of online presence is definitely desirable (as well as on-the-job experience and SEO training).

Having a blog or a Twitter account or a Tumblr or a Posterous (ie not just a Facebook profile) is not just an indicator of ability and engagement, but shows a basic understanding of internet culture and who they will be writing for. After all, you can't kid the kids.

The next question of course is how do you hunt out these social champions within your organisation?

It's something I'm processing in my freelance blogging work right now.

10 expert tips on email marketing

Rough of an e-newsletterIf you’ve ever had the job of putting your marketing email, ezine or e-newsletter together – whether designing the format, writing the blurbs, testing different subject lines or segments, sending it out to subscribers, dealing with unsubscribes – 7 Proven Tactics to Increase Response for your Email Campaigns seemed the session to attend at Search Engine Strategies 2010 London.

Having spent much of last year producing a monthly email across nine segments for a major car insurance and breakdown company, I was interested to hear latest best practice and get some inspirattion. After all, we tracked KPIs, tweaked designs, improved clarity on calls to action buttons, yadda yadda blah blah, and saw a leap in click-throughs. But what else could we have done?

Tamara Gielen, Independent Email Marketing Consultant, who ran email programmes for eBay among others, had some ideas. She promised seven tactics in the presentation but instead, I counted 30. So there’s lots to know, too much to reproduce here.

Here are 10 bulletpoints.

  • Sell your email programme on the website – don’t just have a button asking them to subscribe to your email but clarify the offer on the button, eg, ‘train me to profit’, ‘be the first to know our special offers’, ‘free email tips’, and so on. Agencies may need to advise the client to do this if emails are outsourced.
  • Tell them why you are asking for their info on the sign-up form (perhaps add a ‘why are we asking this?’ button on the page). Be transparent, it builds trust.
  • Welcome your new subscribers – send a welcome email within 24 hours, when they are highly engaged. Let them know, ‘This is what we are going to be sending you.’ Ask them to do something (of benefit to them) and send them back to your site.
  • Listen to your unsubscribers – they will tell you what they don’t want. Maybe they don’t want to fully unsubscribe but are fed up of your monthly email outs. So give them the option of getting less emails on the unsubscribe page, eg once a week/month. Or just email seasonally, even just once a year, when they are likely to be shopping for your service or product. Better this, than losing them altogether.
  • Give ‘unsubscribe’ alternatives – eg if emails are unsuitable, ask them to sign up for an RSS feed, suggest a ‘follow us on Twitter’ option or to become a Facebook fan, would they like to sign up for the catalogue – offer alternative channels for you to communicate with them.
  • Use social networks to grow your list – eg, encouraging your customer to become a fan on Facebook means other people see that in their newsfeed. Why is that interesting? Make it interesting, eg, Papa John’s on Facebook offered a free pizza if you become a fan and won a million more subscribers to their email  as a result.
  • Allow subscribers to share your content via share buttons to help acquisition. First figure out where your audience is, eg, B2B is great for LinkedIn. B2C may be on Facebook, Twitter, etc. But remember people will only share links if there is something of value in the content.
  • Emails do not have to be weekly or monthly – use triggers, eg, a Birthday trigger, such as 'Fiona, Birthday greetings from [brand], here’s a [discount/freebie/offer] to celebrate.'
  • Subject line length/content – include the most important message in first 4-5 words, ask questions, sell benefits, and include an urgency.
  • When should you send your email? – think about when your customers are likely to be browsing and when buying, eg, a retail email may do better at the weekend when people are free to click through and buy. But test your timings. Tamara sends hers at 9.30 on a Monday morning – because few send at this time (the bulk of emails is sent on Wednesdays/Thursdays). Stand outs from your competitors. Also she notes that many have a 9am start and are going through emails at this time – her email then pops up on top (she has 50% open rate by the way).

Images: © Maxpower/Flickr

Two simple ways to justify online spend to the boss

AVINASH_KAUSHIK
Avinash Kaushik gets ready to speak at SES London

There’s a lot of talk at Search Engine Strategies 2010 London about ‘doing it right’. SES London is a three-day conference and expo that brings together the superstars of SEO and SEM to reveal the latest ways they are dancing with the search engines, each side locked in a teeth-gritting tango and dancing each other across the floor in order to win the eyeballs and clicks of users, and present user targeted (marketed?) search results.

At least that’s how I understand it. You got love a metaphor.

But ‘doing it right’ –monitoring analytics, refining strategy, making informed decisions about whether to spend on SEO work (to boost presence in organic search results) or PPC (paid for results) – well, that takes resource and budget, aka time and money. There may be a lot of explaining here, by the way, as I get to grips with marketing buzzwords and attempt to translate it into words and concepts I understand, being from a journalistic background and thinking of B2B verticals as something smutty.

The 'number one bitchfest’, as keynote speaker Avinash Kaushik put it today is : ‘I can’t get my company to pay for an analyst.’

And why don’t we get the love from our execs? Because they just don’t get it. It’s a rare CFO or purse-string holder that gets internet culture and what they should pay and where.

Without this, you don’t have an SEO strategy or, if the consultants at SES London are to be believed, a hope in hell of getting your brand/product seen.

So how do SEO's thought leaders suggest you deal with this?

Here are two lovely anecdotes from their SES speeches:

Aaron Kahlow, Chairman & Founder, Online Marketing Summit

‘I was once asked, “If you had to, would you rather give up your laptop, mobile phone, social networks, etc, or would you rather cut off your left hand?”’

[short pause]

‘So I answered “my left hand”, right.’

And he said: ‘Gotcha! You didn’t say laptop, etc, – but you thought about it!’

Lesson: Tech is ubiquitous. Email is ubiquitous. Social networks are ubiquitous. Being disconnected is, for some, like having a left hand cut off. So try this question on your friends, colleagues, even the CFO – and convince your business people through their hesitation how important and embedded online has become.

Avinash Kaushik, Author, Blogger, Analytics Evangelist, Google

‘I can only blog at midnight. I have a job, I have two small kids so this is the only time I can blog. But my wife she loves me; she says, “Go to bed!”

‘Still I want to blog so I tell her, “I am kind of a big deal.” And she says, “Go to bed!”

‘Why? Because it is irrelevant to her. It is the same with executives.

‘So I hit her with data: last month I had 73,000 visits in 176 countries, even Somali pirates visit my blog. But still she doesn’t care. It’s not important to her and it’s not important to the executives.

‘The third time I quantified the goals of his blog (number of feed subscribers, conversion to speaking engagements, my about page which has tracking codes on all the links). I say, “Honey, you should let me blog because last month, I made $26,000 fake dollars!”

‘And she says, “Work harder”, because finally that number means something to her.’

Lesson: to transform your site, blog, etc, you need to compute the economic value to the financial people in your company. Talk to them in language that they understand.

That is all.

I am attending these keywords in 2010: SES, SXSWi and CSForum

Somehow I've lined up a conference a month for the next three months. Here are their taglines, blurbs and what I'm aiming to do at each one:

Search Engine Strategies 2010
London, UK, 15-19 February

Tagline: The Original Search Engine Marketing Event.

Blurb: Three days of sessions covering PPC management, keyword research, SEO, social media, linking building, duplicate content, video optimisation, usability and more!

Me: Blogging (right here) points of interests – particularly interested in conversion rate optimisation stuff for websites and emails (esp after being RAC ezine's online editor last year), information architecture, business tweeting and happy hour cocktails. So I'll try to throw up (!) some posts on these from the event.

SXSW Interactive
Austin, Texas, 12-16 March

Tagline: Tomorrow Happens Here.

Blurb: Five days of compelling presentations from the brightest minds in emerging technology, scores of exciting networking events hosted by industry leaders and an unbeatable line up of special programs showcasing the best new websites, video games and startup ideas the community has to offer. Join us March 2010 for the panels, the parties, the 13th Annual Web Awards, the ScreenBurn at SXSW Arcade, the Film and Interactive Trade Show and Exhibition, Microsoft BizSpark Accelerator at SXSW and, of course, the inspirational experience that only SXSW can deliver.

Me: There for the margaritas, parties and crazy games naturally, but also to meet interesting contacts, learn best practice on content-related stuff and bring the skills back home. Also looking at finding some connections doing interesting stuff in the hotel/conference/travel line of work maybe. And generally promoting the digital side of the West Midlands region, which is part funding me to go on their digital mission. Should also be blogging a bit from the event as per last year. And hoping to hook up with the Tuttle 2 Texas crew somewhere around New Orleans for the last leg of their trip – more about what that's about on the Tuttle2Texas Posterous. Oh and finally hoping to work out what distributed storytelling is all about from last year's Microsoft BizSpark Accelerator MC and tech journo prof, Brad King.

Content Strategy Forum 2010
Paris, France, 15-16 April

Tagline: Vive la communication!

Blurb: Where business analysis meets user experience and content development – two exciting days of workshops, presentations and discussions led by leading experts and practitioners from the emerging field of Content Strategy. Whether you are already a content strategist, or looking to break into the field, this exceptional event will put you in touch with inspiring people and new ideas.

Me: Content strategy is what I'm most interested in right now and this is the only major conference featuring all the big names that doesn't involve flying to the US. Looking to pick up skills in this area as I've just started working with the wonderful WTF! Fierce Festival to help get their content strategy ducks in a row in 2010. Also hope to finally meet Kristina Halvorson, content strategy queen. And will also be bringing an artist along to document Paris in an experiment of travel journalism for Tourist Vs Traveller – more of that in a future post.

That's me sorted for the year, I think. Unless anyone knows of any interesting travel journalist conferences…