Keynote: How to Use Twitter As a Marketing Weapon

Last night's webinar/presentation was given by Guy Kawasaki with a list of social media and technology credentials as long as your arm. I got in late from my monstrous commute and the home laptop was running on a combo of molasses and squirrels on a treadmill, but I eventually got on - though I missed about a third of the talk.

I was interested in taking this course because I'm not a convert to Twitter. I have my toe in the water but its barely damp. I followed people just to see how its done but I rarely check back. The most I use it is when I sign up for webinars and they force you to use Twitter in order to submit your questions to the speaker. Here is my challenge with that... they never explain how to do that. "hashtagABCD" ok... then what? When I typed it and hit 'enter' did that just go somewhere? Did that go everywhere? and the othe annoying thing about it is that the people speaking NEVER... and I use all caps purposefully.... they never enunciate so if they're telling me to send it with #SMNS, it could be #SMMS, SNNS, or any combination, and they never write it on their 'slides'. I know social media is all about immediacy and things flying by at aeronautic speed, but really, slow down and give us the information in an understandable format.

But I digress - as I will often.

Guy Kawasaki was informative for a Twitter-newbie and what I took away last night was the plethora of Twitter utility sites out there (some listed below) and I found his review of them to be handy. It was helpful because he did a quick drive-by of the +s or -s of each one and that cuts through the clutter when/if I were to go looking for which ones to use. He proports that the main reason for using Twitter as a marketer is to see how your brand is being talked about and what's being said about your brand. Ergo the concentration on Twitter searches. That is the passive reason.

To actively utilize Twitter, you need to post Tweets. He gave a few sites that automatically do it for you (some at a cost - to my understanding), and some can be timed to send them out at intervals. There are some that you can code in restrictions before it does auto-tweets. As you can imagine, there are many, many options. The key in building your audience (and therefore your brand) is to get people to notice you. Retweets help this and sites such as Tweetmeme provide widgets that you can use on your blogs to facilitate users easily passing on your link via their Twitter feed.

There was a lot of self-promotion of his site, AllTop.com.  And there was a smattering of things I didn't understand - but that could be because I missed the start of it.

The other thing I found useful is that he breezed quickly by StumbleUpon and SmartBrief, which I'm aware of but have never visited. It satiated my curiosity to see someone use the sites.

Below are some of the Twitter sites he mentioned with a quick description or his opinion of them:

Twitterfeed: makes blogs a tweet, but more limited (also feeds to FB)
Twithawk: enables search conditions, can be set to auto-respond to tweets - charges 5cents per tweet to prevent spamming. Has built in conditions such as no searching for the word 'the'.
Tweetmeme - Tweet search "the hottest Twitter search on the internet" - so they say.
Twitterati - Places tweets onto your blog.

I will go back and watch/read last night's session later today, and comment if anything more pops up.

...And what did YOU think?


Addendum: Here is a link from Mashable on How to Make the Most Out of Your Twitter Profile