3 Twitter Tools for a Viral Marketing Campaign
By Last week Guy Kawasaki moderated a webinar entitled “From Brainstorm to Firestorm: Creating an Environment for Viral Marketing Success”. He began the session with a 20-minute tutorial on how to be a power Twitter user. My interest was particularly piqued because up until that point, I just hadn’t “gotten” the point of Twitter. As one of the savviest marketers in the world, Mr. Kawasaki has sat through more business plan pitches than he cares to remember. So when he lavishes such special praise on a new technology and then proceeds to detail how he uses it daily, it's worth my while to pay close attention. So what is the point of Twitter?
From a broad perspective, it's most powerfully used to reinforce your personal or corporate brand by keeping people abreast of what you are doing and occupying your followers’ top-level mind-share. Mr. Kawasaki defines Twitter as a broadcast mechanism that can be used to increase one’s online followers. Just like Facebook, LinkedIn, blogging, etc. But, at a maximum of 140 characters per post, logarithmically more focused.
He asks: How do you increase your online followers? By being more interesting and by providing as many interesting links as possible. How do you become more interesting and find as many interesting links as possible? By using tools that automate the experience and get your followers to become engaged in what you have to say.
He discussed 3 tools to automate the tweeting process:
1. Objective Marketer 2. Twitterfeed 3. Twitterhawk
Objective Marketer is a set of scheduling and analytics tools that allows you to create and organize Twittering campaigns to get your interesting posts dispersed to your followers. As a scheduling tool, you can post immediately or schedule a post in advance. For instance, you might actually have a day job. Since you might do most of your posting in the morning before work, you could schedule those tweets to be posted on a regular schedule throughout the day, so that your audience is constantly reminded of your presence and relevance as they follow their own Twitter accounts through the day. You could also set posts to repeat after a certain period of time, to reinforce your message to your followers.As an analytics tool, Objective Marketer analyzes click-thrus to present a broad picture of how all of your Twitter posts are being read, clicked on and buzzed about to others.
Twitterfeed is a tool that utilizes RSS feeds. It automates integrating RSS feeds into your Twitter feed. You can even place a blog into your Twitter feed to keep the posts coming at regular intervals.
Twitterhawk allows you to create a targeted marketing campaign on Twitter. You can search for a specific stream and automatically respond to it with a Tweet.
In addition to these tools suggested by Mr. Kawasaki, a powerful way that I’ve used Twitter is to search keywords for topics, people and companies in which I am interested. Then I can add them to my list of people that I follow and hopefully convert them to followers of my own Twitter account. For instance, I follow Duarte Design, Guy Kawasaki, Tech Crunch, Mashable and other companies in the technology space.
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