1. Connecting With Your Customers With Twitter

Hands down this is the Number 1 reason – why you should use Twitter for your business. This is a fantastic way to stay in touch with your customers and it takes seconds to do.  There are plenty of apps for your Smart Phones to use Twitter directly from your phone so you don’t even need a computer.  The idea is to send a message or two throughout the day about what might be happening at your store or restaurant or hair salon or whatever business you have.  The customers that are on your Twitter list will receive the message, think about your store and it that is all that happens it is a positive.  You can certainly prompt them to do more with coupons or notices of upcoming events, etc.  We will talk more about that later.  The point here is staying in the front of your customers mind is a key ingredient to getting more business, period.  

2. Customer Feedback From Twitter

Your customers will be able to interact as well and good news is always great but if someone responds negatively you will have a chance to rectify the situation and solve the problem and Tweet about it.  This will not only help the disgruntled customer, who might normally have just retained the unhappiness, and given yourself a real chance at keeping that customer long term but also attracting more customers because they see how attentive you are.

3. Increase Sales With Twitter

In many cases you will see a direct increase in sales once your account is up and running and you are posting to it regularly.  Other cases may be a more indirect sales result, i.e. retaining customers – like the example above.  The fact is by communicating with your customers only good things will come from it – usually in the form of an increase in sales

For all you folks who use Firefox, I’ve found a great little extension that you can download for free.  It’s called Twitterbar.  It allows you to post your comments to your Twitter Account directly from your Address URL without having to log into your Twitter Account!  Pretty Cool.  FYI – the picture below is the only change you’ll notice on your screen, so you won’t have to re-learn where your stuff is at.

You can also search the entire land of Twitter, and all social media, with the TwitterBar as well!  Just type in what you are looking for and add –search and it will bring up what you are looking for.

Click Here to go to the Download Site –> TwitterBar

This class will teach you how to take advantage of some websites and tools that are out there so that you can socially network your Twitter Accounts while you sleep. It is truly a very cool little. In this class we’ll teach you how to listen to words that you’re interested in that people are currently tweeting about. Then, once a word is heard, your twitter account will automatically follow the people who said such tweets. After that, if they follow you back, which is the norm, your twitter account will automatically reply with a direct message that you have composed ahead of time. During all of this cool automation, your twitter account will also be automatically sending out tweets to all of your followers on a regular basis. It does this by automatically sending them RSS URL feeds of related articles that you and your followers are interested in (based on what word tweets you are listening to) which it finds out on the web. There are also a couple of maintenance tools used in this class to automatically trim off the people you are following, but who are not following you back.

Please take your time and go thru the class step by step. Some of these instructions are a little tedious, but, if you’re patient, and experiment around a little, you’ll understand it very easily and soon be on your way to having thousands of tweople following you.

1) Go to http://www.tweetlater.com – A system that automatically follows people back when they follow you and automatically sends them a welcome message.

a. Add a new twitter account: you can manage multiple twitter accounts if you wish.

b. Check the Auto Welcome box: “Automatically send a message to new followers.”

c. Send this Message; Type in the message you’d like to automatically send to new followers

d. Check the Auto Follow box; “Automatically follow people (new followers) who follow me from this point forward.

e. Check the Auto Unfollow box. This is because Twitter will not let you follow more than 2000 people if you have less than 1850 people following you. At that point, you can only follow 10% more people than those who are following you.

f. Hit the save button.

2) Twollo.com – Allows you to “listen” in on language targeted conversations on Twitter. When Twollo.com “hears” a word you’re listening for, it will automatically follow the person who Tweeted that word.

a. Login in with your Twitter Name and Password

b. Set the “Follow” field “up to 500” and use the “English Speaking” setting.

c. In the “Twitters talking about” field you add the “word/s” you want to “listen” for.

d. Click the “Add” button.

e. You can do this for as many words that you would like to listen to.

f. FYI – If you want to listen to “Gardening Tips” it is better to add the word “Gardening” and then a separate word, “Tips.” Also, add the word “Tip,” too, because it will not recognize the “Tip” in the word “Tips.”

3) Content Feeder – Feeds your Twitter Account with timely and relevant articles.

a. Google.com/alerts – You’ll need a google gmail account for this to work so set one up.

b. Google.com/alerts searches for keywords that you are interested in.

c. In the “Search Terms” field, enter the word or subject you are interested in following. Hint – Use the same words that you are listening for in your Twollo.com account.

Tip: Type “allintitle:gardening” in “Search Terms” field to narrow your search terms to only those articles on the web that have the term you’re looking for in the Title only. This usually provides more relevant articles that you are looking for.

d. In the “Type” field select “Comprehensive.”

e. In the “How Often” field select “As it Happens.”

f. In the “Deliver To” field make sure your Gmail address is properly in there.

g. Click “Create Alert.”

h. You can add as many “Alerts” as you like.

i. NEXT – Now that you have the various words you’d like to be listening for on the internet, we’ll want to automatically feed these articles to our twitter account.

i. Click the “Edit” button to the right of any particular word in your alerts list.

ii. Change to “Deliver To” field from “Email” to “Feed”. This will automatically change the “How Often” field to “As it happens” if you don’t already have it set that way.

iii. Click the “Save” button.

j. NEXT – Click the “Feed” button in the “Deliver To” column on any particular word that is in your list. This will take you to a page that has some XML code in it.

i. Look thru the code. The first time you see the code href= then you’ll want to highlight and copy everything that is in between the quotation marks “ “ right after it.

1. For example – href=”http://www.google.com/alertsfeeds05464156156”/> In the above example you will have highlighted and copied everything that is underlined. Don’t highlight the quote marks themselves.

k. NEXT – Go to http://bit.ly

i. In the Post to Twitter area set up a new account or if you already have, sign in here with your Twitter Account and Password

ii. Once you’ve signed in to Bitly, then you’ll want to “Set up your Twitter account.”

iii. On the Left side of the Screen you’ll see your API Login and API Key – Highlight and copy both of these.

l. NEXT – Go to http://www.twitterfeed.com

i. Click the “Login to Twitterfeed” using your Open ID field

ii. Click the drop down button and click Google.

iii. Then click Login. It may ask you if you want to login as the google account that it shows. Click continue to sign in. If it doesn’t work that way, open another page and make sure your logged in to the google account that you’ve set up and then repeat these steps.

iv. Click Continue to sign in.

v. Click the go to my twitterfeeds (or create a new one) field.

vi. Click the Create a New Feed field

vii. You’ll want to Create a New “Twitter” Feed – Select Twitter from the Drop Down

viii. Enter your Twitter Username and Password Click the Test button to make sure you’ve entered this info correctly

ix. In the RSS Feed URL paste the URL code from the Google Alerts page that you copied (from step j.i.1 above) Click the Test Button to make sure you’ve entered this info correctly

x. Enter the Update Frequency and Post Up to quantities that you would like.

xi. Enter the Include – “Title and Description” field that you would like. You’ll usually want to choose the “Title Only” field because you are only allowed up to 140 characters on your Twitters.

xii. Check the Box for Include the Link

xiii. Choose the Bit.ly field in the “Shorten Link thru” field.

xiv. Paste your Bit.ly API Login and the Bit.ly API Key in the fields that appear.

xv. Skip the other items

xvi. Make sure the “Active” box is checked.

xvii. Click Create

xviii. Notes – Once this is up and running for a while, you can go back to your bitly account and click the Home button. You can then see the RSS Feeds that have been posted to your Twitter Account. If you click on the Info button by each posting, you’ll be able to see how many people clicked on the URL Feed, where they came from, how many people ReTweeted your feed, etc.

4) http://search.twitter.com – Finds people with similar interests

a. Click the Advanced Search button

b. Fill in the fields you would like to search.

c. Click on the various peoples links, go to their Twitter Page and click on their “Follow” button if you’d like to follow them. Once you get “warmed up” you can end up following 100’s of people per hour.

d. If the person you follow is really intriguing, you may want to follow all the people they follow.

5) http://www.twellow.com – Another way to find people with similar interests to follow. This sight searches words in the Twitters Bio. The results pages lists the people according to the amount of followers they have.

a. Use the same steps as the ones in 4) above.

6) Unfollowing People with http://dossy.org/twitter/karma

a. Enter your Twitter Username and Password

b. Hit the Whack button

Go to http://www.internetlaunchmarketing.com/11daystolimitlesstraffic.htm for a Free 11 day class on how to get more traffic to your website.

I have been building websites for some friends and clients since I learned how easy it is to set up Wordpress sites. It is amazing how many applications are available as plug-ins and widgets and its all free. You can add practically anything you need to your site as a plug-in. So when a client asked me if it would be possible to display multiple twitter service accounts to his site I said, “of course we can”. Well, I soon learned that I had violated the assumption rule.

First, I will tell you about the application because I think its pretty cool. The site is for one of the largest concrete pouring companies in Atlanta. Their crews are on multiple sites on a daily basis and they want to have each crew leader submit tweets throughout the day from their phone with pictures and info about what they are doing. That way anyone visiting their website can follow the activities of the day – real time. Each crew leader has his own twitter account so there will be multiple tweets from multiple users coming into the website. I think this is an amazing application of social media to mainstream business. It has followers written all over with good solid information being posted. People will read the feeds on twitter and see them on the site and instantly know these people are experts at what they are doing. It also has that real world thing going on. People like that – they connect with that.

When I started to search for this application I thought it would be pretty easy to find since I knew there were plug-ins for bringing twitter feeds into your site. I found many different plug-ins for adding single account twitter feeds to your site but I could not find anything to accomplish what I was trying to do. After spending a couple of days looking for this particular application I finally found something that seemed promising. As I looked deeper into the listing I had found with my gazillionth Google search there seemed a glimmer of hope. I was a little skeptical after being led down many dead ends over the last couple of days. Unbelievably, after some investigation it still smelled good. It looked good – Hmmm – just maybe this would work. Amazing. After countless searches I was looking at a page of code that was saying it was going to do exactly what I was looking for. It wasn’t a plug-in though, just a page of code. It had been written by a young man in Colorado named Ryan Barr.

Ryan had written a three part series of projects to bring twitter feeds into a site. Part one was about pulling a single twitter users last tweet into a site. Part two was about pulling multiple tweets from a single user into a site. And part three was dead on about what I was looking for. Thank God, the search was over. I was pretty amazed that it had taken me this long to find this application. There were some things I had found along the way that sounded like it was going to do what I needed but after further investigation they all just worked with one twitter account.

It took me a little bit of time to figure out how I was going to get Ryan’s code to work on my site. What I ended up doing was hard coding Ryan’s php code into the sidebar of the theme I was working with. It worked like a charm.

Here is the code Ryan wrote in his blog to make it happen. You can change the variables at the top to meet your needs. There is a description and an example below the code to detail how to change the variables. Ryan was very thorough and attentive to making sure his program was as user friendly as possible.

<?php

?>

If you notice, the upper half of the script contains a few variables (each with a description of what each one does) that will modify how your Twitter block is displayed. Here are the eight variables that can be changed: $usernames, $limit, $show, $prefix, $prefix_sub, $wedge, $suffix_sub, $suffix. Let’s go over what each one does:

• $usernames – Which username’s the script will pull tweets from, separated by spaces. (" ")
• $limit – How many tweets for the script to pull. (Twitter set the maximum to 100 tweets.)
• $show – Whether or not to display the user names with the tweets.
• $prefix – What’s to be displayed before the block of tweets.
• $prefix_sub – What’s to be displayed before each individual tweet.
• $wedge – What’s to be displayed after each user name. (If $show is set to 1.)
• $suffix_sub – What’s to be displayed after each individual tweet.
• $suffix – What’s to be displayed after the block of tweets.

$usernames = "ryanbarr codyfisher";
$limit = "5";
$show = 1;
$prefix = "<h1>Twitter Feed</h1><ul>";
$prefix_sub = "<li>";
$wedge = " says: ";
$suffix_sub = "</li>";
$suffix = "</ul><p><a href=\"#\">More from our Twitter feeds!</a></p>";

 I have twittered with Ryan about his work and he says he is working on a plug-in to be released shortly.  I think it will be a great application addition to the plug-in arsenal of Wordpress.  As twitter continues to grow in popularity and people activate multiple accounts there will certainly be more of these  application needs.  Thanks Ryan for providing this for us and I look forward to using your plug-in when it comes out.  If you want to Visit Ryan’s Blog he has some great stuff in addition to this gem. You can also Follow Ryan On Twitter.  I think he is someone to watch and learn from.

In the meantime, if you have any questions or comments about the application of this awesome tool please drop a note below. 

Happy Blogging.