Posts Tagged ‘twitter tips’

Don’t Use All 140 Characters in Your Tweets

Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010

Are you currently using Twitter for business? If so, congratulations! You’re doing the right thing. Twitter is a great tool for connecting with customers, prospects, and other individuals who share similar interests. It’s also a great way to promote your online content, events, products, and services.

For those of you who might be just getting started with Twitter, you may or may not know that Twitter only allows you to input 140 characters when creating a new tweet. This means your tweets have to be concise. You need to communicate your message in as few words as possible.

Follow @RyanTaft Philadelphia on TwitterRetweeting is a process whereby another Twitter user takes what you have tweeted and tweets it out to his/her Twitter followers. You can tell when something has been retweeted when a tweet is prefaced by the capital letters RT. The “RT” is usually followed by the original author’s username. The image to the right shows that @KratzPR retweeted my original tweet.

Retweets can make a huge impact in your success on Twitter. If someone takes time to ReTweet what you have to say, they are endorsing you. They are also exposing you and your tweet to all of their Twitter followers. This means that you may acquire a few new Twitter followers. Now imagine if one or a few of these new followers likes your tweet and decides to ReTweet it as well…Now we are really cooking. Welcome to the power of viral marketing.

The biggest key to getting others to ReTweet your content is to tweet information that your followers will find relevant and valuable. The next biggest key to getting others to Retweet content is to make sure you don’t use all 140 characters in your tweet. For each tweet, try to leave at least 10 characters out of your tweet. This way, when I go to ReTweet you, and Twitter automatically populates the “RT” characters and your username, I won’t have to alter your tweet in any way. If you use all 140 characters and I try to ReTweet you, I’m going to max out on my 140 character limit. The easier you make it for others to ReTweet you, the more likely they are to do so.

Twitter is a great tool for small businesses. By learning little tricks like this, success with Twitter for business will be much more likely.

Is Gmail down? I’ll Twitter it

Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009

So I had the title of this post saved as a draft in WordPress. When I have an idea for a post, but no time to blog, I “Add New” and save a title for a post. That title acts as a reminder for me to blog about the topic when I have some time. Well what better day to write this post, since Gmail was down for a while yesterday afternoon.

Gmail down September 1 2009

As more users sign up for online tools like Gmail, outages are becoming more common. Whether it’s from hackers trying to take down the system, bugs in the system, or simply system overload, users are having to deal with outages more frequently than they would like. With that said, when one site goes down, many users rush to another in order to stay connected.

Is Twitter the new CNN for breaking news? I know I go to Twitter whenever I’m having an issue with a social tool OR when there is any sort of breaking news. For example, I have Comcast cable and it went out the other day, I hopped on Twitter and searched for “Comcast Philadelphia”. I was presented with hundreds of tweets from local Comcast subscribers who were having the same problem. I was able to find out just what was going by using Twitter.

The trick for Twitter is to recognize that their subscribers are using the tool in this way and make sure their bandwidth can handle the increased traffic. We don’t want Twitter going down due to increased traffic.

Businesses large & small will hopefully realize that Twitter is being used in this way because there is an opportunity for them to trouble-shoot issues by using Twitter. Customer service is a huge expense for organizations, but it’s critical in keeping customers happy. If companies begin shifting those expenses from traditional customer service techniques to new methods such as using Twitter, they can drastically cut costs, and service their customers better. When Comcast goes down, they can simply tweet that information to their followers. Those tweets should explain the issue, provide assurance that Comcast is working on it, and provide an ETA for getting the system back up. This would keep customers in the know and alleviate heavy call traffic to the traditional customer service tools.

When one of your social tools goes down, where do you go to find out what’s going on?

vex4aif3g8