Cibo, a digital agency based in San Francisco, saw my tweet and responded as follows:

@NealSchaffer Interesting poll, a quick query of 5,000+ agency accounts and 1.5M+ tweets shows that HootSuite leads. twitter.com/cibostudios/st…

— CIBO (@cibostudios) January 15, 2012

I am assuming that Cibo pulled in this data directly from the Twitter API, so I believe these results are a good enough sampling to be pretty indicative as to the top 20 Twitter clients being used in 2012. Chances are you are using one of these, but with the changing social media landscape and your potentially shifting objectives and ways in which you and your business use social media, I thought it was a good idea to do a short review of the top clients in hopes that you might want to try a client or app you may have never heard of before.

1. HootSuite is a web-based social media dashboard designed to manage a whole slew of social media platforms above and beyond Twitter — Facebook, Linkedin, and have even begun limited support for Google+ — and multiple social profiles in one interface. It also offers the ability to produce reports based on custom analytics to better track brand awareness, follower growth and other pertinent demographic data. Initially built for internal agency use, we can now say that HootSuite is the most popular Twitter client in 2012. Needless to say that if you haven’t tried HootSuite yet, you owe it to yourself to sign up for a free HootSuite trial!

2. The “web” entry refers to those who send out a tweet from  Twitter.com, which underwent improvements and now sports a new interface, is still a relatively simple and elegant approach to tweeting, searching and discovering. If your business only has one account for tweeting, Twitter.com is still an option, and even if you use other clients listed here, you still might be finding yourself coming back here on occasion.

3. Tweetdeck, which was acquired by Twitter last year, is a social media dashboard application for managing Twitter and Facebook accounts, and it is safe to say that it was the leading client outside of Twitter.com before the emergence of HootSuite.  Once only available as an Adobe Air application, it is now compatible with several operating systems including Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Chrome OS and Linux and is also available for the iPhone, iPad and Android devices. It will be interesting to see what happens in the future to this application, which is another good reason to search around for alternatives just in case…

4. Twitterfeed is a utility that allows bloggers to “feed” their blog posts or other RSS content to Twitter, Facebook and other platforms thereby enabling publishers to reach a wider audience and while receiving real-time data. Yes, that’s right: The fourth largest client for tweeting is an automated one…

5. Facebook features the ability to sync one’s Twitter account to his or her Facebook page. This allows your Facebook posts to be automatically tweeted and retweeted on your Twitter account. I’m personally usually not a big fan of cross-posting from one social media website to another, where hashtags mean nothing and the @FacebookUsername don’t translate to @TwitterUsername.

6. The Tweet Button is a small widget that can be embedded into websites (such as online magazines and news sites, including this blog) which gives viewers and readers the ability to share articles of interest to their followers. It is fascinating to see the amount of sharing of content that internet users do on Twitter. This means that if your website doesn’t have a Tweet Button, you’re missing out!

7. Twitter for iPhone is the official app that is compatible and can be downloaded to an iPhone, iPad or an iPod touch powered by at least iOS 4 or later. Twitter developed this application by purchasing the creators of the best client for the iPhone at the time: Tweetie.

8. CoTweet is a social media management tool that allows teams  to manage one or more Twitter accounts by offering such capabilities as tweet assignments, notes, and on duty status. Similar to a HootSuite or a TweetDeck, I praised the “archive” functionality in CoTweet and announced that it was one of my Top Twitter Applications in a recent blog post. However, CoTweet’s parent company, email marketing software company ExactTarget, announced just recently that the free edition of CoTweet will no longer operate after February 15, 2012. While ExactTarget will be releasing a new social media management dashboard called SocialEngage to replace it, I have already switched to a new client (keep reading!).

9. Twitter for Mac is a desktop application designed specifically for the Mac. It is a sister app to the official iPhone and iPad apps that was originally known as Tweetie. Amazing how many Mac users are also heavy tweeters!

10. The web service dlvr.it allows bloggers to publish, distribute and syndicate their content across various social media platforms. Dlvr.it has become popular recently as a TwitterFeed replacement in that it gives you more robust filtering and analytical capabilities. Once again, though, this is a platform for automation.

11. Paper.li enables people to publish online newspapers based on twitter topics — stories and articles — that they like, giving their readers fresh news daily, automatically, like a personalized broadcast. If you thought you’ve been seeing a lot of Paper.li tweets recently, you’re not alone. As a source of tweets Paper.li is now a huge player, and it will be interesting to see if this trend continues – and how it evolves.

12. Originally known as Tweet Later, offering the ability to back then a cutting edge way of scheduling your tweets to post in the future, SocialOomph is a service, both free and paid, that offers productivity solutions for social media users. Among its many features are the ability to manage many accounts, post scheduling and blog integration. I know many Internet marketers who are still heavy users of SocialOomph, but I don’t know how many enterprises have adopted them.

13. I was happily surprised to see another app that I regularly use and highly recommend, Buffer, make it to the top 20 Twitter clients in 2012. Buffer offers a smarter way to schedule your tweets.  Plan out all your tweets for a particular day, fill up your Buffer with your desired tweets, then Buffer schedules them for you. While not a true client per say, Buffer is a perfect complement to help you schedule your posting on Twitter and on their recently added support for Facebook.

14. Tweetie for Mac was designed originally for the iPhone and later made available for desktop, but after being bought out it is only available now as the official Twitter client. I assume that these are the diehard Tweetie users who have yet to upgrade to the “official” client for whatever reason, but this obviously isn’t an option anymore for you or your business.

15. Echofon is a client that this available for iPhone, Mac, Windows, and Firefox. It has the ability to automatically sync unread tweets between a computer, and iPhone and other devices. While Echofon has always been a popular Twitter client for the iPhone, it now supports browser and PC environments as well. I was honestly surprised to see it make the top 20, but apparently a lot of you out there are using them!

16. Twitter for Blackberry is the official app specifically for use in Blackberry handsets.

17. Twitter for iPad is another official app that was developed after the release of the iPad and is a sister application to the official iPhone and Mac apps.

18. MarketMeSuite is a social media tool and software created for social media marketing and management. Its creators aim is to turn one’s followers into customers via better online engagement. Once only used by Internet marketers and social media enthusiasts, MarketMeSuite is now used by more than 20,000 businesses. To be honest, this is the one tool on this list that I’ve been looking to spend more time investigating, so if you’re a user, please share your impressions in the comments. Thanks!

19. SproutSocial is another social media management tool for Twitter and Facebook, but this one offers contact management, competitive insight, lead generation and more unique functionality. Since SproutSocial also had the killer archive feature I was looking for, and was also available for the iPhone, I switched over to using SproutSocial as my main social media client early in 2012 and am not looking back. If you haven’t, sign up for a free SproutSocial trial - and discover what you might be missing!

20. The web service bit.ly is a tool that helps collect, organize and shorten links and URLs. It is available via web or mobile. Many users use the bit.ly bookmarklet to easily create tweets with shortened links which they can then analyze the results for later.

When you analyze these top clients and realize how many are for mobile, iOS, automation or are or will be discontinued, it is safe to say that the top Twitter clients in 2012 for any business to consider come down to:

• HootSuite
• Twitter.com
• TweetDeck
• SocialOomph
• Echofon
• MarketMeSuite
• SproutSocial

For any business that tweets, however, they are undoubtedly using Facebook and are looking for a cross platform social media dashboard. Those 5 clients in bold above are what you should be investigating if you are looking for a new client to use in 2012.

I find that active tweeters often have very deep and passionate relationships with their social media apps, so now it’s your turn: What do you use for your Twitter client and recommend to the world? Any surprises in the above results?

Twitter has always had more uptake in Japan when compared to the United States, but although business use of Twitter lags behind that of the United States, it has become a major form of mobile communication and news reading/sharing.  When disaster struck and electricity went out, social media became an emergency broadcasting channel. In fact when I met those within the Liberal Democratic Party, who required all representatives of their political party to have a Twitter account in late 2009, they thought that the first and foremost use of Twitter was as an emergency channel for broadcasting.

We all know that Twitter is much more than that.  And the way that the Japanese used Twitter taught the world several things that we can all learn from:

1. Faster Than CNN

While CNN reports the news 24/7, it can’t beat Twitter in terms of speed of delivery.  While CNN was repeating the same content over and over again with infrequent updates, Twitter truly was where the news was breaking.  Indeed, in 2011 we can say that the news breaks on Twitter first.

2. The World is Listening on Twitter

I always tell people that when you tweet, you are on the world stage.  Try tweeting out a brand name, and chances are they will follow you back.  I had the experience of tweeting out how I was helping a friend’s family evacuate from Fukushima – and the next morning I was contacted by BBC to secure an interview with that family.  Imagine, the BBC crowd sourcing from…Twitter!  Media has indeed been turned on its head!

3. Hashtags are News Channels

Hashtags started out on Twitter as a way to categorize tweets and make them searchable.  I’ve always told people that Twitterville is like one huge global AOL chat room, and, indeed, we have seen the growth of various #TwitterChats that exist as public rooms that agree to meet at a certain date and time of the week.   When tragedy hit Japan, hashtags literally became news channels.  Want to find out what was happening in Japan?  Follow the #Japan channel.  From Fukushima?  There’s a #Fukushima channel for that.  Hashtags have become news channels in themselves.

4. Links are What Make Twitter Go Round

For those that still think that Twitter is still about where people talk about what they had for breakfast, you are obviously following the wrong people.  Twitter has a rich culture of link-sharing and engaging with content, and if you are looking for a way to navigate through the Internet for targeted information, there is no better way to do this than for searching for it right in your timeline of tweets.  Not only was Twitter much faster than CNN, it became and remains a news aggregator for the world.

5. Social Media in Itself is NOT an Authority

With so many tweets clogging up the hashtag “channels,” it’s hard to gauge what constitutes “authority.”  When I saw a number of tweets that mentioned that the founder of Pokemon has passed away in the tsunami, I naturally retweeted that information as a way of paying it forward and helping to spread information to those that might not have heard.  Shortly thereafter a tweet with a link proved that the whole thing was a hoax.  What tweets should we believe?  Just because it’s tweeted, it doesn’t mean it’s real.  And the authority of traditional media is sorely missed in the new Wild West of news reporting.

Japan taught us a lot about Twitter – has this changed your understanding of the power of tweets?

Undoubtedly, the history of how Mark Zuckerberg started the biggest social network in the world is already familiar to you. Zuckerberg was commissioned to create a social network called Harvard Connections but delayed the project while pursuing the creation of another site, thefacebook.com. Whether or not he copied the idea is up to the courts, but what we do know is that the growth of the site was phenomenal, getting between 1,200 to 1,500 new users in the first 24 hours.

Starting at Harvard, Facebook quickly branched out to other universities like Columbia and Stanford. It then soon was expanded to cover many of the most prominent colleges in the US, Canada and even in the UK. After a final rollout to employees of big name companies like Apple and Microsoft, other universities in Australia and New Zealand and to high school students, Facebook was finally introduced to the world.

Fast forward to today: Facebook has over 750 million users and as of June 2011, is the second most visited .com site after Google. It’s way beyond a social network as well, becoming a gaming platform, marketplace, messaging hub, photo hosting site and more. And now every business is trying to figure out how to increase Facebook fans.

Twitter

Crazy as it sounds, Twitter started out as a hack on top of AOL Instant Messenger that let Jack Dorsey view status updates on his RIM pager. It was too early for the idea though since mobile devices were still quite scarce and expensive at the time.

From humble dispatch software beginnings, Dorsey was starting to piece together a way to expand the service and add instant messaging and text messaging to the mix. In 2006, he collaborated with Evan Williams and Biz Stone to create a prototype for internal use within William’s company, Odeo. After a few short months, Twitter was eventually formally spun off into its own company.

It’s first growth spurt came during the 2007 SXSW festival, where live tweets were broadcast on two distinctly located plasma screens. From 400,000 tweets per quarter in 2007, Twitter now sends 230 million tweets per day and has 100 million active users around the globe. It has also spawned an ecosystem of hundreds of Twitter apps and tools.

LinkedIn

To start a professional networking site, you have to begin with a few professionals. After working for Apple and PayPal and getting a generous payout from the latter’s sale to eBay, Reid Hoffman was now ready to start his own company. After a brainstorming session with a few friends on his couch, he soon gathered a team of 13 people to start building and promoting his site, LinkedIn.

It was tough going at first but the viral growth soon kicked in and eventually Hoffman was able to monetize the site through advertising, job listings and subscriptions. After a few successful years, LinkedIn finally went for an IPO in January 2011. As of September 2011, the company is now valued at $8.8 million, one of the most successful public offerings in the post bubble era. LinkedIn has also now established itself as the hub for B2B social media marketing.

WordPress

Blogging has become almost synonymous with WordPress. Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little forked WordPress from b2, one of the more popular blog publishing platforms at the time. It grew out of concerns that b2, also known as Cafelog, suddenly stopped getting updates and its main developer fell off the grid somehow. WordPress was built from the GPL code of b2 and released to the world in 2003.

Since then, it’s grown quite a lot winning several Open Source awards across the years and becoming the blogging platform of choice for many companies and brands. Mullenweg himself has gone on to create other successful projects through his company Automattic, such as After the Deadline which aims to bring spell checking to every site on the web and Gravatar, a centralized avatar repository used by many of the top blogs in the world. WordPress is what runs this website and has also spawned an ecosystem that has fostered thousands of WordPress plugins.

Tumblr

David Karp started Tumblr in 2007. When Karp was 19, he found out about a new form of blogging called tumblelogging, a shorter form of posting thoughts to the internet. He soon launched his own site on November 1st, filling the niche between actual blogging and tweeting.

The site has grown quite well to 3 million users strong, boasting an 85 percent retention rate due to its pristine yet customizable interface. Tumblr is now home to over 28 million blogs and more than 10 billion posts. Who would have thought?

Foursquare

Your favorite mayor-ousting service began as a thesis project by Dennis Crowley at NYU. After gaining some buzz as a unique SMS-based location service, the precursor to Foursquare and its technology was bought by Google in 2005. He started collaborated with Naveen Selvadurai in 2008 and soon launched a new location-based app in the popular South by Southwest (SXSW) festival the next year. Dubbed Foursquare, it combined a location pinging services with a badge scoring system that made it a huge hit in the event.

It kept on growing, churning out an API so that other developers could build upon its location discovery service. Foursquare now has 10 million users scattered all over the world with 750 million check-ins under its belt. There’s even a holiday named after it; April 16 is dubbed Foursquare Day. Although the personal ROI of using Foursquare is debatable, the future for location-based services from a marketing perspective is promising.

StumbleUpon

Click a button, find a cool site. That was the basic premise for this service built by friends Geoff Smith, Garrett Camp and Justin LaFrance in 2001. It started as an add-on for Firefox, one of the first actually, and as people adopted the new browser, StumbleUpon grew with it. It also spread via word-of-mouth and its popularity eventually led it to being bought by eBay in 2007.

Feeling that the site was growing beyond what eBay could offer, one of the founders set out to buy the company back in 2009. It was a long and arduous time but in April 2009, StumbleUpon became independent once more. The site has done quite well ever since, boasting 1 billion stumbles (or page recommendations for your non-Stumblers) per month. If you haven’t tried it yet, there are many reasons why you should become a StumbleUpon user.

Empire Avenue

What’s this? Using your social media activity to increase your stock price? This could only happen on the magical website that is Empire Avenue. This social stock market was created by Duleepa “Dups” Wijayawardhana, Dr. Michael Mannion and Niall Brown as a sort of virtual currency, tracking your social value on the web.

It was the culmination of a round of drinks in 2008 in Montreal. Gathering some of the best experts in gaming, business and math, they created a site that takes an algorithmic analysis of networks you are part of and translating that into economic terms like your share price. Once an invite-only site, it’s now open to the public and free to play.

If you’ve been hanging around social networks the past few months, you’ll notice people playing Empire Avenue and building up their “social capital” through it. While the site doesn’t reveal statistics about itself, it did raise a cool $1.2 million in financing recently, which means we will be seeing a whole lot more of Empire Avenue soon. And, yes, Empire Avenue is important to social media marketers.

Did you learn anything new here by looking at the history of these popular social media websites? Any other tidbits you’d like to add? Please share!

I’ve already blogged about the most popular Twitter applications that exist according to their Alexa rank, and some of the apps on this list I have already mentioned as well. But I wanted to give you a comprehensive look at the many different applications that exist in hopes that it may help you discover some new apps that you can use or maybe you can add to the comments by providing details on an app that you feel is superior than to what I recommend.

1.) Twitter Clients

I’ll be honest with you when I say that I use multiple Twitter clients, and I do so for a variety of reasons. My favorite client by far is CoTweet, but to get access to their iPhone version it will cost $500+ a year. This means that I need a separate Twitter client for mobile, for which I have been a happy and loyal HootSuite user from 2009 to the present 2011. Between the two of these clients, I have access to all of the functionality I need, but sometimes I do fall back on Twitter.com if I have any issues.

To give you a sense of what CoTweet and its killer archiving functionality look like, check out the video below:

2.) Scheduling Tools

Scheduling tools are a necessity because I don’t want to bombard my Twitter timeline with a bunch of tweets when I can schedule them throughout the day in hopes of increased engagement. While both CoTweet and HootSuite provide tweet scheduling capabilities, the eloquent solution here is clearly Buffer. Create a schedule of when you want to send out tweets and then merely “buffer” the tweet so you don’t need to decide on specific times for each tweet. A serious time-saver and, without doubt, leads to increased engagement over time.

Here’s a great Buffer tutorial video for you newbies:

3.) Following/Follower Management

I like to monitor who follows me to judge whether or not I should follow them back. I also like to look for people that are tweeting about the things that I am interested in and follow them in hopes of engaging with them. The problem, though, is that you can’t scale unless you use a tool to help you manage this process. I want to spend time engaging, not following.

The tool that I have used and evangelized to help in this effort has been Tweetspinner, which I am still a fan of because of its very user-friendly interface. That being said, I have recently been turned on to Tweepi, a very powerful tool which returns a lot of data that allows me to make informed decisions on who (or who not) to follow in an Excel-like spreadsheet format. Definitely an app to check out if you haven’t done so.

Here’s a great introductory video of the main Tweepi functionality:

4.) Content Curation

Content curation is an essential part of social media marketing, especially from a B2B perspective. There are many ways of finding content to curate that I and my good friend Aaron Lee have blogged about in the past. There are some convenient applications, however, that we can use to help us quickly find relevant content and either immediately post or schedule for posting later in the day.

Triberr is one of them, and I have already written a detailed review of Triberr. I will say, from a bloggers perspective, if I’m going to curate content, why not curate it from other bloggers who will also help promote my content to their followers? Now it doesn’t necessarily happen this way, but no one can doubt the advantages from a Twitter reach perspective of utilizing this perspective. That being said, I curate Triberr posts manually and am definitely not publishing blog posts from my tribe that my followers would consider inappopriate. This undoubtedly defeats the purpose of a tribe, and is bound to irritate some bloggers. But let’s face it: If I tweet off-topic (or off-brand), it’s not going to get any clicks for that blogger, and it will turn off my followers so that they’ll be less likely to click on any link I send them in the future. Finding the right tribe is the right challenge, but I do believe I have found a comfortable medium – for now.

For those of you unfamiliar with Triberr, check out this tour of its user interface with it’s founder!

I had the pleasure of meeting Kathryn Rose, founder of the Social Buzz Club, for the first time in Baltimore last week when I spoke a the Small Business Survival Summit. Kathryn is a true social media rockstar who has developed her own content curation platform which may be one of the best kept secrets out there: Social Buzz Club. Comparing it to Triberr, it is a 100% manual approach that is not blogger-specific but topic-specific. If you are a Triberr user looking for supplemental content, or you are merely looking for alternative solutions for content curation, you owe it yourself to become a user and try it out.

StumbleUpon is not a Twitter app per se, but it does allow me to easily share content to Twitter when I am on the go from their awesome iPhone app. To be honest with you StumbleUpon is the only app that I can honestly say I have tweeted from the bathroom using Now, if only they would automatically add “via @StumbleUpon” at the end of each tweet sent over they would get a lot more eyeballs and the respect they deserve…

Finally, I prefer to stay away from automated Twitter schemes, but if you are looking for an automation tool that has so many filters that it can help you make sure you don’t miss the breaking news on only the topics and news sources that you are interested in, I highly recommend you take a look at Dlvr.it, especially if you are a TwitterFeed user.

5.) URL Shortener

I have a custom domain to brand the shortened links that I often share (wind.mn), so I used bit.ly to set it up as well as to monitor the analytics of how my tweets do. Since I recently moved over to Chrome, the bit.ly extension is pretty cool, even popping up when I have a “trending link.” Before a bit.ly user I was a heavy ow.ly user on the Hootsuite platform, which also provides robust analytics.

6.) Twitter SEO

Of course you know that I am already seeing SEO benefits from using Twylah, a truly unique product that can still be your special weapon. I aim at sending out one power tweet a day to bring new visitors to my Twylah page to further extend the benefits to my branding.

Making method in the madness of using the above tools sounds crazy, but I believe that those that are active on Twitter use a variety of tools similar to how I do.

What Twitter tools do you use in 2011? Are there any tools that you recommend that are superior to the ones that I mention? Please share with us! Thank you!

Many businesses, through proactive content curation and a social media strategy that guides them into becoming the resource for their industry by sharing a lot of content, send out a lot of tweets on a daily basis.  Is there a way that these tweets can somehow be used in a way to not only better brand their Twitter presence but also receive some SEO benefits?

Yes, there is.  And it’s a service that you might not have heard of but should be signing up for if you’re excited about the prospect.It’s called Twylah.

Don’t be confused when you see their home page, as their current marketing pitch is that Twylah allows you to create a custom branded page for your tweets.  There is no doubt that this can be done.  But after kicking the tires of Twylah for several weeks and getting to know their founders Eric Kim and Kelly Kim, who graciously agreed to be interviewed as part of this blog post, I can tell you that Twylah is about much more than just that. And it can be an absolute game-changer in terms of harnessing the potential SEO value of your everyday tweets.

Let’s first start with the question: What is Twylah?

The founders of the company put it this way:

Twylah helps you significantly leverage your Twitter efforts.  Currently, individuals and brands are spending a lot of time on Twitter, and not necessarily seeing direct returns on their investment.  Twylah is a tool that captures the value of your Twitter efforts and allows you to realize true returns.  We do this by creating engaging, navigable websites of your tweets, which we call “Twitter Brand Pages.”

Here is what a Twylah Twitter Brand Page looks like:

What you’re looking it, in essence, is another completely branded Twitter profile page.  The background is a JPG image similar to how you can customize your own Twitter background.  But if you look closer, you begin to see what else this branded page of your tweets offers:

1. Your tweets are being dynamically categorized based on what you tweet most.  I tweet a lot about social media, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, business, and social media books, so these tweets have now been categorized on these category pages.  In other words, if one of my followers wants to see what I’ve been tweeting about relating to LinkedIn, they can get that information much more easily on my Twylah page than doing an advanced Twitter search.
2. The tweets are being displayed very attractively by visually promoting any image or video that is contained in the website where the link is leading to.
3. It is possible to engage with any tweet easily through the convenient reply and ReTweet buttons that are provided.
4. For any topic I can see which are both the “trending tweets” as well as the most recent tweets to easily navigate and find the types of tweets that I am looking for.
5. Your Twylah page promotes YOU by including links back to your homepage, a follow link, as well as Google+, Facebook Like, and Tweet buttons at the very top of your page.
6. I saved this for last, but you’ll see there is a box at the bottom righthand corner that includes an advertisement for my new LinkedIn marketing book.  Can’t customize your Twitter profile with an advertisement, can you?

Hopefully, if you’re one of Twylah’s targeted users, you’re already getting excited.  As Twylah said, “We are targeting Twitter publishers (brands and personal brands), who consistently create and curate valuable content on any topic.”  Hopefully, if you’re active in social media, that would include you!

It’s great to be able to show adverts on your Twylah page, but how do you attract people to visit the page?  That’s where the “Power Tweet” comes in.

A “Power Tweet” is a bookmarklet that Twylah provides you to add to your browser as a shortcut to allow you to create a tweet from any web page, similar to how a “Hootlet” from HootSuite works, and creates a special link that will lead the visitor not directly to the content, but indirectly to a link to the content on your Twylah page using the twy.la shortener.  Of course, once there, readers are spending a lot of time looking at more than that one tweet, especially if it falls into one of the categories that is “indexed” on your Twylah page.  This gives your tweets a whole new life, and when people start engaging with your Twylah page, they are doing it on your domain, not Twitter.com.

Of course, if every tweet that you sends out leads to your Twylah landing page instead of the actual content, some of your followers might get perturbed.  That’s why it’s important to use the “Power Tweet” often enough to drive traffic but not too often.  I aim for one such tweet a day, and I try to make sure that the copy is keyword/topic rich to pull in related tweets on my page.

If you’re curious, here are some sample Power Tweets curated personally by the co-founder of Twylah, Eric Kim!

3) The SEO benefits of Twylah are real.

A Twylah page, and all of the tweets within it, get indexed by Google even though your tweets don’t.  But it’s when you add Twylah to your website, through setting up a CNAME on your domain (e.g. tweets.windmillnetworking.com) and pointing it  it to Twylah where the fun really starts.

This may not be a popular search term, but typing in “LinkedIn trending tweets” brings the following results:

Obviously, when someone clicks on that, they are then on my domain with my branding, making it easier to engage with them and get them to come to my own website.  These are also additional views on my tweets NOT coming from Twitter but SOLELY from the SEO benefits of Twylah!

But am I getting any visits from search engines because of Twylah?  Below are my Google Analytics for my Twylah page from the past month:

Now, I haven’t been sending out Power Tweets on a daily basis but my Twylah page hits are already comprising 1.4% of my entire Pageviews.  Furthermore, my web visitors are engaging with my tweets with an average time on page which is six and a half minutes, more than double my current average.  Should I also mention that the bounce rate is more than 10% lower than my current one?

But if we are to see SEO benefits, how many of the above are coming from Google?  The answer is:

More than 10% of the hits to my Twylah page are coming from Google searches.  These visitors are engaging more than twice as long as the average Twylah visitor and are exhibiting a similar bounce rate which is 10 points lower than my current one.

I am confident that, with working Power Tweets into my daily social media routine and the power of Google indexing, this number will continue to go up.  You too will be amazed at how your Twitter content can getting ranked in search engines much more quickly that you ever imagined with Twylah.

To prove this fact, let me share some conversations I had with Alan Berkson, founder of the business strategy advisory service Intelligist Group, about his experience with Twylah.  In his words:

Do a google search for “Influence Measure Optimization”. How far down is tweets.intelligistgroup.com? That subdomain has been around for a week.

Now do a search for “Alan Berkson”. How far down is my twylah account? It’s only been around < 1 month yet is better optimized than content that has been around for years.

The value proposition is interesting….the Power Tweet, which creates a landing page for that tweet AND related tweets is really the heart of it. I’ve already seen higher response on blog and link hits, as well as search engine response.

Hopefully you’ve already created your own Twylah page by the time you’ve read this, so I wanted to conclude with one nugget of advice that the founders of Twylah wanted to give you all, in 140 characters no less, what Twylah’s advice would be on how businesses should be better leveraging Twitter:

Create valuable content consistently. Keep your promotions out of the stream (it doesn’t work anyway). Promote your Twylah page instead.

Have you set up your own Twylah page?  What have your experiences been?  What about those who have clicked on a Power Tweet and engaged with a Twylah page?  Please share your thoughts with us!  Thanks!

(if you just can’t get enough about Twylah, here’s an added bonus for you below, a video that Robert Scoble did with Twylah co-founder Eric Kim)

It was only a matter of time before it happened, but overwhelmed with the sudden and sometimes overwhelming impact that their tweets had on society, some Japanese celebrities are now calling on other celebrities to stop using Twitter.

As social networking websites penetrate every society around the world, every country will at some point be dealing with a variety of issues regarding invasion of privacy, employees getting fired because of their use (or perceived misuse) of social media, and even defamation lawsuits from a tweet.  In Japan, Twitter has become the rage and even Facebook is still challenged in its competition with Mixi to make deeper inroads.  From my own interviews with social media influencers in the Land of the Rising Sun, the use of Twitter seems to be split between professionals who see it as a business tool as well as teens and twenty-somethings who want to follow the latest tweets of the famous celebrities that are so ubiquitous in Japanese society – almost every television, radio, or print ad for a consumer brand seems to feature a famous celebrity.  In fact, similar to the United States, many of the passionate adopters of Twitter have been these same celebrities.

But then something happened – public demonstrations organically started from the act of one tweet from a celebrity.

Sosuke Takaoka, a 29-year old Japanese actor with more than 140,000 Twitter followers, posted a tweet on July 23 that read,

Honestly, I’ve been treated well by Channel 8 (Fuji TV), but I really don’t watch them anymore.  I often think it’s a Korean television station.  We Japanese want to see traditional Japanese shows.  Whenever I see a Korean show on the air I turn off the TV.  ^^ Goodbye.

The tweet was in reference to the popularity of Korean television drama shows on Japanese TV, but Takaoka centered his attention on one of the most popular TV networks in Japan, Fuji TV.  Furthermore, there is obvious historic tension between the two countries.  Either way, because Twitter has become the place where the news breaks in Japan as much as it does globally now, the tweet started to gain attention on what could be considered Japan’s first and still very popular social media website: the 2 Channel message board forum.  This forum is still the 21st most visited website in Japan according to Alexa.com.

The above started a chain reaction where Fuji TV began to be flooded by phone call complaints, and even new complaints from consumers were mentioned in social media because of what was perceived as poor customer service by Fuji TV who didn’t have enough operators to deal with the sudden upsurge in phone inquiries.  Some consumers called out for a boycott of companies that were advertising on Fuji TV.  Finally, on August 7th, a demonstration against Fuji TV at their headquarters was held that attracted 2,500 people.  Although that number might sound small, through the power of social media, the videos that were uploaded to the Japanese version of YouTube, Nico Nico Douga, as well as uStream have had cumulative views of more than 100,000.  The demo organizers are calling for another one on August 21 which could attract far more people than the first.

While the above is an excellent case study of how social media and our present connectivity can lead to social disorder, as we have seen recently in many parts of the world, some celebrities are calling for a boycott against Twitter.

Takashi Okamura, one of the two comedians who form the popular duo of 99, recently appeared onTV where he mentioned this tweet and said,

The problem is that you tweet.  If you don’t want to see the TV programs, don’t watch them.  Why do you have to tell everyone?  The cost of watching TV is only in the electricity that you consume, so why do you need to tweet about it?

Since the original tweet, Takaoka has had his contract cancelled by his talent agency and recently issued a public apology.  Unfortunately with the power of Twitter, many learn their lesson until it is after the fact and the damage is done.  In fact, there is a Japanese Wikipedia page that has already been created and documents the above facts called Fuji TV’s Korean Broadcasting Issue.

As I have mentioned in many Twitter blog posts, the world is watching you on Twitter.   The combination of the public nature of Twitter, the fact that most media outlets (and many companies) have their antennas tuned to our tweets, and the fact that social media has greatly accelerated the speed of communication means that no one’s tweets are safe.

The lesson to be learned, whether you are a celebrity, a business, or a professional, is that you need to create a new “public persona” and stick to it when you say anything on any social media website.  I actually speak about this in my new LinkedIn marketing book where I give the following advice:

It’s easy to say that in creating your public persona you should avoid putting certain things in your profile, but because social media is, well, social, we’re frequently tempted to say things that may catch us off our public brand. Before you post something in any social media channel that may be controversial and therefore affect your future business prospects, ask yourself the following four questions:

• Would my family approve of this?
• Would my boss approve of this?
• Would all of my customers approve of this?
• Would a court of law approve of this?

Unless you can answer “yes” to all four of these questions, keep your public persona intact by simply not posting your opinions on the Internet.

If only I had a chance to have met Takaoka-san before that tweet.

Have you had, or heard of, an instance where you or someone that you know regretted saying something in social media and are now paying the price for it?  Please share your experiences in the comments section below!

Just by looking at Twitter, however, it’s seemingly impossible to find a lot of data that you might be looking for. That’s where Twitter’s APIs come in. Instead of creating everything themselves, they let 3rd party companies come up with thousands of applications for the needs of any given user (of course, recently Twitter has begun to buy back some of these strategic 3rd party apps like Tweetdeck…).

Here’s a simple task to prove my point: I work for a company and am targeting Twitter users who live in a certain area. How do I find them? I decided to experiment with an actual city and show you the different results I get with what limited capabilities Twitter has and 5 ways to search for people by location that I recommend.

For the purpose of this exercise, I used an actual case study from a client who needed to target users in Guadalajara, Mexico. Any Twitter tool must be universal in scope, and the limited numbers of users there when compared to a major metropolitan American city made it a perfect test case scenario for this blog post.

Let’s first start with Twitter to set the standard for our 5 alternative search methods. How do you search for people by location on Twitter? You simply enter the city name in the search bar, and you will get the following:

While the primary results deliver tweets that have the same term, notice that the right-hand side shows “People-results.” It only lists 3 people who happen to have Guadalajara as part of their username. However, when we hit “view all” we are now shown the following screen:

The screen being shown has actually forwarded us to the Who to Follow search result for Guadalajara in the bios of users. Unfortunately, the result was very limiting in terms of numbers – and there were no filtering options.

CONCLUSION: 20 Users Found, No Search Filters, No Data Outside of Bio. Not Usable.

Now let’s compare how the 5 alternatives stack up: (and make sure you read all 5 to get a comparative sense of what each delivers that the other doesn’t)

Some of you might not have heard of this tool, from the creators of Tweetspinner, but if you haven’t you may be missing out on a very valuable application. FollowerWonk allows you to scan bios for terms, location, full name, as well as a range in number of Twitter followers or friends. There’s a few other tricks you can use FollowerWonk for, but here are what the results looked like:

It might be hard to see, but that’s because FollowerWonk provides you with a plethora of data: screen name, real name, location, “wonk score,” tweets, friends, followers, and how old the Twitter account is. Furthermore, the search could be sorted by “relevance,” “follower count,” and “friend count.” Not only that, the number of results that FollowerWonk delivered was the most of any tool tested: 10,823!

CONCLUSION: 10,000+ Users Found, 3 Sort Filters, 5 Data Sets. Best of the 5.

Twellow is one of the most famous user directories, so you would expect to see some great results here. While the numbers, although fewer than FollowerWonk, were impressive, the data displayed was little and had no sorting options:

All of the users who were associated with Guadalajara, presumably as their location, were listed in descending order by their numbers of followers. It’s nice to see the number of followers, but with no ways to sort or other data shown, the tool lacked some of the sophisticated features that FollowerWonk had. Search results returned were 6,105.

CONCLUSION: 6,000+ Users Found, 0 Sort Filters, 1 Data Set. Twellow gave a decent number of results and had a nice user interface, but lack of sort filters and data provided means it is not the ideal solution out of the 5.

Another service that you might not have heard of is Tweepz. Tweepz just has one simple search box to enter a search term, but the results and data that displayed was impressive:

In addition to the expected data, we can see their numbers for followers, following, and updates. In addition to sorting by relevancy, followers, and following similar to FollowerWonk, we can further refine search results by more narrow ranges of numbers of followers and following, language, as well as “extracted entities” or keywords that presumably frequently appear in names or bios that appear on this list. Tweepz even provides us an RSS feed to further work with this data. Unfortunately, while the results were impressive, the number of users that were actually returned were less than half of FollowerWonk: 3,978.

CONCLUSION: 3,000+ Users Found, 4 Sort Filters, 3 Data Sets, 4 Refinement Filters. Despite lack of results an excellent alternative to WonkFollower.

So, if Twellow only had 6,000 users found, you would figure that the granddaddy of all Twitter profile directories, the mighty WeFollow, would have more results, right? WRONG! By far the most shocking result was that WeFollow only returned 70 results. Perhaps like so many older Twitter applications that have come and gone, WeFollow is on its way out? Maybe it is only strong in North America the United States? That being said, WeFollow did deliver one type of result the others did not: “influence”:

With only 70 user results, the data is not useful at all. However, the ability to sort by influence, in addition to number of followers, is interesting. Of course, there is (and never will be) no single way of measuring influence, so the number here is as good as the Wonk Score on FollowerWonk. Search results: 70.

CONCLUSION: <100 Users Found, 1 Sort Filter, 1 Data Set. Not Usable.

The above 4 methods give you a good idea as to what types of results, data, and sorting filters you can get with 3rd party applications. But if Twitter bought Summize, where we can see that search engine in action? The answer is the 5th method below:

This is the “hidden” search bar that Twitter never integrated at is into their service and instead have you searching down the URL (http://search.twitter.com) to access it. Now, this search engine is only going to display tweets, but it gives us the ability to find who is tweeting and what they’re tweeting about in a certain location. Once you select the Advanced Search button on the right above you get a whole host of fields for which you can perform your search:

While this can undoubtedly be used for many  a search purpose, we are interested in using the “Places” filter which we can also try to search within x miles or kilometers of the distance away from that city. Typing Guadalajara into the “Near this place” and including the default 15 miles displayed this result:

This data can be useful for a number of ways in a combination with the results from the other 4 results above. We can do searches seeing how often people we found are mentioned in Guadalajara, who they are tweeting with, and what they are saying.  Twitter also displays the range of our search on a map, allows us to search for particular language of tweets, will translate the tweets into English, as well as show us the Trending topics. Applying the Twitter Advanced Search to a portion of the results we find in, say, FollowerWonk will allow us to build a targeted list of people in a locale which we can further utilize the many fields in Advanced Search to find the exact subject matter of tweets that are our target.

The beauty about the above tools is that they are all free. Sure there are robust social media monitoring solutions that can help you filter and sort the data in a number of ways for a fee, but don’t underestimate the power of free tools to help you mine Twitter to look for people by location.

What other tools are out there that YOU use to look for people by location?

Fast forward to 2011. There has been a lot of talk in the blogosphere and Twitterville about a new automation tool for bloggers who tweet called Triberr. After hearing that “T-word,” some of you who know about it may already be cringing or there are some who could be excited to learn more. Either way, I wanted to share my own personal experiences of using Triberr in this review and what it has reminded me about what is important about Twitter. I also write this in the hopes that this review helps foster a better understanding of Triberr as well as provide a potentially different perspective on how the tool can be used.

What is Triberr?

Put simply, Triberr is a tool that aggregates the RSS feeds from all members of a “tribe” and then allows you to automatically or manually post them into your Twitter stream. The idea is that your tribe support each other by retweeting each other’s content. The process can be completely manual if the user changes his or her settings, and there is also an option of rating a blog post with positive or negative “karma” to inform other bloggers whether or not they should manually approve the tweet. The tweet itself is completely preview-able and editable before publication.

Why Use Triberr?

The prime appeal that Triberr has for most is undoubtedly the ability to get greater reach for your blog posts by having your tribe promote it in their Twitter stream. Many a blogger has wondered, “Why don’t I get as many views and/or retweets even though my content is better than [social media rockstar name]?” Triberr allows you to group together your efforts with blogger soulmates to extend your reach to potentially more than 1,000,000 followers, thus leveling the playing field for lesser known as well as up-and-coming bloggers. Some well-respected bloggers with more than 100,000 followers are also using the platform.

Why the Complaints Against Triberr?

Many see those who use Triberr as merely trying to game the system to get more retweets by automating the process of tweeting each other’s blog posts.

Why Did I Use Triberr?

My intent on using Triberr was simple: I recognized one of the bloggers who’s posts I often retweeted as a member, and then found out that he was in a tribe where I knew a few of the other bloggers. Why not join the tribe, I thought, to be exposed to similar bloggers’ content and vice-versa? While I cannot deny that the promise of additional reach was enticing, to me what was more important is that it offered a way for me to supplement my own content curation efforts by providing me the latest blog posts in a dashboard for me to conveniently review and then schedule to tweet. Actually, there are some bloggers that I support and tweet out pretty much everything they post because I know their content is relevant to my followers and I want to support them. To me, Triberr was going to be a natural extension to this: It is a pre-populated dashboard/mini-RSS reader from other bloggers who want to try to support each other.

What Have My Experiences Been?

I joined a tribe and left it shortly thereafter for a variety of reasons I will outline below. I then took a break from Triberr. After Triberr started allowing something called “inbreeding,” I then experimented on joining another tribe with different bloggers, expanded that to multiple tribes, left most of those tribes, and recently joined another. I can’t say that using Triberr doesn’t have its disadvantages – it really is about finding the right people to be in your tribe, and it is not an easy task for many reasons outlined below.

What Have I Learned from the Experience? And What Advice Do I Give to Triberr Users?

I am not trying to criticize those who use Triberr, but using Triberr has stretched my boundaries as to what I am and am not comfortable tweeting. To say otherwise would simply be a lie. However, I have also strengthened relationships with some bloggers and became friends with new ones. Each tribe even has a “Wall” which encourages the creation of a community for your tribe.  With that being said, here’s what I’ve learned – and my advice for Triberr users.

#1 You are What You Tweet and Your Content Must be Aligned with Your Brand (Content Strategy)

Content curation is something which should ideally provide your followers with tweets aligned with your content strategy that you have personally curated. This is something that Triberr has the potential to help foster. The problem, though, is that not every member might be tweeting relevant content all of the time and that the content of some tribe members might be completely irrelevant to what you are interested in sharing with your community. Unless you join a tribe where every tribe member has content that is aligned with your strategy, you may be finding yourself introducing irrelevant and off-brand content to your community unless you’re in the right tribe and manually previewing each blog post before tweeting to be on the safe side.

#2 You Must Maintain the Quality of Your Blog – and Tweets (Content Quality)

No two bloggers are alike. Some might only post a photo together with one or two hundred words of text in Tumblr-esque fashion while others regularly blog posts with more than 1,000 words. While some might use their blog to make casual remarks or ask questions, others might make an effort to try to make their blog post as meaningful and resourceful to others as possible. Only you know what you consider to be “quality content,” but while some in your tribe you might already know and respect, there might be others who’s blog posts just might not be your cup of tea. Another reason that you should be manually previewing each blog post before tweeting to be on the safe side.

#3 Supporting Your Tribe is One Thing, But Do Some Exploit the Privilege? (Authentic Curation)

A lot of people complain that Triberr is all about what is bad in how some marketers exploit social media in quid pro quid fashion disregarding their community and treating Twitter followers as mere numbers. To be honest, the feeling of wanting to follow someone if they follow you as well as retweet the content of others who retweet yours is quite natural. It’s why you get thanked for retweeting other’s content as well as for mentioning someone on a #FollowFriday. I often look for content to curate from my followers who share my content with their community. That being said, I am not one who has ever been part of a “blog party” where we agree to comment on each others blog posts and digg/stumble etc. each others posts. I saw Triberr as being something different, which it is, as it is representing a retweet of content. However, Triberr actually has the potential to become an even more damaging artificial method of promotion. How? Because once a blogger realizes that they can broadcast a tweet out to more than one million followers, they just might start taking advantage of it. Perhaps they start publishing more often then they might normally be doing to take advantage of the situation. Maybe they don’t spend as much time on each blog post and craft shorter, quicker posts so that they can increase website traffic. A feeling of mutual support is one thing, but what if everyone is just not utilizing the tool in the same manner? You might get the feeling that others are trying to take advantage of you with such behavior, and if so, you really need to inform the tribe leader and/or leave the tribe and find another. Another reason to be manually previewing each blog post before tweeting to be on the safe side.

#4 With Reach Comes Responsibility, So Don’t Become the Firehose (Frequency Strategy)

The reach that can be had through Triberr is, simply stated, incredible. However, with the reach comes responsibility. I was a member of one of the largest tribes where I was amazed by how much my own content got retweeted. The cost of that, though, is the volume of tweets to review and thus tweet on behalf of others. I usually like to tweet out some informative links that I have curated to my followers, but I also like to have a threshold as to the maximum number of tweets I want to send out in a day. Joining any tribe over a few members will challenge your threshold, and in turn potentially the threshold of your followers. The problem is that nobody blogs at the same frequency. There are some who blog every day, while some only do it weekly. Aligning yourself with a tribe where bloggers tweet at a similar frequency is a must. All it takes is for one blogger to take advantage of the situation mentioned above or merely someone who blogs daily or sometimes twice a day when you don’t to ask yourself why the same name keeps coming up on your Tribber dashboard. And if you are asking yourself that question, chances are some of your followers might be as well. In such a scenario, can there be any other option other than to manually preview each blog post before tweeting to be on the safe side?

So my conclusion, other than the need to manually preview each blog post before tweeting?

First of all, I have nothing against any particular blogger as there is no right or wrong way with blogging, tweeting, or social media in general. I am not pretending to be an authority on any such subject, because everyone sees everything in their own way, and that is the way it should be. I only share with you my own experience in hopes that other bloggers can find truly aligned tribes while also adhering to what Twitter is all about.

However, my experiences above do tell me one thing: No two bloggers are alike, and no two tweeters are as well.  The only way that a tribe can be a truly unified presence in light of this is if everyone agrees to automatically post each other blog posts all the time in the pursuit of the one thing that can unify the Triberr user: The promise of expanded reach.  However, for the same above reasons, I find that this is a high price to pay and instead am looking for a comfortable medium with tribe members that I respect who also share similar beliefs and philosophies about blogging and tweeting

The developers of Triberr have put together a truly awesome platform which is quick, scalable, and supported surprisingly well by two developers who are only doing this part-time. The platform could develop into a “blogger’s alliance” type of world where companies wanting to engage with influential bloggers might just skip Klout and instead try to influence one of the tribes. How about sponsored tweets from tribes, similar to how platforms have been created to advertise for celebrities? Just as Twitter recommends those who you should follow, Triberr could also team you up with another blogger or two who’s interests and/or content is similar and create a blogger matchmaking service. Not to mention the potential for large enterprises who manage several blogs and multiple Twitter accounts to accurately track the engagement level in terms of retweets from each Twitter community by blog content source. It will be interesting to see how things develop, but one thing for sure: Unless Triberr is used responsibly by those who are active members, tweets coming from the platform may become ignored as much as those “RT @Mashable” tweets coming from Twitterfeed have become…

One could come to the conclusion that a perfectly aligned tribe is impossible because of the varying factors I mentioned above. I don’t believe this is the case, and I also feel that Triberr has its role as a content curation tool which comes with the support of a community of like-minded bloggers. I will continue to use Triberr as part of my social media experimentation efforts as I am presently happy with those bloggers I am in the same tribe with, but I am curious as to your comments and suggestions regarding this review.

What has your experience with Triberr been? Please share your review in the comments. Thank you.

(July 6, 2011) Afterthoughts: There have been a number of blog posts written about Triberr, and this post was in no way in response to any single one. However, I will say that I have had quite a few conversations with Judy Gombita about the subject that were thought-provoking (you should follow her on Twitter as well), and she pointed me to a thought-provoking post on Triberr from Kellye Crane which generated quite a lot of interesting comments.

Related articles

• 2 New Social Media Tools to Try: Refynr and Tribrr [Review] (oneforty.com)
• Is your content out of your control? (onourbikes.com)
• The Collaboration Debate (growmap.com)
• Why There’s Nothing Wrong With Social Media Automation (customerthink.com)
• Joining a tribe – is it right for you? (In response to @SeanEClark’s post.) (huwsayer.wordpress.com)

We often see the Twitter icon on the websites of most big consumer brand websites now, but the question at hand is: How can B2B marketers use Twitter as part of their social media marketing strategy?  Continuing from my recent social media B2B blog case studies post, let’s take a look at 4 successful case studies of how B2B business is developed on Twitter:

Avaya – The Listener

My favorite example of how one tweet set up a 6 figure deal for a B2B company is this one:

shoretel or avaya? Time for a new phone system very soon

The fascinating thing about Twitter, when compared to a LinkedIn or Facebook, is that 1) there are an incredible amount of conversations going on at any given time and 2) for the most part, the information is public.  That’s why social media monitoring tools are so important because you simply can’t humanly monitor what is being said out there.  While most companies focus on the reputation management side of social media monitoring, I believe that monitoring conversations can lead to business opportunities.

Getting back to the above tweet, Avaya was listening, and within 15 minutes responded effectively.

The Bottom Line: 13 days later Avaya closed a $250,000 sale.

B-Co Communications – The Answerer

You don’t have to be a huge B2B enterprise to reap the benefits of Twitter.  Even small, single-person owned companies that are targeting other businesses can take advantage of the same platform.  The beauty of tweeting and social media in general is that it not only levels the playing field for all, it was also made for people, making it easier for smaller businesses to engage with potential clients in a personable and authentic way.

Because Twitter is a public conversation, and there are many media outlets on Twitter, tweeting can indirectly lead to business by receiving media coverage.  This is exactly what happened B-Co Communications, a Canadian PR firm.  Here’s what happened in their words:

…thanks to the power of Twitter, b*co [B-Co Communications] appeared in the Globe & Mail this week! Matt Hartley at the Globe put out a question on Twitter, asking if anyone knew any small businesses that were focused on the Olympics, and if there were any interesting stories…I contacted Matt right away, telling him I thought b*co had a pretty good story. And apparently he agreed!

The Bottom Line: The media coverage that came from that single tweet has allowed B-Co to develop several potential business leads.

Neenah Paper – The Engager

Let’s face it: B2B clients are as distracted by the Internet and social media as anyone else.  People have less time to deal with sales calls, and Neenah Paper found that their target client base of small business owners who were designers, graphic artists, and printers simply were not returning their calls nor agreeing to in-person meetings.

Neenah Paper analyzed the situation and realized that their target customer base was sitting behind a computer the whole day, so why not try to influence them from within the Internet?  This brought Neenah Paper’s marketing into social media, but is was the sales team who took the baton from there and realized that they could easily engage with their potential customers on Twitter and develop business through tweets.

The Bottom Line: Today there are 10 sales reps. who are using their personal Twitter accounts to close new Neenah Paper business.

Windmills Marketing – The Tweeter

If you didn’t know, Windmills Marketing is the name of my social media strategy consulting practice.  And, yes, I have my own B2B success story to share.  I received an email from someone I had never heard of that was interested in my consulting services.  After connecting on the phone, it turned out that the president of a music company had been following my tweets on social media for some time and had finally reached out to me.  “I see from your tweets that you know what you’re talking about, so how can we work together?”

The Bottom Line: One week later I closed the deal for my own social media strategy consulting, and add-on business thereafter has made this client my biggest so far in 2011.

There are endless stories of B2C success stories, but I hope the above case studies give you a sense of the many ways in which business can and is being developed on Twitter from a B2B perspective.

Do you have other examples to share with us or want to showcase how your B2B business leverages Twitter as part of your marketing efforts?  Please chime in and share your B2B case studies with us!

1. Maintain a complete and current bio – you have 160 characters to make your case on a Twitter bio.  Make them count.  Create an engaging, personal, and informative description of what you and your business are about and make it interesting to potential new followers.  Maximize your use of what little real estate Twitter gives you, and remember to embed your profile with associated keywords so that those searching profiles for business expertise can find you.

2. Don’t shorten your URL or web address on your bio page – to some it might look dodgy. Include the complete address so they know where they’re going when they click on the link.  If you want to shorten your URL, use a branded URL shortener like my wind.mn domain you see on my tweets (subject of a future blog post!).  Otherwise, since there is no limitation on the size of your URL on your Twitter bio, don’t make it look like every follower who visits your home page is only a mere metric in your Bit.ly dashboard.

3. Investigate all links you plan on re-tweeting – unless you know the source of the tweet as a trusted authority on a subject and have followed them for awhile, don’t re-tweet a link unless you’ve been there and know what information you’re passing along.  There’s nothing worse than sending your followers to a dead link, especially if it’s pointing them to a questionable website selling snake-oil.  Ultimately, this will hurt your reputation and you will lose followers.

4. Don’t spam your followers – yes, you have a great product or service and you want to get the word out.  However, tweeting exclusively about it will only annoy people and again, you’re trying to build brand loyalty and establish yourself as a useful resource.  Be prudent when sending a message on Twitter about your own products by spacing them out between other valuable tweets.  There are many 20:80 or 1 in 10 rules about the ratio of self-promotional vs. curated content.  I say become an industry resource and try not to tweet more than one self-promotional tweet a day – period.

5. Use good manners, just like in the offline world – of all the etiquette tips, this is just good common sense: Like I always say, “New Tools Old Rules.”  If someone re-tweets your link or information, if at all possible thank them. Remember, if one of your followers re-tweets your information or link, it’s going out to all of their followers.  This is a valuable action, showing trust, and trust is a keystone in any business.  Show your appreciation, and people will be more likely to re-tweet your offerings again and again.

6. Do not DM anything that may appear as spam – needless to say, it’s a bad idea to bulk DM your followers.  Many of them, when receiving an automated or “sales” DM, will unfollow you or block you entirely.  They’ll complain about spam DM’s, others will read about it, and decline to follow you as well. It’s a lose-lose situation.  Save DM’s for personalized messages.

7. Stay away from controversial subjects – the old adage applies here – politics and religion are incendiary topics, and may bring you more trouble than they’re worth. If you’re on a personal account, the sky’s the limit and you can debate anything you like. However, in a business setting, unless it directly pertains to your product or service, it may be best to leave these subjects for another time or account.  Just ask Kenneth Cole, or read my blog post on Twitter content strategy, if you have any doubts.

8. Don’t buy into personal attacks, if they occur – there’s one in every crowd, and Twitterville is no exception. The medium of text communication means a definite margin of misunderstanding because there’s no way to hear someone’s tone of voice or observe their body language. What may be meant as a joke could escalate into something more negative, but it’s wise to just walk away if it seems a conversation is deteriorating into something contentious.  It’s just not worth it.

9. Have fun with it – yes, you may be using Twitter primarily to promote your business or service, but there’s no reason it has to be drudgery. Twitter users are savvy, smart, and can pick up on the nuances of personality through the tweets of others.  Make your messages personable, interesting, and lively.  Keep an eye on the information passing through your own timeline and become involved.  Twitter is truly the most “social” of the social networking platforms that exist.  Take advantage of this to benefit your business.

Twitter is a great platform in which you can promote and build your business and brand loyalty, but it’s a two-way street. It may sound funny, but you must engage in order to engage, keeping in mind these are real people behind those tweets that you see.  Not only are these your potential clients or customers, but they’re potential friends, as well.  Making strong connections with other people is what tweeting is all about, and once you follow these Twitter etiquette tips for business, Twitterville can truly become your oyster.

Related articles

• BlogWorld’s Top 25 Articles & Tips For Using Twitter! (blogworld.com)
• 7 Ways to Thank Someone for a Retweet (convinceandconvert.com)
• The 25 Most Popular Twitter Apps : Have You Heard of Them All? (windmillnetworking.com)
• Is Your Business Making Any of These 5 Common Twitter Mistakes? (windmillnetworking.com)