Some great Twitter Marketing Tips from Brent Payne’s session at SMX Melbourne Social Marketer Workshop
Has built up 30,000 followers for himself on Twitter
He would create different profiles – Soccer Mum, African Safari Photographer, Business Exec so could talk to himself on forums and create links, worked well until algorithm update
Don’t put Social links in footer, put somewhere where they can see
Formula – Put a number a the start of the post and use the keyword like “Top 10 …”
1/3 of posts need to be emotionally engaging – e.g. sharing that you love Nickelback when its not popular, talk about silly things like Karoake, that’s a way to emotionally connect to your audience, if you are a brand, make them feel part of your company, like latest company outing you had
1/3 shd be intellectual – they get the information that they are really following you for, this stuff can be automated.
Automatically set up using Google alerts, anything that Danny Sullivan writes that appears in Google News he has set up to automatically tweet out
1/3 can be personal/insider info – OK to try and get people to do what you want them to do, as long as you have that balance with emotional and intellectual. People say “can’t promote on social media” – Brent believes you can, just keep it to 1/3
Twitter does help for SEO, once you get certain number of tweets of popular on Facebook, see boosts in ranking, even though they are nofollow they still work
Key factors of Social Rank
– Popularity
– Authority
– Relevance
Pay attention to Bing, they are the most open as to how they use Social in their ranking, the others will be doing much the same thing
Tweetcloud – can see what your stream looks like and whether you are on topic
Example of how twitter can build links:
Alyssa Milano said “are you happy” – Brent replied with a picture/graph about “are you happy” and Alyssa loved it and retweeted, it got retweeted by 147 people, drove only 3500 visits but generated 512 links from scrapers, other blogs that automatically post everything Alyssa Media sends out
Twitter Account Types
News feed – Create News feed from RSS. @cnnbrk does this “CNN Breaking News” they don’t follow or interact and send out news. Best to do the best content, cream of the crop, not just everything you create
Employees – Best do not endorse them
Celebrities – they may be your CMO, PR person, public speaker, somebody in your organisation can be the celebrity face of your organisation, like Anderson Cooper @AndersonCooper
Make it a job requirement to have a twitter profile and force to send 3 tweets a day that are emotive about what he is up to
Brand Persona: e.g. Colonel Tribune – Chicago Tribune stole image from Time Magazine, then altered the image hat and wrote Chicago Tribune across the top, legal dept would have had a fit, Brent has said this in public forums like 200 times but no-one cares, says sometimes you need to break the rules. Based on a person Colonel McCormack. He smokes cigars, drinks brandy, people loved it.
Colonel Tribute send outs invites for all the tweetups that we do.
Created a media page for Chicago Tribute which listed the journos twitter handles and this was in the printed version
Engage the Locals = Have a tweetup, had paper hats like Colonel Tribune
Steal from competitors
– follow all their followers using Tweet Adder 3.0
Set up automation to find commonalities
Like Match.com you are setting up certain criteria so you can match someone else.
Sun Times did that to Colonel Tribune
E.g. Brent follows everyone with CEO in their profile and they live in Chicago
Can specify # of followers/tweets people have to have- … set min and max to reduce spam
Brent follows all Matt Cutts followers, pisses him off, if they don’t follow back, unfollow them
Also Matt Cutts apparently follows important people like 300 people, so you want to follow those people too
You can also follow by certain lists – list that Danny Sullivan make are awesome lists
Also people that mention your brand, mention your competitors brand
Auto tweets from Google News
Always retweets Distilled from London if they mention “SEO” because he trusts them, timed tweets and scheduled news
Go into Google News, type in a search query that you want, then at the bottom of Google news, there is an RSS feed button, so he will sort by chronological order over past 24hrs for a phrase like “danny sullivan seo” and if google news picks it up, automatically send it out, and hashtag it and @dannysullivan. Like “Hey, great post by @dannysullivan”
Or “Great [SEO] article by Danny Sullivan”
