Get More from Search - Trends in Search & Social Media

To tweet or not to tweet, that is the question. And the answer is, a resounding yes!

Twitter’s success is nothing short of incredible and its rise to a preeminent social network is secure, with 6 million users and 55 million monthly visitors. The micro-blogging service is outranked in popularity only by Facebook and MySpace.

By now, you’ve either heard of Twitter, use it, or are addicted to it. Being able to communicate to your audience in 140-character micro-blogs can open up new opportunities for your business.  Whether Twitter becomes ubiquitous is yet to be seen, but with an increasing number of brands registered and millions of people using their personal accounts to establish themselves and their companies as “experts,” Twitter should become part of your social media mix.

If you’re a user, you probably went through the strategic part of setting up an account: “What am I trying to accomplish here? What will I write about? Who do I want to follow me? Is this for fun or for business?”  This is an important part of the process and will impact Twitter’s payoff.

What can Twitter do for your business?

• Keep in touch with customers, vendors, partners, employees and consultants
• Establish partnerships
• Learn about competition
• Build your network
• Open up new opportunities to participate in confererences and events
• Drive traffic to your website or blog
• Establish you/your business as an expert in an industry
• Improve productivity
• Grant you instant alerts on the latest news, stats, tools

Whether you’re already tweeting or haven’t yet caught the twitterpated bug, here are a few tips to illustrate how to optimize Twitter’s social media benefits for your business.

1. Structure your posts to get retweeted. To do this, keep your tweets short (around 120 characters, which leaves room for the necessary “RT @username” verbiage) and be relevant (ask questions, share helpful epiphanies, promote useful news and events). This “twetiquette” account is a cute and useful service to remind us all of best practices in Twitter.
2. Engage your audience. You can direct questions or topics to individuals or to your following. Using Twitter platform services such as TweetDeck or Twhirl will organize your follower’s posts, your @ replies and your direct messages. Program in searches for keywords that when posted, will alert you when you’re more apt to have something relevant to say. Keywords might be your name, your company’s name/products/services, hot industry terms, hash tag topics (#hashtag), or topics and people you’re interested in learning more about.
3. Target who you follow. Basically, follow those you want to follow you (industry leaders, popular companies, potential customers and partners). Follow-backs aren’t standard, and some think that following everyone who follows you is good “twetiquette” but by doing this, you’ll dilute the impact of your targeted audience. However, by being relevant and engaging your audience, the prospects of your targets seeing your content and following you back is much improved. Twellow lets you search for Twitter users or search by category of user).

Oh, and if you find this useful, please take a moment and retweet it!

To follow up on my last blog post and illustrate just how much strangers now influence our opinions and decisions, I thought I’d post some revealing findings about the importance of worldwide input via social media.

In Universal McCann’s recent report, “When did we start trusting strangers?” in the “Proliferation of influencer channels” section, it is posited that the web is encouraging trust among strangers the world over. This trend does not correlate with the societal assumption that strangers are out to get us. Rather, we see the web as an equalizer; a readily accessible platform for expression of all peoples. Tapping into that global authority expands our knowledge boundaries and allows us to shape our opinions based on the widest range of (assumably) unbiased, unsolicited and candid information. If knowledge is power, then it seems that we’re craving the power of that collective voice so much that we now hold stranger’s opinions in nearly as high a regard as the people we personally know.

• We trust strangers online almost as much as face to face recommendation
• The top four trusted forms of recommendation are all direct conversation – significantly two of these are now on internet channels: email and Instant Messenger
• We would much rather trust a stranger than a celebrity, by a long way
• We trust a stranger over any paid-for communications or advertising
• We trust a stranger more in a regulated environment like reviews in a retail site such as Amazon or an auction site like eBay
• Blogs are becoming a trusted form of opinion, blogs from people you know rank at number 7 and those by from professionals or micropublishers, number 15.
• Blogs are almost as trusted as their written word counterparts, magazines and newspapers
• Not everything online is trusted: emails from companies are only marginally more trusted than celebrities

(Source: “When did we start trusting strangers?” page 35.)

Those in our “strangers” sphere might not be our BFF just yet, but from the looks of this report and others cropping up weekly, it seems that they’re quickly becoming PGF (pretty good friends).