September 30, 2015 by EziSell

Top 5 Reasons to Use Twitter for Your Business

Founded in 2006, Twitter is a real-time social networking site that has gone on to draw in over 500 million regular users. Although similar to other popular social media sites, the main attraction that sets Twitter apart is called a “Tweet.”

Tweets are short, public messages limited to 140 characters or less that lets users share updates, ideas, questions, announcements and more. As more and more people go mobile, Twitter is quickly becoming the favorite social media application for smartphone users.

Many companies have already realized the power of Twitter and how beneficial it can be to businesses. If you’re still trying to decide if Twitter is right for your business, consider the following:

* Twitter helps businesses get exposure in several ways. Once you start tweeting, your messages have the potential of trending for millions of users to see. If you consistently tweet interesting and authentic information about your business, your tweets may even go viral, meaning other sites will pick up on your information and spread the word about your company. This allows invaluable information about your company and the services you offer to potentially to reach prospective customers quite easily.

* Twitter is a great way to network with other businesses in your industry and follow their progress. In other words, Twitter gives you an inside view of how the competition is doing by simply following their tweets. Additionally, you may find different ways to market your products/services by learning what other successful businesses in your industry are doing on Twitter.

* Twitter is one of the easiest ways to provide customer service. When your followers ask questions, all it takes is a few minutes to reply. Additionally, tweets are in real-time. Customers and followers will see your message just as soon as it’s posted, and can easily reply back to you with a click of a button.

* Twitter is one of the most efficient social media websites. If you’re busy, yet need to promote your business effectively, Twitter’s 140 word character limit along with the site’s ease of use will help you quickly say what you need to say within a matter of minutes. If you need more characters, consider using hashtags. Hashtags, words with the # symbol in front, will reduce your character count and put your keywords into Twitter’s search engine. For example, if you’re having a sales promotion, simply tweet #promotion and your keyword will be searchable to other users.

* Tweets are now starting to show up in most of the major search engines. For this to happen, however, there is a little bit of work involved on your part. By providing consistent tweets with the proper keywords on a regular basis, your tweets, along with your company website and other social media sites, have a better chance of moving up to the first page of Google, Yahoo!, and other major search engine results. Since most people click on the links that show up on the first page, having your company’s information rank as high as possible is imperative.

September 10, 2015 by EziSell

Twitter Advertising Seeks to Evolve with New “ads editor” Tool

Advertising on social media has been a dominant force for several years now. In fact, search advertising has even taken a hit in recent years due to the amount of time people spend browsing social networking sites. It’s not like Google’s trembling in their Adwords boots right now, but it’s probably been on their radar.

That said, social advertising has had the disadvantage of being relatively uncertain for a time, due to the platforms and tools that facilitate it not having as much time to evolve like the ones that support more traditional online advertising. Twitter, long the number two social media network in the English-speaking world, is looking to rectify this by rolling out a feature they call “ads editor” – yes, all lower case – which allows advertisers to bulk edit the parameters and copy of their twitter ads using excel spreadsheet uploads. The use of such techniques is far from new, but it could certainly be a blessing for those who manage hundreds or thousands of different twitter advertisements for their clients’ campaigns (or their own, for that matter).

Things like end dates, budgets, and targeting criteria can be changed en masse by simply downloading a spreadsheet of your campaign, making the appropriate edits, and re-uploading it, explains twitter’s project manager Deepak Rao. Once uploaded, a single click will apply the changes you’ve specified to all affected campaigns; it’s that easy.

The tool will be especially useful to large-volume advertisers, who have the budget to bankroll massive trial and error campaigns based around hashtags and keywords much in the same way Adwords giants work: They begin with ads based around thousand of keywords, sometimes with multiple variants of copy each, and slowly trim the fat, taking away those that perform poorly and focusing instead on split-testing frontrunners. In theory, twitter’s new ads editor will allow advertisers to conduct these types of changes with relative ease compared to the manual editing required before.

Of course, your own intuitive (or learned) marketing savvy will be your best tool here, but no one ever complained about a little time-saving help from technology, right? The tool itself is not available to the public yet, but twitter plans to begin rolling it out to select advertising partners over the next few days. These individuals and firms will get the first chance to test the new product, before twitter expects to have the platform fully rolled out for everyone within two to three weeks. If you’re keep to see if you’re one of the chosen few for this tiered testing, keep your eyes peeled for a notification from ads.twitter.com

Of course, early skeptics of the tool have already emerged, arguing that the use of such a primitive tool as Excel might mean limiting the capabilities of users on ads editor. For example, finding a simple way to factor potential reach and suggested bid into spreadsheets will be difficult, as a spreadsheet will exist as a static, offline document once you edit it on your computer. If the tool worked in a browser-based office variant, however, it might be able to make suggestions in real time in accordance with your edits.

Of course, only time will tell how well the tool actually catches on, but here’s to hoping for the best.

May 30, 2015 by EziSell

‘Pin’ a Tweet to the Top of Your Twitter Profile to Attract More Traffic

Do you have a Tweet pinned to the top of your profile on Twitter? Wait, wrong social media network, right?

Not really. Twitter will actually let you “pin” a Tweet to the top of our Twitter stream so that people visiting your page will always see that particular Tweet first, as opposed to the default setup in which your most recent posting appears on top.

What are the benefits of this? Well, first you have more control over what visitors see when they land on our Twitter feed (uh, duh!). But that means that you can create whatever kind of image you want to project, something that can be extremely helpful if you use your Twitter feed primarily to support your other Internet marketing platforms or offers.

There’s also a social benefit. For example, if you want to attract members of the opposite sex or people with similar interests to yours, you can “pin” the most appropriate Tweet so that it’s always present at the top of your page – such as the photo where you appear most buff, or something related to your hobby or interests.

If you use Twitter a lot, not everything you post is going to be something you want to represent who you are to other Twitter users. For example, you may Share something you found funny but that other people might find offensive. Or you could Tweet something off the cuff that could be taken out of context later.

This is something that happens to sports starts and celebrities all the time. Who’s to say you are immune to it, especially if you are prone to “Tweeting under the influence”.

Setting It Up

Setting up the Tweet you want to pin to the top of your Twitter feed is super easy. All you go to the Tweet you want pinned, then click on the “…” icon at the bottom right hand corner. (You probably never noticed this before, did you?) Then all you have to do is simply click on the “Pin to your profile page” option and there you go.

Make sure you pick a Tweet that truly represents the image you want to project. In other words, don’t just arbitrarily pick some Tweet you think is pretty funny or an okay picture of you. Remember, you only get one chance to make a good impression. Twitter is worldwide and your profile could potentially be visited by thousands of different people, so you want to make sure you get it right the first time.

And if you don’t, well, you can always change it later anytime you want!

The Downside

The biggest drawback to this is the pinned Tweets on your profile can’t be seen by people who access the social media site from their smart phones. And, let’s face it, Twitter and mobile phones were made for each other. When was the last time you accessed Twitter from your PC or laptop? It was probably at least a couple of years ago.

So will posting your best Tweet to the top of your Twitter profile actually make a difference? Let’s put it this way: It couldn’t hurt. You can’t control how people what kind of devices people use to access your Twitter profile. If someone does happen to stumble upon (oops! Wrong site again) your Twitter feed from their laptop or PC and they do happen to like your great Tweet enough to re-Tweet it, well, then that’s bonus!

The bottom line is that if you want to increase your popularity on Twitter and do a better job of managing your reputation, why not pin the best Tweet possible to the top of your profile?