MadTech: Twitter
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February 2010 presentation for MadTech
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MadTech: Twitter
- 1. Twitter Pimp My Twitter ?! MadTech
- 2. What is Twitter? A Very Good Question
- 3. A Very Bad Response
- 4. A Slightly Better Response
- 5. If a Picture is Worth a Thousand Words…
- 6. Text. Text is the Currency of Online Credibility —Georgina Laidlaw, WebWorkerDaily
- 7. Twitter is about Communication
- 9. Share and Discover What’s Happening, Right Now!
- 10. Getting Started Content is King
- 11. a) Know What You’re Talking About; b) Know Who You’re Talking To; and c) Know How To Say It. You Can Dream, But Don’t Forget to Work For It
- 12. Know What You’re Talking About
- 13. Know What You’re Talking About
- 14. Know Who You’re Talking To
- 15. Know How to Say It
- 16. Content is King
- 17. Getting Started Your Audience
- 18. Speaking to Yourself Is Not Fun!
- 19. Growing an Audience Requires Patience
- 20. Complete Your Profile Complete Your Profile Complete Your Profile
- 23. What I Give
- 24. What I Get Back
- 25. 5 Tools & Resources Things to Help You Make Your Way
- 26. A Good Twitter Client
- 28. (Twellowhood)
- 29. A Word About Testing Don’t Complicate, Just…Do It (1) Set Some Goals (2) Track Link Stats (3) Test/Track @replies (4) Find Useful Tools (5) Keep It Fun
- 30. Credits Twitter by Alnisa Allgood, Coordinator, MadTech Insights from: Dan Zarrella, HubSpot
Editor's Notes
- This presentation will range from basic to intermediate level Twitter use. The focus is primarily on ways to use Twitter and how to get followers.\n\nI’ll cover…\n\n(I) What is Twitter\n(II) Getting Started Using Twitter\n(III) Twitter Tools\n(IV) Twitter Gotchas\n(V) Examples of Use\n\nThere will be a lot of things that I skim over, feel free to ask a question whenever; and we are also considering doing a follow-up session later this year.\n\n
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- Twitter for years, did itself a disservice by describing it’s service, as above. That’s cool, but ultimate leads towards the next question… “what does that mean??”\n
- Why is this better? Because it tells you more about what you will be doing, sharing and or discovering.\n
- Text. Text is the CURRENCY of online credibility.\n\n
- So let’s return to “what does that mean?”\n
- Twitter is about Communication. And really there should be two words highlighted here.\n\nNot just communication, but ‘about’. Twitter isn’t just one thing for everybody. It’s not your toaster, which you might use to dry your socks, but you wouldn’t use to wash them. It’s more like a communications swiss army knife.\n\nYou can whisper, you can shout, you can pull out a bullhorn, or casually invite people into engaging conversations. You can be the expert or the newbie. The follow or the leader.\n\nAnd when you get really good, you’ll understand, you are ALWAYS BOTH.\n
- Twitter is about Text Amplified. It’s a liberating and frustrating 140 characters to communicate an idea, insight, or resource.\n\nYour well-crafted mission statement, is probably much longer than 140 characters\n\nYour well-crafted vision statement, is probably more than 140 characters\n\nYour well-paid for tagline, might be less than 140 characters\n\n140 characters, it’s a lot, but soo very little simultaneously.\n
- The new Twitter tagline is much better response to what Twitter is. \nTwitter is a place to share and discover. It provides you the opportunity\nto create new audiences for your organization, campaign, or efforts;\nwhile cultivating new friendships, teachers (people to learn from) and\ncolleagues.\n
- The Getting Started Section is divided into two ares: 1) Your Content and 2) Your Audience. So let’s start with Content.\n
- Don’t take these as having to have a well-crafted tweet, every time you tweet. You do want casual messages as part of your tweets. These are conversational tweets and are a good base for starting to build your audience.\n\nBut you do want to craft the important tweets—your event, the article you want read, the issue you want to promote. \n
- Don’t let this scare you off. Another way to state this, is \n‘talk about what you know’. Talk about the things you love,\nthings that you are passionate about, the things that excite you,\nfrustrate you, make you mad, sad, or bring great joy.\n\nTalking about what you know and love will keep you talking;\nespecially during those periods of time when it may seem that\nno one is really listening.\n
- Now sometimes this can be hard if you’re talking for an organization.\nSometimes they want to control the conversation. That needs to be \nnegotiated with your organization, if you’re talking on their behalf.\n\nBecause being real is important, and Twitter followers don’t want\nregurgitated press releases; at least not as daily feed.\n
- We’ll discuss this more later, but it’s important in the beginning of\nusing almost any social media; to know who you want to communicate\nwith and what’d you like to get out of the experience.\n\nWho listens to you is totally out of your control, and you may want to \nadapt your message over time to account for your followers. Maybe.\nBut who you target is well under your control, and also a measurable\nitem to a degree.\n\nSo if you want other nonprofits to follow you, you might follow more nonprofits and target your conversation towards those audiences. If you want to be more specific, than really, try to be more specific as early as possible—\ndo you want activists, health workers, students, design students, etc.\n
- This can be hard, and no one truly master’s it. But it get’s easier over time; and there are tools that can help you check and see what people think about what your saying.\n\nJust like lyrics, tweets can be easily misconstrued, generally when it matters most. This is why IMPORTANT tweets should be well crafted.\n\n
- So to quickly review, where we are:\n1) Twitter is a conversation tool, that can be used in any manner you like\n2) Conversation is communication and in communication content is king\n3) Talk about what you know, to a targeted audience, and \ntest to see who’s listening and what they are listening to…\n\n
- There’s probably a million and one little details that we skimmed over in the Content section of getting started, some of them maybe addressed in this section: Your audience, or the later section on Tools, but plenty more will remain un addressed, so feel free to ask questions\nat any point.\n
- We all know the old adage about a tree falling in the forest and does\nit make a sound…?!\n\nLet’s face it talking to yourself, while possibly enlightening, and incredibly\nilluminating to the people around you; isn’t always great fun.\n\nTwitter without followers isn’t great fun. So how do we get followers.\n
- Growing an audience requires some patience, but that doesn’t \nmean it’s all just wait and see. There are things you can do, and \nthings you should do. \n
- Really, complete your profile. For discriminating followers, this is one of the first things they will look at, after your tweets; and if you’ve just started you don’t have nay great tweets of interest. So tell people, who you are, where you’re located, and what interest you. You can link to a website, a Facebook profile, a LinkedIn profile, whatever. But the point is to inspire trust that you’re not a spammer or a marketer or someone who only asks for donations all the time.\n\nPut your reputation on the line, and then build it.\n
- Everyone is looking for followers, so find some interesting people and follow them. I like to do what I consider the mix. I’m interested in a lot of things, but too much of the same topic bores me pretty quickly, no matter how much in love I am with it. So I find people who span my spectrum of interest: some nonprofit folks, some tech geeks, some font geeks, design folks, pop culture people, actors, actresses, friends, etc.\n\nI’m actually a bit more discerning on my Nonprofit Tech account. I follow the type of information I want to have access to. Why, I don’t want the feed to be dry and boring; but I use it quite differently than I do my personal account. My work account is centered around learning— my learning, and my sharing what I know and more importantly, what’ve learned from others.\n\n\n
- You may feel dumb or ill at ease, but it gets easier over time; if you start. So you can spend the next two months not saying a word, and making Twitter this huge gianormous step that your trying to do, or ‘just do it’. \n\nPost something silly, sassy, helpful, or just a resource. Respond to something someone has said, answer that Twitter question, that hardly anyone pays attention to, “what are you doing?”\n\nMy posts range from response to others, to resources for others, to work related stuff: I’m procrastinating; Gill Sans is a wonderful font; @AmyJane cracks me up, etc.\n\n
- A quick sample of my posts. A mix of random musings, insights to my work process or at least what I’m working on, responses to others, and resources. I’m not that interesting, so I give and give alot. Lot’s of links to tools, interesting articles, videos, other consultants, other nonprofits, etc.\n\nSo I share, a lot. I try to keep links both frequent and frugal. This means, I link a lot (a large percentage of my tweets, maybe 50%), but I try not to BLAST links. I may send 1-2 links in an hour or sometimes a day. \n\nLink fatigue is a syndrome where the more links you send the less clicks each link gets. We have a nice click average (between 70-120) per link; and have worked to increase that. We started at around 20-30 clicks per link, so this is growing.\n\nFor important links, I also post more than once. Post your important links at least twice. You can schedule them, do the morning/afternoon, wait a few hours, etc. But basically, expose your tweet to more people. DONT do this for every link. Just the VERY important ones.\n\n\n\n
- I cultivated my feed for the first few months, continuously. Now I adjust it here or there occasionally, but as you can see, I’m following over 1,000 people and I’m followed by more than 4,000 people.\n\nMy feed, what other’s give me, and why I selected who I follow, is a mix bad of things that interest me. I find out what is stumping others in the nonprofit technology field, learn about new consultants. I get conference informations, and event announcements, news links, and a lot more.\n\nI can spend an hour in the morning, just following links, from Twitter and be very well informed about a number of interest.\n\n
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- Sure you can just use the Twitter website, or one of the various Twitter websites like Brizzly, and others. But I find a good desktop client, and a good mobile phone client essentials. You can text to Twitter so you don’t need an official phone client, but the phone clients let’s you count characters, or see replies, to look, listen, and participate, while SMS just allows you to send.\n\nChoose a client that suites your style. I’m into minimalism, so You won’t see me on TweetDeck or HootSuite; but for people who like their power laid bare, they are great applications. If you’re looking for a client, try this article at TechCrunch: http://techcrunch.com/2009/02/19/the-top-21-twitter-clients-according-to-twitstat/ to find out what others are using.\n
- Twellow is an easy way to find others who use Twitter. It’s pretty much a directory. But you can search by interest, by categories, by location, etc.\n
- Also it offers the insanely great, Twellowhood. Want to follow locals, your covered.\n
- So to quickly summarize:\n(1) Follow interesting people. PEOPLE are key, if you are only following news feeds from other news based sites, you aren’t having follower growing conversation.\n\n(2) Post interesting things. Share links, events, pictures, videos. Share things that AREN’T yours. High frequency self-promotion reduces followers.\n\n(3) Track link clicks and retweets, so you can learn what your audience is responding to.\n
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