Archive for April, 2009

Using Twitter can definitely take a lot of time. As I’ve been using Twitter more & more, I’ve tried a lot of different things. Hopefully, you’ll get something from this post that will help you manage your Twitter usage more effectively.

My goal is to make my time on Twitter as efficient as possible. Wouldn’t you like to reduce your amount of time on Twitter, but increase the quality of time?

1) Centralized Dashboard: I like to use TweetDeck.

2) Automate: I use Twitterfeed to automate 2 of my Tweets everyday. This will pull fresh content from any RSS feed I choose. Choose as many as you wish. And, it’ll go out and grab the most recent content on a specified time schedule you pre-select. I also use Socialtoo, which allows you to auto-follow people who follow you, auto-unfollow people who unfollow you, blacklist Twitter users, send automatic DMs to your new followers, and disable auto DMs.

I follow everyone back

3) Interaction: Some people only follow a few, while others have thousands of followers. In my opinion, they are not making the most out of their Twitter profile, and just don’t “get-it”. Twitter is social, right. People like interacting. People want to interact. Example of getting it: Guy Kawasaki. Example of NOT getting it: Oprah.

4) Retweet: Don’t be shy. Retweet some of your followers tweets. You know it’s interesting stuff. And, good karma too.

5) Seek & Follow: 2 things I do for this. I use Twellow, and occasionally will search thru somebody’s followers list.

6) Share Original Thoughts: Not every Tweet needs to have a link. Go ahead, say what’s on your mind. People are interested. Really.

7) Quotes from other people: Once in a while drop in a famous quote, bible verse, etc. Quotes from someone on a holiday or birthday can be very appropriate. Like a quote from General Patton on Veterns Day, or something like that. Another idea is to quotes from someone elses Tweet with a [by @username].

8 ) Answer Questions: Search Twitter Search for phrases that contain the who, what how, why, when, where questions…and your keyword.

When you get really serious about using Twitter , and are willing to pay a monthly subscription, it might be time for EasyTweets.

Photo Credit: shawnzlea

People sometimes do odd things in social media. One of these things is making their Twitter accounts private. If the point of social media is to be social, why hide your account? Here are the reasons I’ve come across that people choose to keep their Twitter accounts private:

Personal Accounts - this is one of the more popular uses of taking an account private. If you are spending all day managing a large brand with thousands of followers, perhaps you just want an accounts you can use between friends. It’s easier and more quiet that way.

Privacy - some people are crazy out in them there Internets, so if you are a public figure or have stalkers, I can totally understand why you wouldn’t want your stalker to know where you are every moment of the day.

Inactive / Inexperienced Accounts - if you aren’t a power user or are just starting out on Twitter, maybe it’s too cumbersome for you to go through all the spammy followers. Keeping private should weed some of that out for you.

Reputation Management - believe it or not, everyone isn’t using Twitter. Some people only grab a profile to protect their reputation, so it makes sense to keep the account private in this case.

So Why Go Public?

Ok, so maybe you are now ready to come out of your shell and be a social media expert like the rest of us
You’ll be easier to follow, and will appear in Twitter search as well as the public timeline.

Jump on in, the kool aid’s fine!

——————
Guest Post by Brian Wallace. Follow Brian on Twitter!

Once upon a time when people wrote press releases they did so with the goal of getting their press releases picked up by mainstream media, so that newspaper readers would learn about whatever it was that was being promoted.

However, these days, newspaper readership is shrinking drastically every year and many more people are turning to the internet to get their information, instead of relying on traditional media. According to Nielson Online, in February 2009, there were 8.494 billion searches conducted on the internet.

What does this mean for you if you want to publicize something?

It means that if you want to get your information out to the widest possible audience, even if you do launch a traditional media campaign, you simply can’t afford to ignore the internet.

Writing a press release for the internet is pretty much the same as writing a press release for a newspaper, except for the fact that you want to do your keyword research first. Try to incorporate a good keyword in your headline and in your first sentence, and then once more in the body of your press release. Other than that just write naturally; you are writing for humans as well as search engines, and if you try to keyword stuff you will produce bad copy and the search engine spiders will pick up on it and it may effect your press release’s search engine ranking.

There are a number of places, both free and paid, that will distribute your press releases. On my website, I have a list of free press release distribution sites.

PRWeb and Webwire are very good options as well. They both charge a fee to distribute your release. One advantage of Webwire is that it will run your press release instantly and only charges $19.95.

If you need to get an idea of how to write a press release, go to PRweb and read through some of the press releases on there. You will very quickly get an idea of the structure of a typical press release, the length, and the type of information that is included in it.

And now you have all the information that you need to start crafting your own Web 2.0 publicity campaign.

————————
Dana Willhoit is an award-winning former journalist who worked as a reporter at daily and weekly newspapers for 17 years, before leaving the journalism industry to start her own online publicity company. You can read more about how to craft effective press releases and how to get tons of free publicity at her website, ThePressReleaseSite.

Photo Credit: Claude@Munich