RAA Group

Top 10 Tips For New Twitter Users

Written By Marcelo Lewin

Your friends are on Twitter. Your son talks about Twitter. The news mentions Twitter every other minute. Even your mom is on Twitter. But did you know who’s on Twitter that can affect your business? Your competition.

It doesn’t matter what you do, what industry you are in or how big (or small) your company is, you should be on Twitter engaging with new leads, checking out what your competition is doing and finding out what people are saying about you and your company.

Twitter is the world’s largest “cocktail” party and like all cocktail parties, there are some rules you need to follow so that you are accepted, become popular, attract the right “followers” and ultimately convert them into leads.

Below are my top 10 tips for new Twitter users (Top 10 music kick in now please):

Tip #10 – Provide useful and value added information.
No one really cares if you are drinking coffee now, if your kids just left for school or if you have a headache. Twitter is about providing tips, customer service and useful information that people can use on a daily basis. For example, if you are a photographer, provide daily tips on shooting better photographs. If you are a mechanic, provide daily tips on how to keep your car maintained properly. Providing these tidbits (in under 140 characters of course) that people can walk away with and use daily will keep you and your services in their mind space, and soon, you’ll be able to convert those leads into customers when they need your services.

Tip #9 – Listen to people first.
Like every cocktail party, if you walk up to someone and immediately tell them everything about yourself and what you sell, they will be turned off. In the Twitterverse, this is exactly the same. Don’t jump in and start “selling”. Listen to what people in your industry are doing and what they are looking for. Then jump in and provide useful information, but only if it adds value (see the tip #10).

Tip #8 – Participate in conversations.
After you’ve listened to people and understand what they like (and not like), jump in and start new conversations and participate in current conversations by adding your expertise. Answer as many questions as possible. Be honest and be passionate about what you offer. The effort you put in now to nurture these relationships will come back to you as business.

Tip #7 – Earn trust
I’ve always been taught that you earn trust, you don’t automatically get it. In Twitter, you have to multiply that by 100. You build trust by providing useful information on a daily basis, by answer questions honestly and without bias, by being transparent, by apologizing in public when you (or your company) did something wrong and by giving kudos to people that do great things (e.g. company partners, great employees, fantastic customers and yes…and even your competition). Once you have the trust of the Twitter community, they will seek out your services.

Tip #6 – Quality over quantity.
It’s not about how many “followers” you have; it’s about having relevant followers following you. What do I mean by “relevant”? That depends on your industry and whom you are targeting. If you are a catering company, maybe you want to attract people that just got engaged or throw a lot of parties. Perhaps you want to attract companies (or people) that you want to partner with (such as wedding photographers and videographers). The key is to have relevant followers. It’s better to have 2000 qualified, focused, relevant followers, then 100,000 generic people you know nothing about and may not be interested in what you offer.

Tip #5 – Seek out people that are “influential”.
As tip #6 stated, finding relevant people is very important, but finding “influential” people that are relevant to your industry is even more important. It’s much better to have 1 or 2 followers that are influential (known in your industry, have many relevant followers themselves) then to have 100 people that ultimately, can’t influence anyone.

Tip #4 – Give it away for free.
Provide as much useful information as you can for free and I promise you it will come back to you in the form of business. Social media is all about sharing and interacting with people. The more you share, the more transparent you are, the more people will want to “follow you”. Soon, you will be the “influential follower” that everyone wants to friend.

Tip #3 – Market indirectly.
Once you’ve earned the trust of the Twitter community, have become an influential person in your industry and have provided enough useful and value added information, you will be able to “indirectly” market to people your services and products in between your informational Tweets.

Tip #2 – Do not SPAM.
There are plenty of spammers on Twitter already. You can easily recognize them. They usually follow hundreds (if not thousands) of people, but only 10 people follow them (and those are usually fake accounts they created). They always link to their site, never offering any useful information. They don’t interact with other users in conversations. It’s always one way. Do not become one of those people. If you follow tips #10 through #3 above, you won’t be a spammer. Don’t start with tip #3 directly.

Tip #1 – Don’t expect to tie a Twitter entry to a Balance Sheet entry.
If you are the type of person that expects an immediate ROI after Tweeting for a week, then Twitter (and in fact, all of social media) is not for you. You will not be able to tie a specific Twitter entry to your balance sheet. It just doesn’t work like that. Twitter is a pre-sales tool that allows you to create relationships and nurture them to the point where you can convert some of those relationships into customers.

I hope this article has encouraged you to take on the leap on Twitter. Twitter is not only fun (and free) but it’s a great tool that allows you to build relationships with potential new customers, allows you to nurture the relationships of current customers and allows you to see what your competition is up to.

Join the Twittervolution today! If you are interested in learning more about Twitter, you can take one of our free Twitter webinars or you can, of course, follow me at Twitter.com/NewMediaDude for daily tips about new media.

Considering a new website for your real estate company? Or any other industry for that matter. Wordpress is an open source application you should definitely check out. Wordpress was originally designed to be a simple blogging tool but it keeps getting better and better. Hundreds of companies are now using Wordpress as a content management system (CMS) to power their entire Website. Some of the awesome benefits of using Wordpress for your blog or as a CMS are its cost (it’s free), ease of use, SEO friendliness, online community support and all the free plugins that allow you to easily customize and add enhancements to your site.

Whether you are a developer of a private community or specialize in general brokerage, there are plenty of great plugins that can really help your Wordpress Website.

Here is a list of 20 plugins we install on many of the sites we design for clients. Try them out and let me know if you have any questions about any of them.

Search Engine Optimization and Tracking Plugins:

1.  Google Analytics for Wordpress
This plugin allows you to easily add Google Analytics to your entire Wordpress site for tracking purposes.

2.  Easy Verification
Verify your site with webmaster tools and Yahoo! SiteExplorer.

3.  All-in-One SEO Pack
Great Search Engine Optimization plugin.

4.  Google Sitemap
This is another plugin that helps with search engine optimization. This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO!

Website Utility Plugins:

5.  Database Backup
Hopefully you won’t ever need to use this, but stuff happens. Always nice to have a backup when you need it.

6.  Maintenance Mode
Adds a splash page to your blog that lets visitors know your blog is down for maintenance. Logged in administrators get full access to the blog including the front-end.

Page Management Plugins:

7.  pageMash
Manage your multitude of pages with pageMash’s slick drag-and-drop style, ajax interface. Allows quick sorting, hiding and organizing of parenting.

8.  Exclude Pages
Sometimes you need a page but you don’t want it to show up in your main navigation menu. For example a landing page for an eblast, or a “hidden” floor plan page.  This plugin gives you a check box option to exclude the page from your menu.

9.  Page Links To
Allows you to point WordPress pages or posts to a URL of your choosing. Good for setting up navigational links to non-WP sections of your site or to off-site resources.

10.  Widget Locationizer
Wordpress allows you to specify what widgets you want on your site, but it places those widgets on every page. With Widget locationizer, you can specify which pages your widgets are displayed. This opens up all kinds of options to get creative with your sidebar content and makes your site look much more interesting and less like a blog.

11.  Section Widget
Lets you display section-specific content on the pages of your choice. This plugin is similar to Widget Locationizer, but has a few different perks of its own.

12.  Simple Sidebar Navigation
This is a really handy tool to create and manage sidebar menus. Simple Sidebar allows you to add any combination of page links in your sidebar. This makes your site really user friendly and allows you to strategically place related links in the sidebar. When used in combo with Widget Locationizer the options are endless.

Content Management Plugins:

13.  Great Real Estate
Allows easy management of your real estate listings.

14.  Tiny MCE Advanced
This plugin adds a toolbar with more styling options for the text in your pages and posts. Warning(disclaimer)…don’t use a huge Comic Sans headline to highlight your latest offer. In most cases, your theme should have built in styling options that will match the rest of your site. But there are times where a few more options are needed and this plugin does the trick.

15.  Contact Form 7 or cformsII
Every real estate site should have a contact form. Maybe several.  We recommend a “Soft Submit” (email, name & zip), “Full Submit” and in some cases, a different form for “Request a Tour.” Either of these plugins will allow you to serve up multiple forms on different pages. Form Submittals are sent to a specified email address instantly. Check out Jami Mullikin’s article on database management.

16.  NextGen Photo Gallery
There are dozens of great photo gallery plugins for Wordpress. NextGen is one of the most popular and a great choice. NextGen stores the photos on your site and allows you to make galleries, albums and slideshows.

17.  Dynamic Headers
This plugin allows a custom header image to be displayed on each page.

Sharing and Social Networking Plugins:

18.  Sociable
Allows visitors to automatically add links on your posts, pages and RSS feed to their social networking sites.

19.  Twitter For Wordpress
Displays your public Twitter messages for all to read.

20.  Social Homes
Adds a sidebar widget containing a subtle list of all your social homes as linked favicons so your visitors can follow you.

It might be the ultimate in retail technology: A way to make huge profits by selling things that do not need to be acquired, stocked or shipped. But these items—perhaps a diamond-lined collar for a virtual pet or a special power in a shared game—are becoming big money. Virtual goods sales are projected to hit $5 billion this year, according to The New York Times.

But virtual goods are hardly free. The paper of record said the revenue was “all for things that, aside from perhaps a few hours of work by an artist and a programmer, cost nothing to produce.” Would they have said the same thing about a bestselling—albeit basic—applet? What is software other than the work of artists and programmers? The more important thing about virtual gifts, though, is what they say about the gift buyers. As Winston Churchill’s Web designer said, “Never before have so many spent so much on so little.” Is this pent up demand for immediacy? Entertainment? Is it a sign that consumers are now ready to embrace micropayments? Regardless, $5 billion is nothing to virtually sneeze at.

Twitter, LinkedIn Cut Deal – We’re Still Waiting for the Big Announcement

Written by Marshall Kirkpatrick / November 9, 2009 9:00 PM

Twitter and LinkedIn are announcing a deal tonight that will allow LinkedIn users to publish status updates to their Twitter profiles and pull in some or all Twitter updates to their LinkedIn accounts.

Wait a minute…the two social media companies with some of the most valuable, interesting data on the web made a deal and what do we get? Spammy Twitter streams clouding up our LinkedIn feeds and an occasional uptight Tweet on Twitter that was born inside LinkedIn? We’re still waiting for the meaty announcements everyone says are coming someday soon – that Twitter and LinkedIn are open for business.

I don’t mean to be too grouchy, but this looks like just one more sweetheart Silicon Valley deal that has limited imagination and represents a lost opportunity for the kind of innovation everyone expects these kinds of companies to drive.
In the announcement video recorded by LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman and Twitter’s Biz Stone, both talked about how Twitter is great for business. What did they mean, though? They meant it’s a marketing platform, a way to get your message out further, etc. If you have something you want to say to everyone on LinkedIn, why not say it on Twitter too?

But is business just about broadcasting your marketing message? What about the listening part of doing business, thoughtful analysis, responding to actionable information and market conditions? Conversations with your customers and business partners?

Twitter is arguably better for listening than it is for broadcast and conversion of marketing messages. This kind of cross-posting deal falls short of the huge potential latent in the data both of these companies control and instead appeals to the craven broadcast-model of marketing. Challenging that broadcast-model is where many people believe social media derives its meaning.

What could this look like? It could look like an option to view the employer and job title of anyone you see on Twitter or through a 3rd party Twitter interface. It could look like Twitter opening up its fire hose for unfettered 3rd party analysis and development – then you’d see social graph and content analysis done that gave a big boost to the User Experience on LinkedIn. (“This LinkedIn user has been conversing with friends on Twitter who were talking about ‘mobile,’ ‘Wisconsin’ and ‘gaming’ over the last 2 weeks.”)

Whatever the case may be, both occupational data (LinkedIn) and social messaging data (Twitter) are rich green fields for mashups and analysis – but these two companies are holding back the tide of innovation by refusing to offer a clear path to their data by outside partners.

LinkedIn partners with next to no one. Only large, established organizations like Business Week, the New York Times and now Twitter get access to LinkedIn data. Other services all around the web will tell you stories about reaching out to LinkedIn for API access and getting the cold shoulder.

We wrote about this concern three weeks ago (“LinkedIn Hits 50 Million Users; Still a Roach Motel“) and the company told us then and today that big changes are coming to its API soon. That’s great. That’s something to look forward to, if cautiously. We’re years into the LinkedIn Platform today and there’s only a select few partners doing anything there so far.

Likewise, Twitter is fabulously open with its data in some ways (on a per-item basis) – but it’s leaving a substantial number of outside developers frustrated because they can’t get their hands on the full feed of Twitter data (the fire hose) to analyze. Startup companies that do appear to have relationships with Twitter tell us things like “We won’t describe our relationship with Twitter to you and neither will anyone else who has one.” That’s charming. It’s unclear whether anyone but Google and Bing have access to all the Twitter data.

Twitter investor and real-time web guru John Borthwick told us in another conversation today that he believes Twitter is just in its early days as a company, that there’s nothing mysterious going on. “I’m hoping there will be a click-thru EULA [End User Licensing Agreement] to the firehose [someday],” he wrote. (Emphasis added.)

That sounds good.

So everybody’s working on the wide-open web that so many of us want to see? Standards and APIs and open platforms to facilitate a new era of innovation are right around the corner?

Sounds great. For now though what we get is a little cross-network message broadcasting. Hopefully it’s just the beginning.

© 2003-2009 ReadWriteWeb

Facebook Inc. said Thursday that it won a $711 million damage award from Internet marketer Sanford Wallace for spamming its popular social networking site.

Palo Alto-based Facebook alleged that Wallace accessed its users’ accounts without permission and sent them phony posts and messages after accessing their accounts.

The company announced the damages award in a post on its blog Thursday night, saying the San Jose district court judge in the case also referred Wallace to the U.S. Attorney’s office for prosecution for criminal contempt of court.

Wallace did not oppose the damages motion nor appear at the Sept. 18 hearing, according to a court filing.

Facebook’s General Counsel Sam O’Rourke wrote in the blog posting, “While we don’t expect to receive the vast majority of the award, we hope that this will act as a continued deterrent against these criminals.”

The Wallace case marks the second large anti-spam award Facebook has won in the past year. It was awarded $873 million a year ago from Adam Guerbuez and his business, Atlantis Blue Capital, who bombarded users with sexually explicit spam messages.