Top 10 Twitter Etiquette Tips for Business

1. Listen to Your Mother and Mind Your Manners

This is just good common sense. As someone who is a marketing professional first, I always like to say, “New Tools Old Rules.” If someone mentions you or retweets you, if at all possible thank them. Not only do People like to be recognized for their efforts, but this is a valuable action, so not thanking them would be rude. This is also a great way to begin building a relationship on Twitter. This small gesture may open the lines of communication between you and a potential customer or business partner. Show your appreciation and people will be more likely to re-tweet your offerings again and again. Even better, return the favor and retweet one of their posts.

2. Use #Hashtags Appropriately

I personally love hashtags. They are a great way to encourage participation not to mention help others track and find information. Having said that, it is important not to overuse them. While I like the long hashtag as much as the next person, using it too often or putting a hashtag in front of every word of your post will do nothing more than annoy your followers.

3. Resist the Urge to Tweet Too Much

Time and time again, research has shown that there is a fine line between just enough sharing and too much. Oftentimes businesses that are new to Twitter don’t yet understand this principle. Don’t fill your followers’ feeds with spammy Tweets. The best way to engage your audience is to post relevant, interesting, useful, and original content. Before you post, ask yourself: “Would I care about this if I were a follower?”

Tip: If you have a lot of ideas, use a program like Hootsuite to schedule your tweets so that they can be spaced out.

4. Warn Followers if You’re Going to Tweet a Lot

If you want to live-tweet an event at your business or charity gathering, you will need to tweet a lot!. While it’s a good idea, you may lose followers who feel assaulted by a barrage of tweets. A little fair warning will be much appreciated, and your followers will likely give you a pass for the day.

Most of what you put on your own site is under your control.

That statement often surprises people. They expect me to say that everything you put on your own site is controllable by you. Technically that’s true but there are a few parts of your site where what you decide to put there is ignored.

The first of these items is the page title.

This is supposed to be used by Google for the blue underlined link in the search results. Most of the time, that’s what they do.

But if your site is listed in the Open Directory (Dmoz) then Google will substitute the title from there in the search results unless you tell it otherwise by using the following meta tag on your pages:

meta name=”robots” content=”noodp”

That will then tell Google not to over-ride your page titles most of the time. But – sorry control freaks – that doesn’t mean they won’t over-ride the title if their computer thinks it can come up with a better title with regard to the search that’s just been carried out. This doesn’t happen often and there doesn’t seem to be much you can do when it does happen.

If you use more than about 65 characters in your page title then the search engines will truncate them. The length of your titles is under your control so make sure that they’re not cut off in their prime!

The second item out of your control is the page description.

If your web designer hasn’t put a meta description in each of your pages then you’ve given Google free rein to put whatever text it thinks best below your page title in the search results.

If you use more than about 155 characters then the description will be truncated, sometimes back to the end of the last word that will fit into the space available and sometimes back to the end of the previous sentence. There doesn’t seem to be as much logic to this process as you’d imagine, although I’m sure that some excellent programmers at Google would assure you otherwise.

But even if you’ve got your meta description perfectly crafted, Google can still substitute something else at its discretion if it thinks that it can “write” something more relevant for that particular search.

The third on-site part of the search engine optimization that isn’t totally under your control are the links on your pages.

Computers break every now and then. That goes for links as much as anything else.

Your internal links should always be perfect. But, just in case they’re not, it’s worth examining the error logs for your site. They can usually be found in your control panel and are worth checking on a very regular basis.

For example, page names are often case sensitive so it’s easy to get these muddled up, especially if you’re uploading pages from a Windows computer onto a Linux host.

External links are theoretically under your control – which means Google will likely penalize you if they point to bad neighborhoods.

You need to check your external links on a regular basis. Other sites may have simply ceased to exist. Or they could have changed their site layout so the page you were linking to no longer exists. Or a plethora of other reasons. It’s best to use a real person rather than a computer program to do this checking.

We won’t get into off-site SEO in this article. That’s another can of worms and definitely not something for a control freak to examine lightly!

While the potential is there for social media branding, many companies and businesses fall far short of their goals due to poor planning and implementation. They forget about what makes social media so powerful: socializing.

Anyone can set up a social media account and start posting updates, links and pictures. But it takes strategy to make a social media profile work for your business, strategy that many brands miss. Facebook and Twitter are riddled with posts and links that are strictly promotional. They post links to their newest items for sale, special offers and discounts, inspirational quotes from famous people, and links to their latest articles.

While the above posts are an important aspect of social media marketing strategies, they fall short if left unbalanced without the social aspect. Good social media gurus don’t just share their links and promotions with their potential customers, they share conversations and create friendships with their loyal followers.

How to Really Connect With Followers

Effective Social Media Marketers should:

1. Promote products, services, and deals less often and instead share advice, tips, and tools that enrich their followers’ lives, inspiring them to share those same tips with their followers and friends. Thus begins the viral marketing campaign via social media.

2. Never ignore messages, comments, and posts from followers and fans. Social media gurus are responsible for reaching out to followers as friends and equals, emphasizing the “social” in social media.

3. Repost and share helpful information and tips from followers, fans and customers. For example, if a business focuses on the sale of baking products, featuring recipes and photos from fans via social media will excite followers and promote more sharing, growing the brand online.

4. Actively engage in conversations with fans and followers; thank them for sharing the company’s message, products, services, and posts; and form relationships and strategic alliances with customers. Make followers and customers feel important while remembering that they are important to the survival of the business.

5. Reach out to bloggers via social media, offering compensation such as free products and services in exchange for a rave review or hosting a giveaway, which will then be shared via social media. This turns the follower’s audience into the company’s audience for very little investment.

6. Put a face to the social media profile, especially on Twitter. Social media users want to know they are conversing with a person, not an entity. By giving the company an individual’s voice, it enables a true bond to be formed. This could mean having multiple accounts so that the CEO, CMO, and head of customer relations are all involved in SMM efforts.

By employing the ideas above and brainstorming potential strategies unique to a business’s brand, companies can, and often do, execute successful social media campaigns for Internet marketing that go above and beyond their own expectations.

“Hey, I just liked your Facebook fan page! Please like mine back!” ~ Random

Now, I don’t know about you, but every time this happens to me, I feel awkward. What if I look at this person’s page and determine it’s junk? What if it’s spammy? What if it holds little value in the world at all? The burden! The obligation! All from a single note from someone I’ve never met!

Gasp. What if I don’t like their page?

I try to bring value to my websites. I try to inject interesting content, helpful tips and a wealth of wisdom in my contributions to the Internet community.

In addition, it takes a lot to “wow” me. I’ve never just “liked,” or “followed,” or “retweeted” someone just to be nice. Oh, wait..that’s not true.

In The Beginning

In the world of search engine marketing (SEM, commonly and erroneously referred to as SEO the same way everyone insists on calling all facial tissues “Kleenex,” there is a technique referred to as “back linking.” Back linking (spelled backlinking, back linking or back-linking, depending on who you talk to) is an activity whereby you add your website to niche directories, submit articles, post videos and podcasts, post blog comments and more – all of which include one-way links back to your website.

Of course, the result is simple to guess. The more conduits leading back into your website, the more traffic you have, and the more conversions (sign-ups, comments, calls, sales, etc.,) you should receive, right? That’s the theory, in a nutshell.

Well, humans are ingenious beasts. It wasn’t long before people figured out you could swap links and accomplish similar results. Google caught on, slapped everyone, and reciprocal link campaigns lost their value.

Then came link farms, where links between sites were less direct, placing sites in a circular chain of links. Google figured that out too, mostly.

During all this, social media was blooming. Blossoming. Exploding.

One booming social channel was called Twitter. Maybe you’ve heard of it? Personally, I resisted Twitter at first. The notion of a glorified text messaging system seemed a faddish time-eater to me. As a business owner and father of four, I am busy enough as it is. Eventually, I gave in, signed up and thus began my fall from grace.

I Blame Twitter

From day one, I began to see the “if you follow me, I’ll follow you” phenomenon in Twitter. Being new to Twitter country, I took this virtual exchange with random strangers to simply be part of the Twitter culture. “This is what you do with Twitter,” I said to myself. To play the game, you must first learn the rules and I figured following random people (especially if they followed you) was how you played the game.

Occasionally, I would see a Twitter account that did not follow this pattern. Usually, this person was a celebrity, so they would have a million followers in contrast to the five people they were following. These examples were not the norm, however.

Enter Facebook

Born two years earlier than Twitter, Facebook was all about connecting friends. As time passed and dreams of monetization increased, fan pages were created. As fan pages were created, people and companies began to realize the power of “likes.” This power – similar to Twitter, whereby a broadcast became more powerful with the growing size of the fan base – was a real turn-on to anyone who understood the marketing principles of exposure and amplitude. Want to extend your reach on the most popular social network on the planet? Get more “likes.”

How do you get more “likes” you ask. Provide greater value. Increase your engagement. Maintain dialogues. Be entertaining. Be remarkable. “All that takes work, Matt!” you say. “What if we just trade “likes?” That sounds easier.” True.

Welcome to “Back Liking”

I see a problem with reciprocal “like” campaigns. For one, social media is supposed to be about connection and engagement; not spamming. It’s similar to getting spam on your cellphone. Your cellphone is a very personal conduit into you, like your Facebook newsfeed. Who wants it junked up with spammy broadcasts and solicitations? Yuck.

Another problem with “like” reciprocity campaigns is the dilution of your “like” power. How can anyone trust you as a person of influence if you “like” 3,000 pages and many of them are junk or of little value. If you have “liked” 3,000 quality resources, that’s another matter; good for you.

Afterglow

This brings me back to my initial point. “Liking” someone back out of pure reciprocity and not from a place of belief in them or their message:

- squanders your influence (a currency advertisers pay social networks handsomely for),

- soils your newsfeed (and your attention) with posts and ads irrelevant to you, and

- fails to reflect you and your tastes accurately.

I believe one of the best ways we can shine in the world – including the virtual world of social media – is to show integrity in our communications with others. Our daily challenge is to bring that integrity to every corner of our presence, both online and offline.

The next time someone asks you to “like” them back, make sure you can do so with a true heart and a clear conscience.

In support of your efforts,

Matt

But too many times I see companies plastering up a Facebook page just because everyone else is doing it. Or, they shoot out a few tweets and after a few days or weeks give up because no one is paying attention.

Is social media the right tool for your business? Here are some guidelines to help you use social media as a strategic marketing
tool:

1. Have a purpose. Like any other marketing strategy, social media should be a tool that helps you meet a goal. You wouldn’t just go out and start buying ads without knowing what you want to accomplish, so don’t do it with social media. It might not cost anything to start a Facebook page, but there is a cost in time and that’s also a valuable resource.

2. Don’t sell. Social media is social. People use it to relate to one another and just like you wouldn’t walk into a party and start pitching your wares, you shouldn’t hard-sell on social media, either. There are ways to get people talking about your products or services, but you have to tread softly or risk losing your audience.

3. Be prepared to invest time and effort into your social media marketing. You will need to understand your target audience and how best to approach them. You need to understand what interests them, and know what it is you have to say that is valuable to that audience. Don’t post or tweet just to do it – make sure you have something to say or you will quickly be dropped by your readers.

4. Understand social media and use it yourself. There is no better way to understand Yelp, Chime In, Twitter, etc. than to participate and use them regularly.

5. Tie your efforts together and integrate them with your overall marketing strategy. You should not be doing something completely different online than you are doing offline. Avoid the split personality – don’t try to be hip and cool online if you are a traditional, conservative business offline. You risk damaging your brand and alienating online audiences who can see right through that.

6. Keep up with the changes. New sites are emerging all the time. Auction sites, gaming sites, photo sharing and music sharing – they are all expanding their focus to include building communities. Some of those communities are bound to include potential customers.

7. If you don’t have time to do it yourself, find someone who can. Often companies have younger employees who are well versed in social media and could, with guidelines, represent the company. There are many agencies that will help you with this.

8. Have guidelines. This ties in with #1 because your guidelines will be driven by your purpose. Establish guidelines for anyone posting on behalf of the company about what they can and cannot say. If you don’t want to put pricing on social media, say so. Be clear about what employees can post on their personal sites, as well.

9. Monitor constantly. Many experts in the field recommend that you start your social media adventure by listening first. Find out what your customers and others might be saying about you online. Once you are active in social media, be sure to set up Google Alerts and other tracking to monitor what is being said.

10. React but don’t overreact. If you see something posted about your company online that you don’t like, feel free to respond. But don’t get overly emotional about it, and don’t fire back. Respond with basic facts and a real desire to solve the customer’s problems – that will gain you a lot of credibility from anyone else who sees the exchange. And remember, one complaint is just one complaint, so don’t overreact.

11. Enjoy it. This is a new way to engage your customers and draw in new customers. People of every age are participating in social media, from teenagers to grandmothers, and it is a growing part of our culture. As you bring your business into the discussion, you may find raving fans who will provide recommendations for you.

12. Online marketing is a tool – it doesn’t replace your other marketing efforts. Sure, a lot of what used to be advertised in print media is now online. But there is still an important role for all of the other marketing tools including public relations, direct mail and advertising. Like your toolbox, each tool has a different purpose and you wouldn’t use a hammer to sand wood. Online (or inbound) marketing is a great resource that is very cost effective for businesses, but it must be a part of the larger marketing strategy or it will fail.

So, how do you know if it’s time to break up with your SEO content writer?

1. You’ve Been Taken Out for a Spin

When your boyfriend shows up to take you for a spin in his new car, that’s a good thing. When your SEO content writer takes you for a spin – as in shoving your stuff through an article spinner – that’s a bad thing. So bad, in fact, that it means it’s time to call it quits.

I actually landed one of my biggest SEO clients this way. The firm’s president caught his content writer spinning stuff, instead of manually rewriting it like he was supposed to do. Their break-up was a messy one, since the SEO firm now had to pay me to re-do all of the other guy’s work (and, believe me, the content was a mangled mess!). But for my client, ending the relationship was absolutely essential for the survival of his business. After all, who can establish a solid reputation when they’re publishing junk content everywhere?

2. You Were Cheated On

Cheating is a big no-no in any relationship, including the one you have with your SEO content writer.

How can your writer possibly cheat on you?

By handing over work he did for you as a “sample” to a potential new client. This is a huge deal for a couple of reasons:

- First, you’re the copyright owner of that content, not your writer. So, it’s not his to give out to anyone.

- Second, who knows what this person is going to do with your content now that he’s got it. There’s nothing to prevent him from publishing it under his own name, sending it out to his email subscribers, or using it as a chapter in his next ebook. As soon as it leaves your writer’s inbox, your content is de-valued.

When your SEO content writer cheats on you like this, it’s no different from seeing your girlfriend out on a date with another guy – and you have just as much reason to be angry.

3. Your Second Date Wasn’t as Good as the First

We’ve all been there – you go out on a date with someone, and you think you’ve hit it off. Then, for some reason, the second date is a total dud.

Your SEO content writer can pose the same problem.

Let’s say you place an order, and everything was just awesome. You’re so excited to have found a decent content writer that you can’t wait to place another order. But that second batch just isn’t very good.

What’s the deal?

It’s a common ploy in the SEO content writing world – do whatever it takes to land a client, then slack off and cut corners once you’ve got one. Lots of subpar writers assume that you’re way too busy to go through the entire vetting process again to find another writer. They figure you’ll stick with them because it’s “easier.”

Here’s the bottom line – good SEO content writers will deliver high-quality stuff whether it’s your first order or your 1,000th order. In the content writing world, dealing with “duds” is completely unacceptable.

4. You Just Don’t Mesh Well

Personal relationships fizzle out every day because, sadly, some people just aren’t compatible. It’s no different with your SEO content writer. Even if your writer tries really hard and his heart is in the right place, he may not be able to give you a finished product that meshes with your brand or your company’s style.

Like in any relationship, communication with your SEO content writer is crucial. If you want witty content, tell your writer that upfront. If you want a more formal tone, let your writer know. But if your writer knows exactly what you’re looking for, and still can’t deliver, it’s time to break up.

5. You Don’t Have Time for Him

You see it all the time – people break up because their busy lives make it impossible to devote a lot of time and energy to their relationship. Unlike a romantic relationship, you shouldn’t have to devote a lot of time to your SEO content writer.

Good writers can work without too much direction from you. Remember, you’re paying them to save you time! If you have to hold your content writer’s hand, then go through and clean up his work once he’s finished, you’re devoting way too much time to him – and it’s time to break things off.