Twitter marketing

A lot has been said (and has yet to be said) about Twitter when it comes to marketing your wares. They key to any marketing effort, if you subscribe to the Seth Godin school of marketing, is creating something of value (e.g. remarkable) and helping people discover that it exists. What draws me to Twitter most is how ridiculously easy it makes finding people all over the world that could use your product, and in real time allowing you to connect with those people to help them discover what you have to offer. Below I describe how I've been using Twitter to get the word out about the site.

Tracking

There are hundreds of tools out there built to help you manage your Twitter life, but I've found that the following are all you need in managing your marketing efforts (for basic sites/services):

1. A Twitter account, specifically made for your product/business
2. Twitter Search
3. BackTweets
4. Google News Reader

Step 1. Set up a Twitter account. I originally started using my own personal account, but quickly realized that I was spamming my followers with country code nonsense way too often. So I signed up for @countrycodes:


Step 2. Hop over to Twitter Search. This allows you to search the entire Twitter stream for words or phrases that you are interested in. The most obvious things to search for are your company and product names. Definitely go ahead and do that. The the not-so-obvious strategy is to search for signs of "intent" that a person would find your product or service useful. In my case, I search for things like "country code", "international calling", and "dialing internationally". I presume that most people that use these phrases are looking for country code information. You want to be careful to avoid searches that are too broad, as you'll get back a lot of noise. Expirament and see what returns the most useful results.

I've found that when people are seeing this search tool for the first time, they are blown away by how much is being said about their little part of the world, and how many people could benefit by their product. An example Twitter search:


Step 3. A new service that I've found to be extremely useful is BackTweets. It allows you to search the twitter stream for URL's, which are normally obfuscated by the tinyurl's of the world. You simply search for your domain name (e.g. simplecountrycodes.com), and just like Twitter Search you get back every Tweet that included a link to your site:


The standard Twitter search does not allow you to do this, and I've found this to be extremely valuable. You'll also want to do the same search for your competitors domains, to see why people are linking to them, and what they are saying.

Step 4. Manual searching is all well and good, but this isn't a long term strategy. You need to be able to collect all of these searches into a manageable system, and keep track of what's changed since last you reviewed the results. This is where Google Reader comes in. All you do is add the RSS feed for each of the searches we ran through above to your RSS reader of choice (Google Reader in my case), and from that point forward you'll never miss out on a single mention of your site, your domain, your business, or users online looking for your product. Here are some examples of where to find the RSS feed:




And here's a snapshot of the results in my RSS reader:



One other things you can do once you're comfortable with the above is to track links from blogs using Google Blog Search:


Note: If your product is bigger, popular, and requires more real time awareness, I would replace Google News Reader with TweetDeck, and have a saved search for the search terms you came up with. With that in place, you're able to see new tweets in real time and respond quickly.

Communicating

Having found people looking for your product, the next step is to help them become aware of what you have to offer. With social media channels you must strive to be authentic in your communication, and focus on providing real value (not just advertising your crap). People see right through the interruption based advertising approach, especially in opt-in forums like Twitter. If your product provides real value to a lot of people you have a huge head start.

The process I follow is simple:

1. Scan my RSS feeds (gathered above) for people looking for something my product can help them with.
2. Respond to them with a pointer to that information.
3. Rinse and repeat.

For example, I come across a tweet like this:

and respond with:


Another example, having seen this:


I respond with this:


In each case, I take the time to point them to the specific information they are looking for (e.g the country code for France), and don't try to push anything else on them. On the one hand, it's relatively easy and generally gets a good reaction. On the other hand, this takes time to continue doing (as a result, you can't say this is "free", if you value your time), and it's hard to say if time spent here couldn't be used better someplace else. Only time will tell where efforts pay off most.

That's pretty much all there is to it. As you connect with more people, and assuming they find your responses helpful, you'll notice users Re-Tweeting your information, and hopefully start spreading the word about your service...