The product consists of nine tuition videos, each one very well presented, easy to understand and all less than 10 minutes duation or so. Since I already have an established Twitter account, with a particular spin on my posts, I decided to create a new account for Tweet Dynamite. The whole thing, from start to finish, took me about 2 hours to set up, although the process could be done quicker.

The whole idea behind Tweet Dynamite is to set up an account that automatically follows people in your niche and automatically posts Tweets, also in your niche. Your profile will contain a link to your main web site and Dave also explains how to add a money making idea to the whole thing!

The automation works as advertised although, as Dave suggests, I Tweet manual posts on a regular basis to keep everything as *human* as possible. Unless you have plenty of time (and who does) to research and post lots of Tweets manually then Tweet Dynamite is for you.

Although it is early days I have checked my website on Google Analytics and there has been a steady increase in traffic since I implemented Tweet Dynamite. You can check out Tweet Dynamite here.

So let’s go. Right – when I checked my email a few days ago I had a few new Twitter followers and, as I usually do, I opened up each persons profile to see what they were about before following them. One persons profile appeared like this (and has been unchanged up to today):

Huh!?! Okay, I don’t know about you but this is completely wrong. You can see that Xigum follows me – my mugshot is 4 across and 4 down in Xigum’s following list. But what can we learn about Xigum from his / her (?) profile? Let’s see:

• Name: Okay, so this Tweeter is called Xigum.
• Photo: Nope, no photo. Xigum is using the standard Twitter o_O picture (o_O can be read as oh-Ohhh, so even Twitter frowns on this).
• Location: No location is given. No major drama but it would be nice to know.
• Web: No web page URL is given. No problem really, if Xigum doesn’t have a web page.
• Bio: No bio is given. No photo, an odd name and no bio. Xigum has decided to remain anonymous.
• Updates: No – no updates. Huh?

So what ‘crime’ has Xigum committed you may ask? Well, unless I’ve got it all wrong, Twitter is is a Social Networking site. As such, users are, not surprisingly, expected to be social (i.e. introduce yourself to Twitter world using all the profile tools available) and they are also expected to network with other users (i.e. make regular updates for followers to read).

So Xigum has decided that he / she does not need to follow these basic guidelines, and I can tell you that Xigum is not alone. There are plenty of Twitter users who have done exactly the same thing as Xigum. So, if you are going to use Twitter, take the time to make a complete profile, including photo, and post regular updates.

By the way, you may be unsurprised to learn that I did not follow Xigum back!

]]> http://keith-blackburn.com/twitter-how-not-to-tweet/feed/ 12 http://keith-blackburn.com/the-value-of-social-media-in-internet-marketing/ http://keith-blackburn.com/the-value-of-social-media-in-internet-marketing/#comments Sun, 29 Mar 2009 11:10:30 +0000 Keith Blackburn http://keith-blackburn.com/?p=311 The use of traditional forms of advertising and product marketing platforms, such as newspapers, magazines and television, is slowly on the decline. It is evident that an increasing number of businesses are turning to the internet for promotional needs, for the simple reason of cost effectiveness gained from the enormous reach of web based advertising coupled with reasonably priced advertising solutions.

In a further advancement of online promotion several brand name businesses have ventured into social media marketing (SMM). It is such a pioneering aspect of promotion that businesses are not entirely sure of the best way of using SMM. This was most recently demonstrated by the Mars relaunch of its candy brand Skittles.

Essentially, in its original form, the Skittles website allowed a real time uncensored feed from posts on Twitter (a post would have to include the hash tag #skittles to be fed to the site). This novel yet somewhat naive venture into social marketing had, perhaps predictably, disastrous results. Many Twitter users abused the idea by feeding obscene / derogatory posts or by submitting promotions to their own products. Mars quickly changed the format of the site and, after some morphing, it now appears to be a YouTube.com driven site. So Mars initially made a mistake, but how does all this apply to the internet marketer.

Basically, the average online marketer could take advantage of the popularity of social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and the like. These are free to join sites and are, generally speaking, very user friendly. Another tool that is becoming the norm is the use of video and audio on websites and blogs. So how does the online marketer go about generating visitors to monetized websites or blogs using social networking sites. Perhaps Jack Humphrey’s excellent article The 90-10 Rule for Successful Twitter Networking should be used as a guide. Jack basically advocates making 90% of your content value related and just 10% as promotional content (although Twitter specific, this article should be a guide for all social network marketing). This makes sense if one gives more than a passing acknowledgement to the term social networking (a self-explanatory term if one thinks about it). After all, you would not wish to be bracketed with a group comprising cold-calling telemarketers or in your face door-to-door salespeople.

So is social marketing the way to go? Well, clearly it is an area worth exploring and testing. Whilst methods of effective social networking promotion are still being developed, particularly on the limited Twitter platform, it is possible that these methods will, sooner rather than later, become extremely effective and the internet marketer would be wise exploring the possibilities now or be prepared to play catch up later.

I generally don’t go looking for followers, but will almost always reciprocate when someone follows me. This is not some sort of high-handed attitude – I have adopted a philosophy based on this blog post which, as you can see, advocates providing value to other users and not just using search tools to  follow thousands of people or saturating Twitter with posts linking to your own product. People will find you if they want to. Obviously this is just a personal thing that I believe in and, of course, I do start following people I find particularly interesting who are internet marketing orientated.

So, what is value exactly. Well, I try to link to news items of interest (not breaking news generally) offbeat or humorous articles and videos (everybody needs to smile and laugh) and any marketing articles and tips I stumble on. I also ‘retweet’ posts which I think others will find interesting. Obviously there is a lot of information to be learned from other Tweets as well.

I was quite surprised by a number of ‘follows’ I received; from WaggyWoo (a dog loving Tweeter) to Jim DeMint (the US Senator from South Carolina) to HBK (who, as far as I can gather is Shawn Michaels of WWE fame) and plenty in between. I was particularly pleased to be followed by a few high-flying marketers, such as Mike Filsaime and Tony Hsieh (CEO of Zappos).

You’re bragging Blackburn, I hear you say; well not really – I am certainly not fooling myself into thinking that these guys saw a post of mine and went ‘Wow’! The follows were probably generated automatically. However, Twitter does allow me to interact with these major players. This shows the power Twitter has for networking but I also firmly believe in providing plenty of value for followers to read (or listen to) if they so choose.

Within a few hours of signing up to I was surprised to find that I had a follower. I didn’t do anything about this though and the follower had disappeared the next day. A quick check of Twitter etiquette told me what should have been obvious; if anybody starts following you then you should return the compliment and start following them, which is what I started doing. I now have a small group of ‘followers’ and, of course, have a similarly sized small group of people I am following.

But where does all this lead to? I started following a group of IM experts, since I felt it would be enlightening to read their posts, and a couple of these people have returned the compliment. However, I kept getting notifications that seemingly random people were following me, I returned the compliment, and so it went on. Then I came across a couple of free guides on basic and more advanced Twittering and things suddenly made a lot more sense. You can get the guides here in exchange for your name and email address, and you can follow me on Twitter here.