How Easy Is It To Twitter?

It's so easy that even people who aren't born yet can do it! Yes, some enterprising geek expecting a baby got antsy about the baby kicking and came up with a way to set up a belt for mom that has sensors in it that communicate through some nifty homespun software to send Twitter updates in-utero.

Ok, that's either crazy or genius, I don't know which. But once this thing comes out of prototype, I know young internet professionals who may alter their family planning schedules to be able to use something like this so their kids can be among the first generation of social networkers who got started before they were even born.

For the rest of us, it's a little easier, since we have working digits and can use keyboards and all...

One of the most basic quick-Twit tools is the Firefox Twitter update add-on, Twitter Bar. This cool little gadget inserts a special icon at the end of the address bar for you. You just configure the add-on with your Twitter user info, then go to the address bar in the browser and type. When you're done with your status note, mouse over the little icon (which is a grey minus normally) and it will turn into a green plus and tell you how many characters you have left in your message. Then you click the green plus when you're ready to broadcast and presto... your Twitter post fires off into the ether without you so much as changing your browser direction.

One of my favorite Twitter update tools is another service called Ping.fm. I can put most of my social media profiles in here, like Facebook and MySpace and so forth, then update them ALL with a status message whenever I want. The best part is the GTalk account that Ping uses - I can literally post a message in IM through Gtalk and Ping.fm will tinyURL-ize my links and broadcast my status update to ALL of my social profiles at once. Seriously, that's an awesome timesaver.

Twitter is an integral part of the social media marketing service that I offer through one of my other projects, LollipopSocial.com. Several of the clients that I work with through Metric Voodoo are beneficiaries of this service without even realizing it, as it's also a staple of most of my business SEO strategies. It's so easy to utilize Twitter, that it's practically foolish not to use it.

Example 1, to generate straight e-commerce business:
build a list of people to sell to - find competitors or complimentary types of business who share your demographic, and look up their Twitter followers. Follow those people who really do seem to fit your demographic profile. A good percentage of those people will follow you back. Spend a couple of weeks Twittering really useful things, like breaking news, clever sayings, links to useful pieces of information, cheat codes for videos games, things that will "train" your followers to click the links you send out. Then surprise them with a discount code for your e-commerce web site. "Use code XYZCODE for 10% off at *tinyURL*" and check your web analytics in a few hours to see what happened.

Example 2, to find out what other people are thinking: (marketing research)
build a list of people to watch - find sites or groups you are interested in, where you feel folks from your target demographic should be hanging around and look up the followers on those sites, and follow them... yes, this is just like the example above, but it's what you do afterward that's different. In this instance, we don't care if anyone ever follows us back - we want to see conversations and status updates that take place on these other profiles, to see if we can gain a sense of what's important. One of the most unrecoverable mistakes a marketer can make is to misinterpret or misunderstand their target market. Reading through the status updates and ocassional personal remarks of those people who should be part of your demographic can give you some insights into other aspects of personality and habit that you may not otherwise be aware of. For example, who knew that 30-something moms were so touchy about having aching backs? If you kept up with the Twitter Motrin Meltdown, now you know...

So there you go, two really easy and legitimate ways to use Twitter in your everyday internet business strategy. And who says there's never anything useful on this site?