149 South Champlain St, Burlington, VT

I recently came across another powerful use that Twitter provides people with last week. It not only provided an awesome place to network, but it supported a new local business. Last month, I began to see a trend start to rise with something along the lines of this: #btvfall2009tweetup. Curiosity got the best of me, and I started researching what this was all about. Turns out, a new local bakery, August First was hosting a “tweetup”. A tweetup is a gathering of people who use the social-networking tool, Twitter. The event was organized through Twitter by using a third party app, twtvite. This application allows you to organize an event by giving details such as directions to the event and a yes/no/maybe RSVP option. This had been the second invite I had seen in about a month and I was ready to join in on the fun.

The event was organized by John Connors (@JohnCVermont) who specializes in Information Technology at Saint Michael’s College. Upon arrival, I was handed a badge with my real name and twitter user name on it so people would know if we had crossed paths on Twitter previously. Surprisingly, most of the faces in the cozy bakery were familiar. Everyone seemed very content with their coffee in-hand and talking technology. August First was a great location to have this event with their welcoming environment and their variety of tasty treats.

I will now be making an effort to attend every tweetup I can, not only for the geek-talk, but for great time all around.

If you’re on Twitter and want to see what’s going on with the team, you can find us on our Twitter List here. Also, you can follow August First here.

Cheers,

Matt Sisson

Tweetdeck

According to Mashable, The Social Media Guide, Twitter saw a 752% growth in 2008. It’s no wonder everyone seems to be jumping on the bandwagon.

There are many benefits that come with proper Twitter usage:

• Reinforce your brand and increase awareness by linking your Twitter account with all of your other web outlets.

• Check your Google Analytics; Twitter is a direct source of traffic.

• Network with like minded professionals, potential customers, and other local businesses.

• Tweets are now indexed in Google; we smell potential for organic Google traffic!

What a lot of people don’t realize are the practical uses of this valuable tool. Many businesses recognize the potential with this platform and yet after creating an account, have no clue what to do. It’s important to know about Twitter etiquette, hashtags, practical applications, and more.

Before getting started, there are a few things to remember.

Does your Twitter engage your customers?

The first instinct of many business owners using Twitter is to just spam deals and promotions thinking it will draw in more customers. Steve Schwartz, the creator of the How To Use Twitter for Business Video Series, makes a good analogy. In Part One of Steve’s Three Part video series, he says to think of Twitter like a cocktail party. You wouldn’t stand there yelling out promotions for your business, but you would engage people by talking to them. That leads to the three steps of successfully using Twitter for business which are Listen, Follow, and then Engage.

The first thing Steve’s videos recommend is to install a third party platform to manage your Twitter account. We recommend TweetDeck or HootSuite; the video refers to TweetDeck however, which makes it more convenient to reference. Tweetdeck makes the Twitter interface much more user friendly, it’s free, it automatically shortens your URLs (good to stay within the 140 character limit), and it links your pictures to a hosting service. Everything mentioned here is further elaborated upon in Steve’s awesome videos.

Tweetdeck Interface

A few more things to remember that will help Twitter success include:

• Make your Twitter profile design and name similar to your main website’s design; this is important for branding.

• Advertise your Twitter on your web site in a visible location, as well as for your blog and other social media sites.

• Consider making your updates cross platform, so all of your profiles are updated at once.  There are trade offs to this approach, however, so make sure that it’s the correct approach for your business if you pursue it.

Once you jump start your Twitter account, the next step is to measure it’s impact. There are many analytic software programs out there similar to Google Analytics. I’d recommend checking out Quantcast or Twitter Analyzer.

Once you get some followers and become more comfortable with the tweeting lifestyle, you should consider other third party applications. Here are a few you should check out.  Please comment with any others you find!

• Klout – You can measure your Twitter influence with your Klout score, see what people are talking the most about, and keep an eye on trends.

• TweetSpinner – This site offers effective tools such as profile rotation, anti-spam software, Customer Relationship Management, scheduling with automatic updates, and much more.

These basics will help you capitalize on Twitter and in time you’ll see the benefits that social media can deliver.

The upcoming Media Convergence Conference in New York City, put on by The Economist, launched a video called Shift Happens, that helps put these changes in context.  They posted a fascinating video about the event here:

My favorite statistic: The average American teen sends 2272 text messages a month.

With numbers like that, and the often quoted 2008 NAR study that shows 87% of home buyers use the internet when making a purchase, I wonder how much longer people will continue to disproportionately spend money offline?

This feature enables rapid sharing of information about listings, bookmarking blog posts about your local service area or a quick email to friends and family. It’s easy to use and provides a choice of platforms depending on what you want to achieve. Bookmark your favorite listings with Google bookmarks for example or Twitter a listing to an engaged group of followers and receive instant feedback. Use the Facebook function to participate in real estate groups or people looking for particular properties in certain areas.

As people become more accustomed to these links and use them more and more it adds further usability and interactivity for the viewer. For the realtor adds superb SEO opportunities especially in garnering relevant, inbound links from trusted sources.

Examples of our sites with this feature are:

Bryan Bomba

BCK Real Estate

Greybeard

Can you have too many followers?

10, 50, 100, 500? There is surely a finite amount of conversations any one person can follow and how well relationships can develop by “drive-by” remarks. It is also true of people following you. How do you provide good value to say a thousand people that follow you?

From a business point of view it is sensible to maintain a smaller volume of followers that are truly interested in your business to keep people engaged and vice versa. The best way to achieve this is to grow organically, which is often a good maxim in business. With the use of APIs (application programming interface) that artificially generate lists of friends you risk becoming a spammer. Much like all interaction with the web it is perhaps wiser to focus on good contributions in your local or national community with content that people want to hear about rather than empty tweets that will often get lost among all the other noise.

Relationship building has become the currency of social media and like any relationship needs to be cultivated, therefore putting a marketing hat on and talking “at” people is not going to cut it in this medium and there won’t be much value gained.

What do you think? Leave your comments.

This article from the New York Times highlights how savvy real estate agents are using social networking to target their buyers.

Some important points raised in the article include how the new trends on the web are reaching younger audiences for free. This more tactile marketing by many web-savvy professionals are now sending messages on Twitter, getting referrals on LinkedIn, posting blogs, uploading virtual tours onto the Internet and sending text messages and alerts to customers’ phones when homes come on the market.

Bettie Meinel, vice president for career development at Century 21 Laffey Associates, based in Greenvale, said that because consumers are already online seeing the photos and virtual tours, “that is their first showing.” Actually touring the house shows more serious intent, she explained. “If they like it enough, they make an appointment to come and see that property; that is the second showing,” she said.

Also check out other blog posts on these topics in the social media and video sections.

The graying of Facebook

Two articles that comment on the increasing median age of Facebook users, in particular the 35+ crowds. A recent one, ‘Facebook Users Growing Up Fast’ from mediapost.com, talks about how now over half their users are over 25 in part due to the aging of existing users and the influx of older users. It also discusses ways in which marketers are looking to serve this new group of users.

The second one ‘My Midlife Facebook Crisis‘, which came out a year ago,  is a hilarious day-in-the-life style article from the Wall Street Journal. It anecdotally makes the point that we’re all inescapably social net-workers now.

Twitter flying high

Twitter has been getting a lot more mainstream media attention lately, so we thought we’d post this article ‘Putting Twitter’s World to Use’ from the New York Times. Amongst other things it talks about the increasing interaction between businesses and their customers driving business decisions and as a research tool diving into the world’s collective mind.

It’s only upwards for the folks at Twitter.

Image by Martin_Heigan via Flickr

Increasingly, companies are using Twitter to enhance their customer service. Handling customer service in a public environment like Twitter is probably just the next round of transparency. Want to know how good a company’s customer service is? See if they’re on Twitter and what they’re doing there.

Here are some articles related to using Twitter for customer service.

• ABC News has an article about using Twitter for customer service in the travel industry. It includes examples from JetBlue, Southwest and several hotels.
• Businessweek has a profile of Frank Eliason, the guy who operates @comcastcares, one of the first and most celebrated customer service + Twitter practitioners.
• Here’s an article describing tactics of using a multiple-person twitter account (useful if you have a team handling customer service).
• The blog of @comcastcares talks about scaling customer service in social media from the point of view of someone who is actually doing this.
• Here’s an article from the New York Times on banks using Twitter.
• A list of brands on twitter, see how they’re doing customer service online with Twitter.
• Web analytics provider, Omniture is using Twitter to provide customer service.

This article is part of the Twitter for Business series. If you like this article, you might find other articles in the series useful. Please let me know about good articles about Twitter that I’m missing.

Image by wallyg via Flickr

I’m back from vacation and I’ve built a social media dashboard for all of you going to Real Estate Connect in New York City this week. You can find it here:

Real Estate Connect Social Media Dashboard

It’s set up to gather images, video, twitter posts, blog posts and all sorts of stuff that are tagged with ICNY09 or #ICNY09. So if you’re at the event, tag some of your thoughts, or where the good parties are.

Also if you’re at the event, come ask me questions at the Blogger Connect event (I’ll be presenting the listening to your audience section) or at the Down and Dirty Analytics panel on Thursday. Or even just grab me in the hall and see if I can help you out with your web marketing strategy, site analytics or whatever.

Image by GustavoG via Flickr

Instead, you should read this post by Chris Brogan. He outlines a tactic that will be very effective. Somewhere along the way, while using this tactic, you will figure out what your strategy should be.

Required skills (which are within your grasp to learn, no holding back please):

• Ability to use online spreadsheet or other data tool (think Google Sheets)
• Ability to use online communication tools such as email and Twitter
• Willingness to continually explore online social networks to find allies