Twitter – Tweeting to your #audience
Facebook, WordPress, Wikipedia, Pinterest (etc etc) are taking up more and more of our time. Twitter has become part of my daily digest of news and information. Twitter is useful in keeping track of popular trends and your favourite celebrities. However you can quickly be overwhelmed by the massive volume of tweets, even if you are only following a handful of Tweeters.
Regardless, Twitter among many are vital tools in getting people interested in your product/service/launch. When picking a business name, you now need to consider if the Twitter and Google handles are available in addition to reserving your domain name.
There are endless articles on the marketing power of Twitter but be wary of how you use this tool. A slip of the keyboard after a few drinks may cause embarrassment to your brand.
The basics:
+ Think before you tweet – Ensure message is appropriate and adds value.
+ Watch your grammar – Use your spell checker.
Make your message count by considering:
+ Using appropriate hashtags – Adding a ‘#category’ to your tweet can attract more readers but importantly those interested in your topic/category.
+ Leaving room for re-tweeting – Allow space for others to re-send your message. They can add a ‘RT’ to the start of your message to spread the word.
+ Including a web link and making sure this link works – Web links draw in your followers and allow you to day more than 140 characters.
+ Quote others – Some say that adding a ‘@person’ to your tweet can gain more attention. It also humanize your messages.
Growing your audience:
+ Interact – Target other Twitter users by directing messages to others (including ‘@person’ in your message).
+ Follow – Follow others. Try and target those with similar interests to your own. Beware of spammers.
+ Include Links – Add your Twitter handle to your website and email signature.
+ Ask – Ask others to follow you.
We are not experts here but try varying combinations of the above and see what happens. Do some combinations work better than others? Let us know.
In the interim, check out our tweets here:
http://twitter.com/SparkNLaunch
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+ Happy New Years – Bring on 2012!
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You might also enjoy:
+ Startup Myths – I shall not be fooled again by gurus
+ The Bootstrap Challenge – Walking the Talk
+ Social Media Experiment – Twitter, Google+ and now Facebook
+ Project Trout – Social Media Experiment Update #3
Welcome new readers! If this is your first time here, you might want to start with a new article or read through our older submissions.
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Project Mackerel – Calling all Beta Testers (Follow Up)
This is a quick thank you to all those enthusiastic people who responded for our call for testers (Post: Project Mackerel – Calling all Beta Testers). We will be in touch shortly with updates and details on our soon to be released prototype for early feedback.
To those people still to reply, there is still time. We are always keen to hear from others. So please get in touch if you are keen to get involved.
—-
Project Mackerel is our very own web portal project. We have been working on an online portal idea to help job seekers impress in interviews. While this is not totally in keeping with the ‘self-employment’ genre of this blog, we are pitching an adaptable idea to try and help those out of work, or those looking for the next step upwards.
We are currently working on our (very) early prototype and require feedback from willing testers. You may be an experienced programmer or newbie web surfer. We are aiming to start initial testing next month. We just need enthusiastic volunteers to give us some early feedback and helpful suggestions.
Anyone interested, please get in contact via the contact links or e-mail (sparkNlaunch at gmail). When replying it would be useful to know a little bit about yourself.
Thanks!
We are also open to any advice in this department. We have been researching and there appear to be various avenues to go down. We plan a later post to document our findings and experiences.
Useful links:
http://betali.st/
http://www.thebetafamily.com/
http://www.entrepreneur.com/blog/222566
.
You might also enjoy:
+ Learning From Other Startups – 6 Real Life Stories
+ Startup Myths – I shall not be fooled again by gurus
+ Social Media Experiment – Twitter, Google+ and now Facebook
+ Project Trout – Social Media Experiment Update #3
Welcome new readers! If this is your first time here, you might want to start with a new article or read through our older submissions.
Where to next? Check out a random article.
Stay in touch: Check us out via RSS Feed, Twitter, Google+ and Facebook.
Join the conversation: Leave a comment or tweet this post.
Project Trout – Social Media Experiment Update
Late last year we kicked off Project Trout (Social Media Experiment #1), aimed to share our own experiences with using social media to gain traffic and interest.
Our findings so far are not so surprising:
+ It is hard to get noticed, even in your own niche/field.
+ It takes time for responses.
+ Some efforts have resulted in zero attention.
+ Interest in a tweet doesn’t necessary result in a visitor to your blog.
We have summarized the activities below.
Week 1:
Go live – Blog goes from private to public. 8 initial postings available.
Enabled Google Webmaster Tools.
Enabled Social Media buttons on each post.
Improved header information and text.
Week 2:
Twitter and Google Plus accounts activated. An additional 4 postings made available.
RSS feeds added to Feedage.com.
Twitter: 6 Tweets, 2 Following, 11 Followers
Blog: Some traffic and comments to blog.
Week 3:
Monitored Twitter activity via Twitter Counter.
Added links to FeedShark, a free tool to promote your website.
Week 4:
Experimented with Pluggio and HootSuite to schedule and manage Twitter account.
Week 5:
Twitter: Increased the amount of Twitter users we were following from c. 15 to 350. Had a dramatic impact on followers (peaking around 110). Then a sudden fall over the following days down to nearly 80 followers. Many followers were spam accounts later deleted by Twitter.
Week 6:
No new activity.
Week 7:
Current focus is Twitter and WordPress blog. Google Plus has been neglected for now as difficult to gain a large following as a ‘page’ rather than a ‘user’.
Twitter: 42 Tweets, 300 Following, 92 Followers
Blog: 20 posts now available. Traffic still remains low.
Planned Activities:
More interaction within WordPress community.
Continue Twitter tweets.
Create more high quality content.
Current Links:
Wordpress: sparkNlaunch.wordpress.com/
Twitter: twitter.com/sparkNlaunch
Google+: plus.google.com/sparkNlaunch/
RSS: sparkNlaunch.wordpress.com/feed/
.
You might also enjoy:
+ Learning From Other Startups – 6 Real Life Stories
+ Startup Myths – I shall not be fooled again by gurus
+ Social Media Experiment – Twitter, Google+ and now Facebook
+ Project Trout – Social Media Experiment Update #3
Welcome new readers! If this is your first time here, you might want to start with a new article or read through our older submissions.
Where to next? Check out a random article.
Stay in touch: Check us out via RSS Feed, Twitter, Google+ and Facebook.
Join the conversation: Leave a comment or tweet this post.
The Zoo Project – A Fantastic Marketing Opportunity
Appreciated that the entry date has now passed (end of Jan) but spotted this as an interesting project to follow. There are a lot of new businesses starting up trying to operate as the latest network provider between merchants and publishers. Parties are trying to build and offer new platforms to support this growing industry. This competition is offering an incubator for those interested in getting a foot in the door (or more).
The project is organised by Trade Doubler, a well known “Performance-based digital marketer”. More details on the project are available at The Zoo Project website.
Some quotes from the site:
The Zoo Project is a business incubator designed to foster grass roots growth and help drive innovation in the online marketing arena for companies specialising in the Affiliate Marketing industry.
Successful applicants will benefit from open plan business space in the central London location of Victoria, completely free of charge.
I don’t have any links to the organisers or any competitors but wish everyone good luck and will be waiting to see what comes out of this project.
.
You might also enjoy:
+ Learning From Other Startups – 6 Real Life Stories
+ Startup Myths – I shall not be fooled again by gurus
+ Social Media Experiment – Twitter, Google+ and now Facebook
+ Project Trout – Social Media Experiment Update #3
Welcome new readers! If this is your first time here, you might want to start with a new article or read through our older submissions.
Where to next? Check out a random article.
Stay in touch: Check us out via RSS Feed, Twitter, Google+ and Facebook.
Join the conversation: Leave a comment or tweet this post.
Project Mackerel – Calling all Beta Testers
Project Mackerel is our very own web portal project. We have been working on an online portal idea to help job seekers impress in interviews. While this is not totally in keeping with the ‘self-employment’ genre of this blog, we are pitching an adaptable idea to try and help those out of work, or those looking for the next step upwards.
We are currently working on our (very) early prototype and require feedback from willing testers. You may be an experienced programmer or newbie web surfer. We are aiming to start initial testing next month. We just need enthusiastic volunteers to give us some early feedback and helpful suggestions.
Anyone interested, please get in contact via the contact links or e-mail (sparkNlaunch at gmail). When replying it would be useful to know a little bit about yourself.
Thanks!
We are also open to any advice in this department. We have been researching and there appear to be various avenues to go down. We plan a later post to document our findings and experiences.
Useful links:
http://betali.st/
http://www.thebetafamily.com/
http://www.entrepreneur.com/blog/222566
.
You might also enjoy:
+ The Startup Dictionary – Learning the Lingo #3
+ Learning From Other Startups – 6 Real Life Stories
+ Startup Myths – I shall not be fooled again by gurus
+ The Bootstrap Challenge – Walking the Talk
Welcome new readers! If this is your first time here, you might want to start with a new article or read through our older submissions.
Where to next? Check out a random article.
Stay in touch: Check us out via RSS Feed, Twitter, Google+ and Facebook.
Join the conversation: Leave a comment or tweet this post.
