Posts Tagged Twitter
What’s next for Twitter?
Posted by The Running Start in Online businesses, Random Thoughts on September 14, 2011
Last week, Twitter announced a new milestone – over 100 million active users are now registered with the service. While “40% of Twitter users simply log on to read Tweets from others,” I’m left wondering about what’s next for those who actually publish messages on the platform?
As the company matures, I’m sure that there is a lot of debate over how Twitter should evolve. Charles Arthur from The Guardian raised a good point over whether Twitter should focus on being a “media company or a technology company?”
If they go the way of a media company, helping organizations and individuals to publish their own content and messages in real-time, there are some tools that I’d like to see developed.
I’ve put together a wish list of things that might useful to publishers:
- Enabling people to publish their messages in Rich Text Format. It’s currently difficult to emphasize certain words unless you put them in quotation marks or ALL CAPS.
- Making the hashtag experience less awkward. Perhaps hashtags shouldn’t actually be visible in the Tweet but included somehow on the back-end of a message, just like “meta data” in HTML code? That would also allow more room for your messages, when being limited to 140 characters (another limitation that might need to be altered).
- Making discussions around an event or location easier to find and participate in the conversation. Toronto startup Crowdfield may be on to something with their location-based conversation discovery app. If there are multiple conversations happening simultaneously at a conference or location, it can be confusing to follow just one hashtag at the same time. How does one decipher one conversation from another? There’s got to be a better solution for this.
Timing is everything
Posted by The Running Start in B2B Marketing, Online businesses on March 30, 2011
Yesterday, I listened to Dan Zarrella from HubSpot‘s webinar about the “Science of Timing.” As a blogger and as a social media participant, I thought it would be worthwhile to share some of the insights that he provided. Here’s just a taste of what was discussed:
Timing for social media
Zarrella shared a slide which identifies the best time of day to get Re-Tweets. Content that is Tweeted in the afternoon and evening is much more likely to be Re-Tweeted than in the morning. I’ve seen this same trend happen with my own content. See the HubSpot slide below for scientific proof:
When it comes to Facebook sharing, it appears that weekends are the best time to share content with your “fans”.
Timing for blogs
Zarrella has done a lot of research on when people are most likely to read blogs. He showed data that indicated that blogs are more likely to be read in the morning and during the day. However, when it comes to gender differences, men are more likely than women to read blogs at night. Therefore, if your blog is targeted to male readers, you may want to alter your blog publishing strategy slightly.
Zarrella showed a slide that indicated that weekends are when you are more likely to receive comments from your readers. While most bloggers (myself included) prefer to blog during the week, there is definitely some merit in also blogging on the weekend. See Zarrella’s slide about comment timing below:
There were even more valuable insights presented in the HubSpot webinar yesterday. In case you want to see all of the data, here’s a link to Dan Zarrella’s webinar slides on SlideShare.
5 Cost-effective Ways to Promote Your Tech Event Online
Posted by The Running Start in Entrepreneurs, Online businesses on January 18, 2011
There’s no doubt that events are a great way to promote thought leadership in your industry and drive sales leads if you are a Tech B2B Marketer. If you are just starting up your business and have a limited budget, here are some cost-effective ways to plan and promote your event online.
1. Online guest list applications
There are some great online guest list applications that make it easy for you to manage your RSVPs and sell tickets. There’s a great Canadian web tool ironically called GuestListApp which is free if you are hosting a free event. Otherwise, if you are selling tickets, they just take a small % cut of your ticket sales.
2. Twitter
If you haven’t already built up a Twitter following of your top current and prospective clients, you might want to get started now so that you have an audience to send your event announcements out to when you’re ready to start promoting. Generally, you can expect about 30% of people who you follow will follow you back. You should also create what is known as a hashtag (“#” symbols) for your event and promote it in advance so that people can start talking about your event and find others who are attending your event before the big day. I’d recommend that you Tweet the announcement out at least once a week leading up to your event to ensure that people don’t miss it. Twitter is also a great way to let customers know when you are presenting at a trade show and where people can find you just before and after your presentation.
3. Promotion on blogs
If you have a blog on your website, make sure to let people know about it through that channel. You can also post your event on popular technology blogs to expand your reach if you are trying to get a big turnout. Some popular Canadian Tech blogs are Techvibes and Sprouter.
4. LinkedIn
If you have a company page on LinkedIn, make sure to promote your event through that profile. You can also create a LinkedIn Group for your event to have people follow and comment on your event before, during and after the event has happened. In addition, you should share an update that includes a link to your event website that will be sent to all of the people in your network via your profile news feed. Make sure that all of your employees in your company who have LinkedIn profiles do so as well.
5. E-mail Invitations
This sounds like the simplest and most obvious option for promoting your event but I thought I’d still mention it because it’s much more cost-effective than printed invitations. Plus, most people are used to getting e-mail invitations by now – unless you are hosting an extremely high-profile event for c-level executives or more of a gala type event. There are numerous e-mail marketing tools on the market, including ConstantContact. Just remember to follow Canadian e-mail anti-spam laws when sending an invitation out to a guest list.
If you have other ideas for cost-effective ways to promote an upcoming event, please send me a comment.
Are your ears burning? Here’s a list of Canadian-made tools to help you listen to what your customers say about you online
Posted by The Running Start in Inspiration, Online businesses on January 3, 2011
It has been said that in business, good listeners get the best advice on how to move forward. In the emerging world of social media, this has never been more true. Many tools have been developed to listen to what your customers are saying about your brand and your industry online. If one of your company’s 2011 new year’s resolutions is to listen to your customers more, then you’re in luck. Canada is a hotbed for creating online tools to listen and engage with your customers online.
A few weeks ago, TechVibes reported that Radian6, a Canadian social media monitoring company in New Brunswick, was finishing the year as a market leader by tripling their revenue in 2010 from 2009. They weren’t the only Canadian social media monitoring tool/platform to make a huge impact on the Internet in 2010. Here is a list of some of the top Canadian web-based platforms for listening and engaging with your customers online:
- Radian6 – based in Fredericton, New Brunswick
Radian6 is a web-based platform which aggregates all of the relevant conversations that are happening online regarding your brand and products into one simple dashboard in real-time. The company was named by Forrester Research, Inc. as a “leader” in online listening platforms in Q3, 2010.
- Sysomos – based in Toronto, Ontario
Acquired in July 2010 by MarketWire, Sysomos has also achieved leadership status in the social media monitoring space. Sysomos sets themselves apart via their automated sentiment tool which analyzes billions of conversations online via blogs, social media, video and more to provide insight into consumer sentiment – segmented by gender, age and location.
- Syncapse – based in Toronto, Ontario
Syncapse Corp. also had a momentous year in 2010 – being named company of the year at the Canadian New Media Awards. Syncapse is now a global company and provides a platform for managing and monitoring all of your social media initiatives on one platform. The Syncapse platform also allows you to glean insights to help optimize your efforts, identify your key influencers and measure your ROI.
- HootSuite - based in Vancouver, British Columbia
HootSuite was the first social media dashboard chosen by Twitter in 2010 to exclusively test out their new in-stream ads. They also hit their
one Millionth user mark at the end of 2010. The HootSuite dashboard enables teams to manage multiple Twitter and other social media accounts, track specific keywords that are relevant to your brand, assign Tweets to multiple editors on your team and more.
If you know of other notable Canadian social media monitoring and/or customer listening tools, please post a comment on this blog.
Photo Source: iStockPhoto.com
Placing Your Bets Online for B2B Technology Marketing Channels
Posted by The Running Start in Inspiration, Online businesses on December 29, 2010
In a previous blog post, I talked about whether or not Twitter was a better social media channel for promoting your brand as a B2B Technology marketer than Facebook. After recently reading the Online Marketing Opportunity Report produced by Hubspot, I now have some data to back up my assumptions.
The chart that I pulled from the free report below illustrates both the top online marketing channels for the keyword “software” and the top social media platforms where that keyword is most prevalently searched. Clearly, LinkedIn and Twitter are the top social media channels to target as a marketer promoting technology/software online.
The chart below also points out that blogs are a more popular channel for researching “software” related products online. According to the report, there is also less competition for that keyword on blogs, Twitter and via LinkedIn than there is via search engines. However, I will point out that although Facebook is only a tiny sliver in terms of popularity for searching for terms related to “software”, you’ll also find the least competition if you choose to promote your product there – at least according to the HubSpot report.
Since I like to place strategic bets, I would say that developing a strategy that incorporates blogs, social media (focused on Twitter and LinkedIn) and a some of your budget dedicated towards Search and YouTube would go a long way online as a Tech B2B marketer. Of course, one can never overlook the power of e-mail as a digital marketing channel as well!
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