How To Start On Twitter
Posted by Mitch on Sep 7, 2010
As I look back on all the times I’ve written about Twitter, I realize that I’ve never told anyone how to actually get going there. A big part of me just assumed that most people would figure it out, but when reality sets in and we know that more than 93% of all the people who sign up for it drop out after a month, probably because they really didn’t know what to do, it behooves me to at least try to help out in some fashion. So, for those of you who are on Twitter and know what to do already, this probably isn’t for you.
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Of course the first step is to create a Twitter account, but think about this one before you do it. You can go three ways with this, depending on what you want to do. You can use your name or a derivation of your name; you can use your company name; or you can be creative and use whatever hits your fancy. Your reasoning should be sound. Using your name is simple; because that’s who you are. Using your business name is simple as well, but with the caveat that if your business name is long you’ll want to shrink it down drastically. Being creative with your name could be problematic, especially if no one knows who you are because that might affect, at least initially, who will hook up with you.
After that, there’s all sorts of information you can make on your Twitter page, as well as changing backgrounds and the like. Forget all that stuff for now and move to the next important thing, that being to add an image. Almost no one on Twitter wants to connect with someone else that doesn’t have some kind of image on their Twitter page unless they know who you are. It doesn’t even have to be an image of you; it can be pretty much anything, but try to show at least a little bit of class. Many folks gripe about some of the suggestive images on Twitter, but most of those accounts are from spam accounts, and if you don’t want people initially thinking that’s what your account is then shy away from that. If that’s really who you are you can always go back to that later on.
Okay, now you’re ready to tweet to the world; your problem is that no one knows you’re on, and thus no one will see what you have to say. Actually, that’s somewhat inaccurate. Everything you tweet goes into the general stream, and someone is bound to see it eventually. These days, however, most people have already set up who they’re going to follow and possibly certain topics they’re going to look for, and thus you might end up having a small audience of people who might find you. Instead, it’s time to head to the search box to look some people up.
The first thing to do is type in the names of some people you know to see if they’re on Twitter. You’ll be surprised to find that many people you know will be there in some capacity, and some will be pretty active users. When you find someone you know, start following them by clicking on the button that says “follow”; that’s easy enough. Then look through the names of people that they’re following to see if you know anyone else in that group, and you can start following those folks as well. Anyone you follow will get a notification that you’re following them, and if they like you they’ll probably follow you back. This is a great way to get started.
But don’t get too carried away with adding people. Twitter gets very protective of its people if someone is adding lots of people but hasn’t said anything yet. That’s your next step, saying something. There’s two ways you can do this. You can go to your main Twitter page and type something in that little space, remembering you only have 140 characters (it’ll count for you so you don’t have to do it).
Or you can send a message to one of the people you’re now following. The way you do that is to click on the widget looking thing, then select the top one that says “mention ____”. That will open up a window with that person’s Twitter name preceded by the “@” sign. Just type your message and hit ‘tweet’ and you’re on your way. Don’t just say “hi” and leave it at that; it’s your introduction, so make it stand out, even if it’s only “Hi ____, I’m finally on Twitter; I hope you’re doing well.” Okay, that’s a bit formal, but at least you’ll have said something.
And there you go; you’re now on Twitter and you’re ready to go. Of course, your issue will be having to constantly come back to this Twitter page to see lots of messages, so at some point you’ll find the smart move is to use some sort of application to access Twitter easier. But that’s for another day, or you can look back through this blog at some things I’ve mentioned in the past. And of course don’t forget to connect with me on Twitter; just click on that little blue bird to the right.
I hope this little tutorial gets you started easily enough; if not, ask me to clarify and I will. Good luck!
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Mitch Mitchell
Social Media Marketing Won’t Work If…
Posted by Mitch on Sep 3, 2010
I’ve talked a lot lately about social media marketing and influence. Overall, comments have been positive, but fairly minimal. Not that I’m searching for big numbers of responses to the topics (okay, I am) so much as thinking that, as we move into a new age, this should be a pretty big topic for a lot of people to be both thinking about and talking about.
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What occurred to me yesterday is that the topic is out there, but not really all that big to the group that I’m marketing to the most. That group are people between the ages of 35 to 65, people with established businesses who I thought might be ready to learn more about how to market to people. What I’m realizing is that there is a definite generational difference between the people I’m marketing to and the people who literally already get it. I’m marketing to a group that’s missing it, that can’t see why they’d even want to get started, let alone want to learn it.
I actually understand this. I’m the same way in other areas. On Wednesday a group called Lady Antebellum was in town, and I had, and still have, absolutely no idea who they are. Justin Bieber was also in town; him I’ve heard of, but I couldn’t tell you a single song. Without having kids, I haven’t tried to keep up with the pop music scene, and thus I hear songs that for the most part I don’t like and names that mean nothing to me. Out of the names listed for the next reincarnation of Dancing With the Stars I had to look up 6 of them to see who they were; these are stars?
I get it; we concentrate on what interests us at all times, and even if something might be in our best interest for our business, if we can’t fully embrace it then we feel we don’t need it. So I decided to list 5 things that indicates why social media marketing won’t work for you.
1. You don’t have time. I keep hearing this one over and over, and frankly, it’s both a valid concern and nonsense at the same time. It’s hard for people to squeeze more things into their schedule if it’s booked tight and you’re working all the time. The reality is that no one is booked all the time and no one is working all the time. We all waste time during our workday; if we didn’t, we’d go crazy. My belief is that even if all you decide to do is 15 minutes a week, just to establish a presence somewhere, you do yourself a world of good. If you could find an hour a week you could write a blog post, maybe post a link on a Facebook business page, do an update on your LinkedIn page, respond to one group post on Linkedin, and send out a link or message on Twitter regarding a business, a retweet, whatever. When you have more time, do more; just do something.
2. You don’t have the money. How much money does it cost to do social media marketing? Depending on what you do, nothing or just a little bit; way less than any other type of marketing you might do. Twitter; free. Facebook; free. LinkedIn; free. Email; could be free, and with an autoresponder less than $200 a year. YouTube; free. Blog; free, or if you pay someone to write it then that could get pricey depending on how much you want written.
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3. You don’t understand it. Most of the time when people say this, it means they haven’t even looked at it. If you sign up for LinkedIn, it pretty much tells you what you need to do step by step. There might be some intricacies for real business benefits, but in general, you’re done. Same with Facebook; probably the day you sign up you’re going to have invitations already there from people who’ve been wondering where you’ve been. YouTube isn’t as easy, and though Twitter seems pretty easy, I could see where someone could get confused early on. But I run into almost no one (had to add the “almost”) who’s signed up for a Twitter account and says “I just don’t know what to do” without meaning “I don’t have time”.
4. You don’t even try. Michael Jordan says he’s never made a shot he didn’t take. Whereas many people have thrown up a website, they haven’t taken the time to determine whether it represents them well or not. “Close” doesn’t get it done when you’re hoping to get business from someone that’s thinking about paying you thousands of dollars and your website looks cheap. “Close” doesn’t get it done when you’ve written one blog post in a year. “Close” doesn’t get it done if you create a Facebook business page and done absolutely nothing with it. As with anything else, you have to at least take some kind of consistent action, even if it’s once every two weeks, otherwise it’s best not to even start.
5. You’re not social. And there’s that word again, “social”. Social says you interact with someone instead of “at” them. Social says you respond to comments or email here and there. Social doesn’t say you have to tell everything about yourself, or deal with people who upset you or irritate you in some fashion. It does mean you have to be ready to participate in whatever you start, and it can’t only be about you. And trust me, on Twitter, if all you’re doing is putting out links and retweeting people all the time, it’s viewed as you being all about you.
I can’t remember if I’ve written stuff like this before, but I’ve certainly brought it up in workshops, and I plan on always bringing it up whenever I have the opportunity to talk about it. No one has to do it all; but if you want it to have the chance to work, you still have to do it.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Mitch Mitchell
Are You Sometimes Feeling Ignored?
Posted by Mitch on Sep 1, 2010
I tend to visit a lot of blogs. I’ve talked about it before on this blog, how I used to subscribe to nearly 250 other blogs, but at some point I got it down to around 104. Of course me being me I have added some more blogs to my reader since that time, and I’m given some of those an opportunity to show that they at least have something interesting to say on a consistent basis before I start whittling my list down again.
 Save the Back Yard Dog |
One thing that helps me determine I’m going to eliminate a blog from my reader is whether or not I ever get any responses from those blogs that I tend to leave comments on. Those of you who have seen me leave a comment on your blog know that I’m not one of those people who often leaves just one line responses. Sure, sometimes it may only be two lines, but you know those two lines are going to mean something and have something to do with the topic, and sometimes those lines are kind of long.
Sometimes you get the feeling you’re being ignored, and nobody likes that. I certainly don’t, especially if I’ve taken time to make a comment on your post. After all, as I’ve written many times on this blog, and many of you have written on your blogs, what’s the point in accepting comments if you’re never going to respond to anybody? If you’re going to do that you might as well just turn off comments, become Seth Godin, and move on with your life.
It’s not just blogging that sometimes leaves me feeling ignored. There many times on Twitter where I reach out to both people I know and people I don’t know and comment on some of the things they share. Most of the time you never hear anything back from those people, which once again leaves me wondering why I’m even bothering to try. At this point I pretty much know that almost nobody who’s using Twitter on a consistent basis is going to the website to post their comments or to read posts from other people. Everybody is using some kind of platform to check out their Twitter messages, which means pretty much everyone has created some kind of filter so that they see messages from people who write comments to them. If they haven’t done that then they’re idiots, and I doubt that people who are participating a lot on Twitter are idiots.
In my mind, people who do the two things I mentioned above are missing the point of social media networking. They don’t call it social “seminaring” or social “sharing whatever I have to say because I’m important and you’re not”. If they did then the word “social” wouldn’t be a part of it at all. I don’t like it when it’s people I don’t know, and I certainly don’t like it when it’s people I do know. There are a few people I have eliminated from my Twitter stream because I felt ignored, even if I’ve talked to them in the past. I don’t expect people to respond to everything I say to them, because sometimes there’s just nothing to say in response to a previous message. But I do expect some give and take every once in a while, and if I’m the only one giving then I’m getting out.
The one thing almost everyone knows if they visit this blog is that I’m going to respond to their comments as long as they’re more than one line. Of course, if we’re doing a back and forth at some point one of us has to end, and it could be me. Beyond that, I get to everybody at some point, and even if I don’t always respond to your comments, I always respond to a comment made by a new visitor, in hopes that they will return again and again. If anybody ever feels ignored by comments they leave on this blog, just let me know; but I don’t see it happening.
Are you feeling ignored by some of the blogs you visit? Are you taking care not to ignore people who visit your blog?
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Mitch Mitchell
Setting Up Twitter Tools
Posted by Mitch on Aug 24, 2010
As some of you know, I’ve been using the WordPress plugin Twitter Tools for almost a year. I found it to be a great program to set up how I wanted it to send my blog posts to Twitter, and it was the only plugin I could find at the time that would let me post-date my posts and still automatically go out.
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Then some of you saw my post a few days ago talking about twitter plugin changes that are on the way, that actually have been on the way for months but most of us hadn’t heard a lot about it. As it pertained to Twitter Tools at least, suddenly you had to go into Twitter and set yourself up as a developer, each individual blog, and get these codes for the program to continue working. I had written the WordPress people about it and they didn’t offer enough help for me to be able to get it right.
Well, if you paid attention to the comments on that post, you’ll see that my friend Chris, a super techie, offered instructions on how to get it done. Man, talk about nick of time type of stuff! However, it might be difficult following along with the comments. I’ve now done it 3 times for my 3 blogs; I can tell you what you need to do to get it done right.
First, go to your Twitter page, then go to Settings. Once in Settings go to Connections. After that, look to the right of the page where it says Developers, and click on the link at the end of that little paragraph. You might not have anything on this next page, but you’ll see a link at the bottom left that says “Register a new application ยป”; click on that.
Now you’re on the page where you’ll register your blog as a new application. By the way, I’m not sure if you’ll have other plugins you use with Twitter than you’ll have to do the same thing for, but for Twitter Tools, this is definitely how you go about it all.
The first thing is asks for is an image; you don’t have to do this ever, since you’re the only one who’s going to see it, but you can if you want.
Next it says Application Name. This should be the name of your blog, but it can be anything. With one of my blogs it said someone was already using the name, so I had to modify it slightly.
Next is the Description box. Just write something short and sweet in there on what your blog is about.
Next is Application Website; type the entire URL of your website in there, including the “http://” part.
Next is Organization; I left this empty.
Next is Website; type the entire URL of your website in there, including the “http://” part.
Next is Application Type, and it should be defaulted to “Browser”; if not, that what you want to select.
Next is Callback URL; type the entire URL of your website in there, including the “http://” part.
Next is Default Application Type; this one is important because it’s defaulted to “read only”, and you want “read and write” instead.
Next, you want to check the box next to “Use Twitter for Login“.
Finally the captcha; get it right, although it will let you do it again if you get it wrong; I hate those things!
Once you hit save, if it’s acceptable you’ll see a message telling you so. You’ll be on a new page, and you’ll have your first bit of information to put into your Twitter Tools settings on your blog. If you’ve updated it, open it up under Settings in your control panel on your blog. Once you have it open, you’ll see it asks you for a Consumer Key and a Consumer Secret. Both of those are on the Twitter page you’ve just been taken do. It’s best to copy and paste it in so you don’t mess it up.
After that, you’ll see you need information to fill in for Access Token and Access Token Secret. To get that, you go to this link, http://dev.twitter.com/apps and it will take you to a page where you’ll see the “application” you just registered, which will be your website. Click on it and you’ll go to another page where you’ll see a list of items to the right. Click on the one that says My Access Token and it’ll take you to the page with the information you need for the two items above.
Once you’ve put that in click Save, and if the plugin says it connected to Twitter you’re done with all the hard stuff, and just need to customize your settings based on what you want to do.
And there you go; whew! It turns out to look a lot more difficult than it really was. And I can’t think Chris enough for the help; you da man!
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Mitch Mitchell
10 Posts That Deserve More Attention
Posted by Mitch on Aug 23, 2010
Something that’s hard for a lot of people is self critique. We’re either too easy on ourselves or too hard on ourselves.
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I’m no different, although my parameters change depending on what it is. When it comes to this blog, I know that there are a few throwaway posts, where the post isn’t necessarily important to anyone but was entertaining to write. That’s part of my quest to give visitors something different to look at.
However, there are times when I write something that, in my mind, didn’t get enough attention or enough visitors for whatever reason. Every once in awhile, I like to go back to some of those posts and share them in one specific post, hoping that maybe newer visitors will see those titles and say “hey, I must have missed that one”. At least that’s what I hope. So, here are 10 posts of mine over the last 2 months of 2009 and first 6 months of 2010 that didn’t get many visitors that I feel deserve more attention.
5 Ways Poker Is Like Blogging – This was my attempt at being creative by comparing two of the things I love doing most, one of which is playing poker.
An Interview With Marelisa Fabrega – Marelisa is one of the top bloggers in the world, and I was able to secure an interview with her. This needs to be read by everyone.
Twitter Marketing – Do You Have A Plan? – I found myself again some days ago explaining to someone what Twitter was about and how it could be used for business, and this wasn’t at my workshop either.
How Can You Prosper Through Publicity? – Everyone who has a blog needs to understand just how much more prosperous they could be, either monetarily or personally, by figuring out how to handle their publicity better.
What Do We Expect For Free? – We all like free stuff, but are we taking it to the extreme for some things?
Are Writers Taken For Granted? – As someone who’s been writing to make a living for the last year, it seems that people devalue just how much of a commitment it is, even when they can’t do it themselves.
Content Is An Electronic Emperor – This was my response to a comment made by Rupert Murdoch, partially one of the most hated men in the world.
Web Courtesy – Don’t We Deserve That Much? – With so much hate that people spew in blogs and especially when responding to news stories, I question whether there is any courtesy anymore.
Are You Using Social Media For Promotion? – I wrote this last year, way before I ever started thinking about doing workshops on the subject.
My 10 Favorite Blog Posts Of 2009 – Okay, this isn’t quite fair, but at the end of the year I posted 10 blogs posts I liked that I wrote in 2009; so now you have 10 more to check out if you’re interested. 
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Mitch Mitchell
Twitter Plugin Changes Coming
Posted by Mitch on Aug 20, 2010
Well, it seems the gravy train is over, or at least temporarily derailed. I’m not as tekkie as people think I am, so I didn’t know this until I tried to update Twitter Tools the other day, and learned that you now have to go through some interesting steps in trying to get it to work with Twitter; I still haven’t figured it out.
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What’s going on? Twitter announced in April that they were going away with what’s called basic authentication because of all the spam and other ways that people were connecting to and abusing Twitter. They’re going to something they call OAuth, which will require all kinds of registration steps, special keys, etc. In other words, this is now a big deal. It’s a big deal because, based on what I’ve read, on August 31st all those things we presently use will be inoperable, unless the folks who developed those things decide to get the information needed to continue their usage.
What does it mean for us? It means that we don’t know if any of the things we presently use will be working after the 31st. Actually, the only one I think we know will be working is TweetMeme, and that’s only because Twitter just bought it. So, we’ll be wondering if any of the other things we use to post to Twitter, have others retweet our stuff to Twitter, use to check out Twitter followers or comments or posts or whatever else, will work the way they do now without more information from us. Twitter wants to move away from people only having to put in a username or password to get information; isn’t that interesting overall? They’re going the route of protecting their interests while Facebook goes the route of finding new ways to erode our privacy.
Actually, I did come across one plugin, but you then have to sign up for an account online that they charge you for, so I’m not even mentioning them. However, this might be the wave of the future, having to pay for access to Twitter through options that aren’t truly associated with Twitter. That also will prove to be interesting.
Either way, I guess we’re all in the same boat if we have Twitter accounts; let’s see what’s in store, and which white knight will ride to the rescue.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Mitch Mitchell
Are You Restricting Your Influence?
Posted by Mitch on Aug 19, 2010
I know you didn’t think I was done talking about influence, did you?
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Last week, Kristi retweeted an article someone else put together titled The 100 Most Powerful Women On Twitter. It was an interesting list for two reasons. One, I knew very few of the names on the list. Two, it was amazing seeing the high number of followers some of those people had that weren’t celebrities. The woman at #1 is super young, though super cute I must admit, and a singer whose music I’d never heard.
The list was compiled using Twitter Grader, which I’d written about back in September 2008. I hadn’t been to that site for awhile, so I decided to go over and check my rating. Out of 100, it says my rating is 99.3; I love that figure, and I decided to pop the badge onto the blog, which you can see there to the right just above the bird. However, it also said that out of around 7.6 million people, I rank around 49,500.
I thought about it a little bit, and then I realized that I have gone to some lengths to limit my opportunities for growth without realizing it. And I don’t just mean Twitter. But let’s start with Twitter.
I’m very strict with who I follow on Twitter. I’ve talked about some people who are twitter selfish, which irks the heck out of me. I’ve talked about people who only work on grabbing more twitter followers as if it’s only supposed to be a number’s game. And I talked about why I don’t follow some twitter folks. And I asked if people were being social with social media.
But I also talked about having a twitter marketing plan. One thing I never talked about in that post was how you might have to lower your standards a little bit to gain more followers without compromising all of your standards. For instance, something I could do is to start following more people with bonafides that aren’t quite as social as I like people to be because many of those folks retweet stuff they see, and maybe those folks would see some things I write and retweet them to their audiences. That would alter one of my standards, but it would be better than my going out and just following everyone I see, hoping they’ll follow me.
That sounds like an odd strategy, but I know it’s a working strategy a lot of people have, following someone with a lot of followers to hopefully get into their stream of consciousness. Frankly that seems like pandering to me, but people have done much worse to get noticed.
Then I thought about Facebook. With all the changes they’ve made, and my deciding I wanted to protect more of my privacy, I have my account set up so that if you’re not connected to someone who I’m connected with you can’t find me on Facebook. I don’t know too many people who’ve done that. Somehow, I still have almost 475 friends, but I don’t get those random former friends from my past finding me anymore; I’m not sure that’s a good thing, but I’m also not sure it’s a bad thing. Sure, there are some people who have more than 5,000 friends (it seems Facebook is always changing its rules on how many “friends” one is allowed to have), and I have a feeling I could have way more friends, but at what cost to some of my privacy, though we’ve talked here about there really being no privacy anymore?
Can you have influence online if you’re not Seth Godin and don’t make yourself more accessible? I think you can, but it takes a bit more work in other ways. You have to reach out to people you know in different ways. You have to find a way to have people thinking of you as an authority in some fashion. And you have to be as engaging as you can be and be ready to take advantage of opportunities when they come your way.
Hey, no one ever said working on being influential was easy!
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Mitch Mitchell
I'm Just Sharing is where I share my thoughts on internet marketing, writing, blogging and many other things. You never know what I'll be posting on. So keep coming back, read, enjoy, and buy! ;)
