Much has been written on the effectiveness of Twitter as a marketing tool. I won't elaborate except to encourage you to investigate it for yourself. Here's my take on it and a peek into how I'm using it.
I'm going to be throwing around the term "Feed" a lot. I'm referring to web feeds. If that's Greek to you, click here to get up to speed and then come back for the rest.
The advantage to Twitter is that it's almost a universal application to Social networking and all the other sites have applications or widgets that let you syndicate your Twitter feed easily. As an example, check out the sidebar on the right side of this page. That's basically a widget pulling my Twitter feed.
I consider Twitter the "atomic level of social networking". Your Tweets are the basic building blocks of your social content, just like atoms are the basic building blocks of matter. . .if I remember correctly from Mr Augustin's Freshman science class.
Anyway, so what I've done is automate a lot of my Twitter activity and then syndicate it to my other accounts and sites. This is going to start sounding like the leg bone is connected to the hip bone and the hip bone is connected to the. . .well you get the drift.
WordPress plugin. I use Twitter Tools for WordPress for my Madison County Virtual Tours site and my personal blog. The plugin will send a Tweet automatically when I publish my article. Not the only plugin available that does this but it works great.
Twitter Feed. Very cool. Take ANY RSS feed (just make sure it's from a trusted source if it's not your own) and feed it into Twitter. It's easy to get busy and forget to Tweet. With Twitter Feed, you can add people to your virtual "Twitter staff" so to speak so your Twitter feed is never stagnant.
Tweet Later. This lets you automate replies to followers and some other cool stuff. I get a digest of Tweets from Tweet Later that match certain keywords that I'm interested in (like virtual tours for instance). Now I don't have to scan through my stream on the Twitter site. A time saver. Also as the name implies you can schedule Tweets to go out at a later time.
Tweet Deck and/or Twhirl. The Twitter site is very utilitarian. These two applications run on your computer and connect to Twitter. So far I prefer Tweet Deck to Twhirl. I have to keep them both shut down when I really have work to do because they notify you every time somebody that you're following posts a Tweet. Both are a productive way to use Twitter though.
Now that you've got your content funneled into Twitter you can use the Facebook Twitter application to syndicate all your content to your Wall. Same goes for other social networking sites. You can connect your content to all the people in your network. This does take some time to get set up, but once it's going it really carries a lot of leverage.
This kind of stuff is what computers are for!
Brett
SpotLight Virtual Tours
Great info! Thanks!
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