Posts tagged tweets
Twitter clocks up 50m tweets. What does that mean for marketers?
Feb 24th
Twitter, which has only been around since 2007, now racks up more than 50 million tweets a day. That means 50 million visits a day to a site that has yet to figure out how to monetize. But on the plus side, those numbers mean an opportunity for advertisers to get in front of 50 million people. How? Simple.
For the past few years, advertisers’ exposure on social networking sites has been seen as essential. But perhaps it’s not about advertising, per se. Perhaps it’s not about talking either. If there are 50 million tweets, someone is listening, and wouldn’t you want someone to be listening to nice things about you?
One marketer has suggested to me that Twitter should be about getting consumers to talk to each other – not a place for brands to preach to them.
It’s an interesting thought. So I decided to listen into the conversation and see if customers really were talking to each other.
To do this, go to www.search.twitter.com and you come across a ‘Google’ search-like box. Type in a brand or company. I typed in ‘Coca-Cola’, for example.
Then I was presented with a page full of tweeters who had tweeted about ‘Coca’Cola’. Funnily enough, almost none of the tweets were from Coca-Cola itself or stories about Coca-Cola. People are genuinely talking about it.
Another example. I typed in ‘Google’. Given the news that the EU is going to invest the search king following the catastrophic launch of Buzz. I found a few links to news stories, but again, consumers were actually talking about Google, or at least mentioning the brand, in actual conversations.
However, the problem with Twitter is that it is time consuming. I am on Twitter (here!) but I rarely go on to check on tweets because before I can get to the bottom of the list they are updating. These 50 million tweets are a lot to keep track of.
But perhaps it’s worth keeping in mind though, that the best way to use to site isn’t to preach, but instead listen and just be happy that consumers are talking about you. That, is free.
Moreover, Twitter attracts a number of influential users, including Google’s Eric Schmidt and Microsoft’s Bill Gates. Today we hear that the Dalai Lama even has an account on the microblogging site.
Just imagine if you could get those guys to talk about you.
The right tools to help you monetise your tweets
Jan 5th
It’s finally 2010 – the year that will be Twitter’s “revenue year” as promised by co-founder Biz Stone.
And it’s encouraging to note that according to a new OneNewsPage.com poll published on UTalkMarketing half of respondents are also making money from their Twitter activities.
We heavily covered ‘All things Twitter’ last year including how marketers and brands can monetize their tweets and how to incorporate tweets into their everyday marketing activities as a way of keeping in touch with consumers.
Twitter has more than 40 million monthly users, with London being the international hub of activity. Last year, Microsoft began to integrate Twitter messages into Bing, its new search engine, and Google announced a deal to do the same meaning that this year, tweets will be more visible and possibly more lucrative than ever before.
So here’s a list of tools to help you get the most from your 140-character status this year:
1. TwitterCounter
TwitterCounter analyses your account or that of any person using Twitter and provides information on the number of followers over time plotted on a graph.
It uses this information to extrapolate your likely follower growth in the future. You can also find statistics such as your current ranking on Twitter according to follower numbers, and you can then compare this to the most popular users on the service.
2. Twitalyzer
Find out how much influence you have on Twitter. Twitalyzer analyses your activity in five areas: influence, signal, generosity, velocity and clout.
Signal indicates the proportion of tweets that contain information, generosity measures how willing the user is to re-tweet, velocity watches how regularly tweets are made and clout refers to how often the user is referenced by others. Influence is a combination of all of these scores.
3. TwitVid
Share video clips via Twitter. You can upload videos and add a tweet to go with it. TwitVid links to Facebook, MySpace and YouTube.
4. The Twitter Tag Project
Follow Friday is a weekly event on Twitter where users recommend new people to follow. You do this by sending a tweet including the username or names of the people who you want to recommend marked with the hash tag ‘#followfriday’.
The Twitter Tag Project provides a tool to help you work out who to recommend. Enter your username, and it’ll suggest a bunch of people based on your last 200 tweets, ready formatted into #followfriday tweets.
5. TweetGrid
TweetGrid offers a similar service to Monitter, but integrates elements of a full Twitter client. You can log in and use it to send tweets and make re-tweets as well as monitoring searches in real time.
You can also opt for different page layouts, including three columns, or grids of three-by-three searches, giving you nine searches on one page.
6. Twitterholic
Find out how addicted you are to Twitter by entering your username at this site. You’ll get an overall ranking and a ranking by your location. You can also see what tags have been applied to your account. Twitterholic also shows the top 100 Twitter users for context
7. Friend or Follow
Worried about who’s following you back, or who’s dropped you shortly after following you? Friend or Follow helps you find these answers. Go to the site and enter your username.
Friend or Follow then analyses your account and presents you with three lists: people you’re following but aren’t following you back; people who follow you who you aren’t following back and people you’re following who are also following you.
8. TwitterFeed
Automatically notify your Twitter followers whenever you post to your blog. It does this, simply enough, by linking your blog’s RSS feed to your Twitter account.
You can sign in using an open ID and then link your Twitter account. TwitterFeed also enables you to check for updates at hourly or daily intervals and include your blog post title in the automatic tweet.
9. Dabr
Dabr is a lightweight web-based front-end for Twitter that’s optimised for mobile use. It offers many of the functions that other Twitter clients provide, and increasing numbers of desktop PC users have switched to Dabr because of its speed and ease of use.
Icons next to each tweet enable you to reply, re-tweet, mark as a favourite or direct-message the user. Pictures appear as thumbnails in the timeline
10. Mr Tweet
Mr Tweet helps you to find new followers based on people you already follow by looking at their followers and people that they recommend. If you recommend people to Mr Tweet, your followers will see your recommendations and Mr Tweet will use them to help improve his recommendations, which you’ll see when you visit.
11. Twittervision
Watch a selection of tweets as they are posted in realtime set against their locations on a world map. Twittervision is fascinating to watch, although of course you only see a small fraction of the tweets currently being made around the planet. It does gives you a feel for where the global Twitter hotspots are, though
12. Monitter
Monitter supplies real-time search updates from Twitter presented in multiple columns. Search by username, hash tag or keyword. You can enter a different search in each column, and they constantly update.
There’s no need to log in or even have a Twitter account. This makes Monitter a useful place to go if you’ve been working with a client application and have used up the limited number of API calls per hour Twitter permits you to make.
Before you pay to use Twitter, ask yourself if it’s worth it
Nov 27th
A new report say that the majority of companies are planning to increase their spend on social media activities next year, but will it be worth it?
The Social Media and Online PR Report from Consultancy reveals that fewer than a quarter of companies are able to see a ‘tangible’ return on their investments, while just under two thirds had gained ‘more benefit’ from their spend ‘but nothing concrete’.
However, companies that have concentrated spend on social media have seen a return on investment with more than half of all firms that had made a significant effort saying that they had seen return.
Some 90 per cent of respondents said that social media is taking up more time than it did a year ago, while 86 per cent are planning to increase their budgets next year.
But you can’t ignore the recent comScore figures about users declining. Recent figures have shown that the number of users on Twitter has actually declined in the past three months, with growth down by 8.1 per cent.
Are users simply over the hype of Twitter?
Twitter launched in March 2006, two years after the social network that started them all, Facebook, which launched in March 2004. It’s taken almost three years, but the site now has more than 92 million users worldwide.
To put that in perspective, radio took 38 years to reach just half the amount of current Twitter users – 50 million. TV took 13 years and the internet, four.
Social networking isn’t just a fad, it is fundamentally changing the way we communicate, as we discovered at our Social Media roundtable earlier this year.
A number of major advertisers and brands have used Twitter as a way of communicating directly with their customers, but not only are new users down, Nielsen data reveals that traffic to Twitter was down 27 per cent during September and October. That means less eyeballs seeing your tweets! And yet, co-founder Biz Stone announced this week that the site will be launching paid accounts next year.
The site is also considering signing further deals with companies to licence its content and live streams, just as it did recently with Yahoo, Google and Microsoft’s Bing, that will see your tweets in search results. But it also means that your tweets will have to spot on, full of key words and be engaging. Is this too hard to achieve for brands in just 140 characters?
As it is, only 10 per cent of Twitter users accounted for 90 per cent of all tweets as of May 2009. A study from Harvard Business School confirms that the typical Twitter user tweets “very rarely”, while the average number of tweets per user over a lifetime is just one. People are losing interest and brands and advertisers are failing to ‘tweet’ about anything compelling.
A report last week said that users on were tech-savvy and usually work in the media and marketing industry.
And surprise surprise, the brands they are talking about the most include Google, Apple and Amazon followed by a mix of tech companies and other strong global brands like Starbucks, Disney and HP.
But one of the biggest complaints made by Twitter users about brands on the site was that tweets need to be “more human”.
Using Twitter to promote brands just got harder. And while tweet may direct users to your website or attract them to deals or even just engage with your consumer, one must wonder if there is any real future in this micro-blogging site. Has the hype ended? Or has it just begun?
Twitter seems hell-bent on making next year it’s revenue year. But despite all the media attention, many are wondering what the future holds for Twitter and marketers will soon wonder if Twitter is worth the investment, especially when it competes alongside so many other social media sites that are yet to lose users or suffer declines.
How to make money from Twitter using Amazon
Nov 5th
Amazon has this week sent an email to members of Amazon Associates letting them know about its new Twitter integration feature, which can earn users money!
Basically, when you’re logged into your Associate account, you’ll see a new ‘Share on Twitter’ button on your Site Stripe (a management toolbar along the top of the page). Clicking this button will prepare a tweet complete with a shortened URL to send out of all of your Twitter followers.
It’s interesting because as Amazon clearly notes at the end of its email, you will earn referral money for anyone that clicks on these links and buys a product.
As Twitter users do love to click on links, this feature could actually mean some real money for popular Twitter users with a massive following.
And it’s yet another way that companies — and now even Twitter’s users — are making money from the micro-blogging site, which Twitter won’t see a dime of (presumably, anyway).
A lot of blogs disclose when they’re supplying you with a referral link that they will make money from (though certainly not all of them). But on Twitter, that’s going to be hard for people to do even if they wanted to because of the 140 character limit.
Other social sites, like MySpace, for example, do not allow you to post affiliate links. Twitter, it would seem, has no problem with this. In fact, at least one employee tweeted that he was excited for the launch.
Recent Comments