twitter tools – Nicole Munoz Consulting

Promoted Accounts is one of Twitter’s three advertising platforms, this one specializing in helping you acquire new followers.

Tweeters find their friends many ways. Upon joining, many are encouraged to look through their Facebook or email accounts for people who are already on the site. They may also just browse the site and follow people who they find interesting.

Twitter also has a feature called “Who to Follow.” This is what it typically looks like:

When you’re a paying Promoted Accounts advertiser, your ad will instead be displayed in the Who to Follow box, along with a note indicating to users that yours is a promoted result rather than an organic result.

A RECOMMENDATION-BASED ALGORITHM

Unlike other advertising solutions, Promoted Accounts uses a special algorithm to determine whether or not you would be interested in seeing a particular advertiser’s message before showing it to you.

It does this both by analyzing your habits and by analyzing your friends’ interest. For example, if a lot of your friends are interested in video games, Twitter might infer that you’re also interested in video games. Therefore they might show you a Promoted Account advertisement from Xbox.

This prevents your ad from showing to people who genuinely aren’t interested in your product and helps you more finely target the people who might have followed you anyway if they knew about you.

THE PAY PER FOLLOWER MODEL

Promoted Accounts works on a pay per follower model. Instead of paying only for impressions, you only pay when people decide to follow you.

Of course, your follow rate needs to be sufficiently high for Twitter to be interested in continuing to offer you impressions.

According to Pierre Legrain, Product Marketing Manager at Twitter, the pricing per follower works on a bidding basis much like Google AdWords.

Legrain also says that most bids come in at between $.50 cents and $5 dollars. Other industry experts believe that most accepted bids really fall between the $1 and $3 dollar per follower range.

Legrain has also said that the “stay rate” and engagement level of paid followers are about the same as organic followers. In other words, there is no decrease in readership or drop in the average follow length just because someone’s following from a promoted source. (Source)

A LONG TERM STRATEGY

Unlike Promoted Tweets or Promoted Trends, which both lend themselves more to individual tweets or individual events, the pay per follower (CPF) model lends itself very well to being a long term rather than a short term strategy.

If you know what a follower is worth to your brand, you’ll know what you can pay on a CPF basis to acquire that follower.

Although every company should test it for themselves, if a paid follower is truly as valuable to you as an organic follower and you can profitably pay for Promoted Account followers, then this form of advertising could be a truly lucrative form of exposure for you and your company.

GETTING STARTED IN PROMOTED ACCOUNTS

To register as a Promoted Accounts advertiser, visit:

http://business.twitter.com/advertise/start

Building a super successful ecommerce business really is something you can do from your Lazy Boy recliner! That doesn’t mean you should, of course, it just means that there are numerous tools in place to help you stay at the top of your game at all times. And at all times, the game is about keywords and relevance.

When running ad campaigns and attempting to drive more traffic to your site, keywords are of the utmost importance. Go too vague, and you loose consumers who are looking for something specific. Research is absolutely necessary before you begin any adword campaign, and also periodically throughout your marketing efforts. The following tools will help you gain valuable knowledge regarding keywords.

When searching the latest and greatest social media sites for buzz on keywords related to your business niche, it is important that you look at the words used in conjunction with your keywords, for oftentimes users are simply mentioning something and a particular keyword happens to be included. The goal is to find out if there is a buzz related to what you have to offer, and what that buzz is.

Lexicon is one tool that will help you get your hand on the pulse of the general public. This application is used with the popular social media site, Facebook. To utilize Lexicon on Facebook, you need to first have a Facebook account, for this application is used in conjunction with the site. Lexicon searches wall posts to obtain a general conversation held throughout the site; pretty fascinating, if you ask me.

Once logged on to Facebook, simply search “lexicon” (quotations not necessary) and the application will become available. You can use this application to search for specific keywords related to your business. For example, if you sell pizza, you will see that in December, relatively few people post about pizza. Perhaps this indicates that many are still recovering from their Thanksgiving day festivities. Try out Lexicon for your niche and see what sort of buzz you tune into.

And then there is Twitter, the new craze that has wings flapping and fingers strumming keyboards all across the globe. For searching Tweets, there is Twist. Twist was actually launched in 2008, but not everyone has caught on to the benefits of Twitter tools for business just yet. What Twist does is similar to Lexicon, but for the Twitter site only. Twist finds all mentions of your specified terms in messages and graphs them over time. Using Twist, you can even click on any specific term and go directly to recent Tweets for that phrase.

Using Twist, you can compare terms against one another. For instance, let’s take the pizza business again. Comparing pizza to burgers, you will find that pizza wins out every time as far as mentions go. From this data, you could draw the conclusion that the pizza business would fair better than a burger joint.

Now, you are most likely not selling pizza or burgers, I know; but examples are what they are. The main point of these applications is to help you see what the general public’s awareness is on any given topic. When your focus is to build your business, it is the voice of the general public that matters the most; and therefore utilizing social media sites and their tools will do the best job of telling you what you need to know.