Writing a killer tweet within a real estate of 140 characters is no less than copyrighting an advertisement for a newsletter. The only difference is that the newsletter is read only once, on a particular day while the tweet remains in the web almost for ever if not deleted otherwise. Another major difference is that you do not pay for your tweet and you can do it again and again and also delete your tweet at any time. So with this great amount of flexibility and this great tool in your hand, you have a chance to reach many people without even paying. But how your tweet pays off depends hugely on its content.
These 140 characters if used properly can become a killer marketing copy and create a havoc in the form of traffic to your website. To write a short sweet and really effective tweet we need to keep a few small things in mind. I will explain some of these things which will make your tweet an effective marketing message.
1. Decide what you want to communicate:- Just find out what you want to communicate to your followers and be sure about the marketing message you want to convey to your followers. Write down in brief the essense of your marketing message somewhere. For example the message you want to spread across is that you are giving a 20% discount on all your products to any of your followers who re-tweets and also shares the link of your site in his/her blog.
2. Write the tweet in around 80-100 characters and leave the remaining for the URL. Say for the above example I would write the Tweet in this way:- Hot Limited Period Offer - 20% Discount on products to all followers who tweet. To avail click here.
3 Use a URL shortening service to shorten the url size and use the twitter real estate to the fullest. Some of the examples of URL shortening service is http://bit.ly/ etc.
If you start writing tweets do not get too excited and tweet more than what is required. No one is a full time twitter and does not want too many tweets on their phone or account. If you are an individual, you should stick to one or two tweets a day to a maximum of 5 at different intervals. If you are an organization the maximum number of tweets you should not exceed in a day is 10. And remember these 10 tweets should not be all the same, or people will stop following you. If you want to tweet more, make sure you have the topics and things to tweet on. These limitations do not apply on organizations which are expected to send more frequent information to their followers like news broadcasters, sports broadcasters, etc.
So go ahead and write your first tweet which really makes an impact on your followers and makes them to take an action which you want them to.
Showing posts with label All about Twitter. Show all posts
Showing posts with label All about Twitter. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
Monday, June 14, 2010
How to create a great background in Twitter?
It is not required but recommended to have a custom background in your Twitter profile which helps you in the following ways:-
1. It gives you a little bit of real estate to market yourself, your logo, photos, products etc.
2. You makes your followers feel at your home when they come to your profile. It makes you different from all others.
3. In the mind of the users, a custom background creates a credibility for you, if done properly. A good custom background is sure to increase your followers by at least 10%.
In this post I will show you in a step by step way about how to create a beautiful customized background in Twitter.
First you need to think of what you like to have as your background or rather what background would suit you the most. Do not copy other backgrounds because that does not make you unique but rather a copycat. Try to be original and think something creative. Suppose you are a doctor, you may like an operation theatre to be your background or may be a human anatomy. Say you are an electronic engineer, you may like a background with a lot of chipsets and circuits. If you are a software engineer, you may like to have lot of codes in the background. Now this is not the only line to think. If you like bikes or cars, you may put your favorite bike or car in the background. You may even put your photo in background or even a collage of your photos. You may put your best scenery or your best flowers in the background. Literally you may put anything which you like, anything related to you, anything which represents you or anything which you think others will like to see as your twitter background.
Once you are done deciding what you want to put in your background, just create your piece of art in Photoshop. Use your camera to get your original pics to use. If this is not possible search google images for the right one and try not to take any copyrighted images. Do understand that even if you take a copyrighted image, if you change the image to such an extend that it is not at all identical with the original image, this does not amount to a copyright violation.
Once you get the right image you gotto start your editing in photoshop keeping in mind the limitations of Twitter backgrounds. The following are the important factors you need to keep in mind while designing a background for twitter:-
1. The background image is not stretched or shrinked when the screen resolution changes, it gets cropped and a part of the image is not visible.
2. Twitter background is aligned to the left. So the real estate available towards the left is visible in most of the resolutions.
3. Twitter background may look perfect in a particular resolution and really wild in some other resolution. Therefore you need to refer to what percentage of users use which screen resolution. Below are the ways to find this out:-
1. Use your Google Analytics account to find out what most of your users are using. Always try that your background looks proper in at least 70-80% of your user's systems.
2. If you do not use Google Analytics or any such Analytical tool, you may find this data from other reliable sources and surveys. But I can assure you that this data will vary across surveys because people use the data from their own web analytics. Below is a chart of Screen Resolutions from a reliable source:-
Screen Resolutions
1 1024x768 24.44%
2 1280x800 18.94%
3 1280x1024 10.32%
4 1440x900 8.13%
5 1366x768 5.98%
6 1680x1050 5.14%
7 800x600 4.12%
8 1024x1024 2.47%
9 1152x864 2.18%
10 1920x1080 2.06%
The above chart shoes that almost 70% of the users are using the screen resolutions of the first 5 resolutions. So try to make sure that your background is visible properly in these 5 resolutions. If you ensure this, you will find that another 10-20% automatically falls in place.
So always try to optimize your twitter background for 1024x768, 1280x800, 1280x1024, 1440x900, 1366x768.
I am telling you that it is really difficult and almost impossible to make your background look almost the same in different resolutions. But atleast try to achieve the goal of making the main parts of your background visible.
If your background is a repitive one then you are relieved from all this tough job. But if you have specific/ particular images/ text in your background you will need to put some time into it.
Now you might be wondering after reading all this that how do I know whether my background is working or not without uploading!!! There are ways but I would suggest you to upload it into twitter directly using the following steps:-
Log in to your twitter account and go to the settings Tab. Go to the designs sub tab and select a design if you like. But your intention is to be different and therefore I would not recommend you to do so. Just scroll down below and click on change background image. Click the browse button and upload the file which you have designed keeping the above guidelines in mind. The file should be in jpg, png or GIF and smaller than 800KB.
Check whether it is comeing properly in your resolution or not. If it is, you are lucky. Go to your desktop, right click and change your resolution(method depends on operating systems). Check your twitter background with each of the above widely used reolutions and make the necessary changes. Once your background is working with almost all of the widely used resolutions, you are a successful Twitter Background Designer.
In my next posts I will post a live demo of creating a twitter background.
1. It gives you a little bit of real estate to market yourself, your logo, photos, products etc.
2. You makes your followers feel at your home when they come to your profile. It makes you different from all others.
3. In the mind of the users, a custom background creates a credibility for you, if done properly. A good custom background is sure to increase your followers by at least 10%.
In this post I will show you in a step by step way about how to create a beautiful customized background in Twitter.
First you need to think of what you like to have as your background or rather what background would suit you the most. Do not copy other backgrounds because that does not make you unique but rather a copycat. Try to be original and think something creative. Suppose you are a doctor, you may like an operation theatre to be your background or may be a human anatomy. Say you are an electronic engineer, you may like a background with a lot of chipsets and circuits. If you are a software engineer, you may like to have lot of codes in the background. Now this is not the only line to think. If you like bikes or cars, you may put your favorite bike or car in the background. You may even put your photo in background or even a collage of your photos. You may put your best scenery or your best flowers in the background. Literally you may put anything which you like, anything related to you, anything which represents you or anything which you think others will like to see as your twitter background.
Once you are done deciding what you want to put in your background, just create your piece of art in Photoshop. Use your camera to get your original pics to use. If this is not possible search google images for the right one and try not to take any copyrighted images. Do understand that even if you take a copyrighted image, if you change the image to such an extend that it is not at all identical with the original image, this does not amount to a copyright violation.
Once you get the right image you gotto start your editing in photoshop keeping in mind the limitations of Twitter backgrounds. The following are the important factors you need to keep in mind while designing a background for twitter:-
1. The background image is not stretched or shrinked when the screen resolution changes, it gets cropped and a part of the image is not visible.
2. Twitter background is aligned to the left. So the real estate available towards the left is visible in most of the resolutions.
3. Twitter background may look perfect in a particular resolution and really wild in some other resolution. Therefore you need to refer to what percentage of users use which screen resolution. Below are the ways to find this out:-
1. Use your Google Analytics account to find out what most of your users are using. Always try that your background looks proper in at least 70-80% of your user's systems.
2. If you do not use Google Analytics or any such Analytical tool, you may find this data from other reliable sources and surveys. But I can assure you that this data will vary across surveys because people use the data from their own web analytics. Below is a chart of Screen Resolutions from a reliable source:-
Screen Resolutions
1 1024x768 24.44%
2 1280x800 18.94%
3 1280x1024 10.32%
4 1440x900 8.13%
5 1366x768 5.98%
6 1680x1050 5.14%
7 800x600 4.12%
8 1024x1024 2.47%
9 1152x864 2.18%
10 1920x1080 2.06%
The above chart shoes that almost 70% of the users are using the screen resolutions of the first 5 resolutions. So try to make sure that your background is visible properly in these 5 resolutions. If you ensure this, you will find that another 10-20% automatically falls in place.
So always try to optimize your twitter background for 1024x768, 1280x800, 1280x1024, 1440x900, 1366x768.
I am telling you that it is really difficult and almost impossible to make your background look almost the same in different resolutions. But atleast try to achieve the goal of making the main parts of your background visible.
If your background is a repitive one then you are relieved from all this tough job. But if you have specific/ particular images/ text in your background you will need to put some time into it.
Now you might be wondering after reading all this that how do I know whether my background is working or not without uploading!!! There are ways but I would suggest you to upload it into twitter directly using the following steps:-
Log in to your twitter account and go to the settings Tab. Go to the designs sub tab and select a design if you like. But your intention is to be different and therefore I would not recommend you to do so. Just scroll down below and click on change background image. Click the browse button and upload the file which you have designed keeping the above guidelines in mind. The file should be in jpg, png or GIF and smaller than 800KB.
Check whether it is comeing properly in your resolution or not. If it is, you are lucky. Go to your desktop, right click and change your resolution(method depends on operating systems). Check your twitter background with each of the above widely used reolutions and make the necessary changes. Once your background is working with almost all of the widely used resolutions, you are a successful Twitter Background Designer.
In my next posts I will post a live demo of creating a twitter background.
Saturday, June 12, 2010
Twitter for organizations.
Twitter has of late evolved as an indespensible tool and a serious part of the internet marketing strategy of any organization or company seeking an online presence. There are several ways various companies are using Twitter to achieve their goals and to keep in touch with their clients or customers.
Many companies has used Twitter in the best possible way. Dell, Pepsi and CoffeeGrounds are some of my favorite cases.
Dell Outlet is one of the division of Dell which rolls out refurbished and custom made products which need to be sold quickly. They found Twitter to be the quickest way to spread the word. Not only could they roll out information about the products, the coupons and the special offers, they started getting reply from their customers. Their customers gave feedback and complaints about their products which helped them improve their service. Nelson, of Dell in an interview with Twitter says that they have booked more than $3 million of sales only with the help of Twitter.
Another Classic Example is of Pepsi who used Twitter to collect feedback from their consumers. They found this consumer feedback very useful and used the data gathered from Twitter to build on their campaigns. Pepsi uses Twitter as one of their customer service tools and also resolves the complaints. Whenever a customer gets offensive they continue the conversation in DM or through E-mail. Twitter has helped Pepsi to create a strong brand loyalty in the form of their huge group of Followers in Twitter.
Coffee Grounds is a coffee shop which is not as big as Dell or Pepsi, but has used Twitter as well as they have done. J.R. cohen the General Manager of Twitter built a list of Followers, but he never thought that his followers will soon start ordering online through direct messeging(DM). He used to send a personal invite to his followers to his coffee shop and then personally met them. This is how twiter helped J.R. get realtime customers and orders.
These are just a few examples of how Twitter can be used by different companies for different purposes.
It does not matter whether you are a decision maker or not of your company, if your company/ organization does not still have a twitter account just go ahead and open one. And then think on how to use it to get in touch with your target group and consumers. Think of ways on how to exploit twitter. And if this clicks you are sure to get a double hike next appraisals.
The first step you need to take before opening the account is just search the name of your company in Twitter without logging in and find out what people are talking about you. Make a report of the important matters that you find from those tweets of people. Start following some of those people who talk frequently about you and appreciate them for it. If they have complaints resolve them.
Now once you are active on Twitter you need to find out ways to bring in more people to follow you in Twitter. The first thing you need to do is put an eminent link in your website saying Follow us on Twitter. Give special offers/ small goodies to customers who start following you in Twitter which will encourage more people to join. Go ahead and give some great offers in Twitter so that they get retweeted. Every time a person re tweets your tweets it gets spread to more people and increases the chances of more people following you.
The next step after you start putting the link of your Twitter account all across your websites, blogs, e-mail signatures, posts, stationery, T-shirts, business cards, product packaging etc and start getting a lot of followers on Twitter, you need to take one step ahead and start integrating the Twitter API in your website. I will write more about Twitter API integration, Background Design and advanced reporting for Twitter business users.
Keep tweeting frequently and dont let the buzz about you go away. But be sure that you do not spam and send in useless or unusual tweets which may annoy your followers. Tweeting a few times a day would be for very active members such as a news channel or a weather forecast company. Other tweeting a few times a week or once in a couple of days is good enough. But if you become too idle and do not tweet even once in a week that may take you out of the minds of your followers.
All you need to do is to create killer tweets by utilizing the real estate of those 140 characters which Twitter has given you. Even though it is less lets be happy and try our best. In my future posts I will also write on how to write killer tweets.
Many companies has used Twitter in the best possible way. Dell, Pepsi and CoffeeGrounds are some of my favorite cases.
Dell Outlet is one of the division of Dell which rolls out refurbished and custom made products which need to be sold quickly. They found Twitter to be the quickest way to spread the word. Not only could they roll out information about the products, the coupons and the special offers, they started getting reply from their customers. Their customers gave feedback and complaints about their products which helped them improve their service. Nelson, of Dell in an interview with Twitter says that they have booked more than $3 million of sales only with the help of Twitter.
Another Classic Example is of Pepsi who used Twitter to collect feedback from their consumers. They found this consumer feedback very useful and used the data gathered from Twitter to build on their campaigns. Pepsi uses Twitter as one of their customer service tools and also resolves the complaints. Whenever a customer gets offensive they continue the conversation in DM or through E-mail. Twitter has helped Pepsi to create a strong brand loyalty in the form of their huge group of Followers in Twitter.
Coffee Grounds is a coffee shop which is not as big as Dell or Pepsi, but has used Twitter as well as they have done. J.R. cohen the General Manager of Twitter built a list of Followers, but he never thought that his followers will soon start ordering online through direct messeging(DM). He used to send a personal invite to his followers to his coffee shop and then personally met them. This is how twiter helped J.R. get realtime customers and orders.
These are just a few examples of how Twitter can be used by different companies for different purposes.
It does not matter whether you are a decision maker or not of your company, if your company/ organization does not still have a twitter account just go ahead and open one. And then think on how to use it to get in touch with your target group and consumers. Think of ways on how to exploit twitter. And if this clicks you are sure to get a double hike next appraisals.
The first step you need to take before opening the account is just search the name of your company in Twitter without logging in and find out what people are talking about you. Make a report of the important matters that you find from those tweets of people. Start following some of those people who talk frequently about you and appreciate them for it. If they have complaints resolve them.
Now once you are active on Twitter you need to find out ways to bring in more people to follow you in Twitter. The first thing you need to do is put an eminent link in your website saying Follow us on Twitter. Give special offers/ small goodies to customers who start following you in Twitter which will encourage more people to join. Go ahead and give some great offers in Twitter so that they get retweeted. Every time a person re tweets your tweets it gets spread to more people and increases the chances of more people following you.
The next step after you start putting the link of your Twitter account all across your websites, blogs, e-mail signatures, posts, stationery, T-shirts, business cards, product packaging etc and start getting a lot of followers on Twitter, you need to take one step ahead and start integrating the Twitter API in your website. I will write more about Twitter API integration, Background Design and advanced reporting for Twitter business users.
Keep tweeting frequently and dont let the buzz about you go away. But be sure that you do not spam and send in useless or unusual tweets which may annoy your followers. Tweeting a few times a day would be for very active members such as a news channel or a weather forecast company. Other tweeting a few times a week or once in a couple of days is good enough. But if you become too idle and do not tweet even once in a week that may take you out of the minds of your followers.
All you need to do is to create killer tweets by utilizing the real estate of those 140 characters which Twitter has given you. Even though it is less lets be happy and try our best. In my future posts I will also write on how to write killer tweets.
How to use Twitter in the best way?
Twitter is a very popular concept in in US and many people tweet regularly. Almost 90% of US population is available online and almost 70% of the online population uses either facebook or twitter or both. This data is not authenticated and is based on a sample survey carried out on over 100 people in the States by some of my Internet Marketing peers. One more interesting fact is that almost 60% of the people who are on Twitter in the US have connected Twitter to their phones. So they get updates from their friends even when they are in the disco, restroom, watching a baseball match or dating in a cafe.
UK is fast catching up US when it comes to social networking. Lot of other countries are also using twitter a lot. But Indians are far behind in Tweeting. Almost 9% of India's population has access to internet which will soon increase to a whopping 15-20%. In that case India will be the biggest market in the Internet Arena and many Online Ventures will soon come up concentrating solely on the Indian Markets.
Ok, all that was just a background and now lets start off with our first post about tweeting. Many of us do not tweet because we do not know how to and why to? Twitter was invented for friends to keep in touch with friends. Dont worry if you do not have hundreds of followers, it is quite natural as nobody else other than your friends and people who know you would be interested in your tweets if you do not tweet on something which is very meaningful to them. If you a celebrity, you are a lucky one, you should go ahead and create a verified twitter account and your fans will start following you almost immediately. In my later posts I will talk about verified account in details. An individual who is not a celebrity or an organization need not have a verified account.
A group of friends may use twitter productively to post updates to all the friends about a particular thing. If 5 friends are working on a project, they may post tweets on the latest updates about the project so that all the others are updated about it.
But then, some use twitter to say that I am yawning, I am sleeping, I am eating etc. which do not make any sense to anyone. Tweeting needs to be done on important events, updates and interesting things that we think others will be interested at. Say I came across a very good website, I may want to share it with my friends, Twitter is a great way to do it. Maybe I got promoted in my job and I want to inform this to my friends, I send a tweet. Or I have uploaded new photos on Flicker, I can send a tweet along with the link. This is how general people can be in touch and utilize Twitter in the best way.
In case you want to be updated round the clock about your group you can also use Twitter on Mobile which is now only available on Airtel Mobiles. Stay tuned on my next posts on how to add your phone to your twitter account and also about how corporates/NGOs and Businesses can use Twitter in the Best Possible way. I will also write an article on the best twitters and how they became the best.
UK is fast catching up US when it comes to social networking. Lot of other countries are also using twitter a lot. But Indians are far behind in Tweeting. Almost 9% of India's population has access to internet which will soon increase to a whopping 15-20%. In that case India will be the biggest market in the Internet Arena and many Online Ventures will soon come up concentrating solely on the Indian Markets.
Ok, all that was just a background and now lets start off with our first post about tweeting. Many of us do not tweet because we do not know how to and why to? Twitter was invented for friends to keep in touch with friends. Dont worry if you do not have hundreds of followers, it is quite natural as nobody else other than your friends and people who know you would be interested in your tweets if you do not tweet on something which is very meaningful to them. If you a celebrity, you are a lucky one, you should go ahead and create a verified twitter account and your fans will start following you almost immediately. In my later posts I will talk about verified account in details. An individual who is not a celebrity or an organization need not have a verified account.
A group of friends may use twitter productively to post updates to all the friends about a particular thing. If 5 friends are working on a project, they may post tweets on the latest updates about the project so that all the others are updated about it.
But then, some use twitter to say that I am yawning, I am sleeping, I am eating etc. which do not make any sense to anyone. Tweeting needs to be done on important events, updates and interesting things that we think others will be interested at. Say I came across a very good website, I may want to share it with my friends, Twitter is a great way to do it. Maybe I got promoted in my job and I want to inform this to my friends, I send a tweet. Or I have uploaded new photos on Flicker, I can send a tweet along with the link. This is how general people can be in touch and utilize Twitter in the best way.
In case you want to be updated round the clock about your group you can also use Twitter on Mobile which is now only available on Airtel Mobiles. Stay tuned on my next posts on how to add your phone to your twitter account and also about how corporates/NGOs and Businesses can use Twitter in the Best Possible way. I will also write an article on the best twitters and how they became the best.
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