Following the Tweeter: Using Twitter Analytics to Improve Your Social Media Presence

Twitter, although it only asks its users to post short messages of 140 characters or less, remains elusive to a lot of businesses with a social media presence. However, the website passed 500 million users last June, so the land of direct messages and retweets will become harder to ignore.

By analyzing some basic statistics about your Twitter account and its followers, you can get a better grasp of who to follow and what to post on this site. Twitter doesn’t have analytics as accessible as the analytics for a Facebook page. Luckily, there are a bunch of sites that will give you the numbers you need (for free, a lot of the time): Twitonomy, Twitter Counter, Twentyfeet, etc.

What The Twitter Advertising API Means For Your Business

Earlier in February, Twitter announced the release of it’s Advertising API,  a new technology system that allows third party tools to better manage and implement advertising campaigns on Twitter. With the success of promoted tweets and trends over the past three years, this tool serves to help Twitter deliver, “better ads for users, not more ads.”

Until now, businesses that purchased promoted tweets were limited to running individual ads through Twitter itself.  Twitter has partnered with Adobe, Hootsuite, Salesforce, SHIFT, and TGB Digital to pilot the technology, and begin offering branded ad management services to their client base. New third party partners are expected to be announced shortly.

Lessons from 2012 Social Media Disasters

As we approach the end of 2012, we begin to look back and discover that the lines between the online world and real life blur ever closer. It’s become a standard fact of life in these modern times that almost any action taken will have an online echo that someone, somewhere, will react to in a negative way. On the social web, everything is fair game, and brands have a responsibility to expect feedback for every public action they take. Several brands had some social media fires this year, but from the ashes, lessons can be learned.

But We Don’t NEED to Be on Social Media…

For every business that has success in social media marketing, there are dozens more that fail. In reviewing and analyzing successful case studies of social media success, it’s easy to set up mental barriers to convince yourself not to participate. You can point to almost anything and be somewhat convincing; like saying “their audience is all teenagers,” or “they sell downloadable products, we don’t.”

#HurricanSandy

Hurricane Sandy was a life changing event for anyone living on the eastern seaboard of the United States. For people in other regions of the country, social media provided a spotlight on the pre-storm preparations, emergency announcements, on-the-ground reports of damage, and a network of support for victims and volunteers.

Twitter Case Study

One of my goals this summer was to get more involved with Twitter and see how companies are using it. While I was researching the post about how a Wine Retailer is Using Twitter to reach a whole new audience I came across Rae Hoffman’s post titled “An Actual “Non Big Brand” Twitter Case Study

Rae’s case study is about a  a BlackBerry related website called BBGeeks . BBGeeks has had a Twitter account for around eight months now and has grown from zero to over 500 followers in that time. For a web site targeting a very niche market, this is pretty impressive.

A Twitter Site For Critics

Twitter uses are used top conveying their message in 140 characters  or less. Well now Blippr has taken the Twitter concept and applied it to reviews of book, games, music and movies.

No longer do you have to sift through lengthy reviews to find out what someone thought about the Dark Night move. Paring a review down to 160 characters and a rating really forces reviewers to get to the essential appeal or flaw of the movie being reviewed. For instance, do you really need to know anything more about The Dark Night than “Heath Ledger… Man, he was so different than Nicholson. Not cruel and funny, but disturbing and terrifying. A great movie, great story. Can’t miss it.”.

Getting My Arms Around Twitter

I admit it took me a long time to warm up to Twitter. I could not see why anyone was interested in what I was doing right now. I still struggle with the voyeuristic aspects of Twitter but a couple of new applications are helping me overcome my reluctance to using it.

For those of you who don’t know what I am talking about Twitter is a social network that lets you tell your friends what you are doing at any given time. It also lets you see what everyone else is up to. It’s a kind of worldwide bulletin board of tiny messages that form a huge mosaic of everyday activity.