How to tweet effectively and efficiently?

Your tweets can be divided in three major and equal parts. One third of the time you should tweet about you and/or your brand. One third of the posts should be about your areas of interest and expertise, but using material from an outside source: The last one third of the time on twitter is for being yourself: Interact, ask questions, answer questions, re-tweet or re-post interesting things people in your network have shared.

Once you have mastered “what to tweet” next step is finding out “how to tweet”. If “what to tweet" is being effective the later part of this post will make your twitter marketing efficient.

How to use those 140 characters most efficiently?

• Don't Multi-ReTweet: you need not to give credit to every person who have re-tweeted the original post.
• Drop Vowels: make attention as atntn
• Contractions:  "It is" becomes "it's" and "can not" becomes "can't."
• No More "And"s: "And" become "+".
• Use Other Characters:  use "#" for "number" and "%" for "percent".
• Drop Pronouns: One of the easiest to lose is "that." So "the movie that I luv" becomes "the movie I luv".
• Turn Words into Numbers: "To" becomes "2" and "One" becomes "1".
• Shorten Links: visit the URL shortenersite and then use bit.ly or another service to resqueeze the URL.

Please share your input at comment thread .You can follow me @vinaytosh.

Use Twitter to get more traffic for your blog

Follow me at: www.facebook.com/vinaytosh ,Twitter Handle: @vinaytosh 

Twitter is an important medium of a personal as well as business brand building. It provides you an option to write teasers in 140 characters but you can propagate your blogs and articles using Twitter. In this article I will share five step strategies for getting traffic for your blog through twitter marketing.

Step 1: Create a bespoke Twitter theme for your Twitter profile that matches the branding of your website.  This is of course optional, but it’s worth remembering how important it is to be consistent with your branding.  Also take the time to make full use of the bio information – this is often where people try and find like-minded other people so rather than write full sentences use hash tags and keywords.

Step 2: Register your Twitter account details to the following Twitter directories:

1.     http://wefollow.com  

2.     http://listorious.com/

3.     http://twittercounter.com/ 

4.     http://twitterholic.com/

5.     http://justtweetit.com/

6.     http://twellow.com/

7.     http://twibs.com/

8.     http://www.ibegin.com/twitter/

9.     http://twittervision.com/

10.   http://www.TweetFind.com 

11.   http://www.tweetfind.com/ 

12.   http://connect.me/

13.   http://legalbirds.justia.com/

14.   http://www.localtweeps.com/

Step 3: Create a blog/article that you can direct people to adding value. You want people to recommend the article by re-tweeting it so it it’s important it offers immense value and attracts a lot of interest.  I can’t emphasis this enough – social media traffic is about providing value and the more value you give through your blog the better results you will get – this is how your content can really go viral too.

Step 4: Shorten your blog post URL using Stumble Upon’s shortner – http://su.pr.This powerful tool is very different from other URL shorteners because the sharing and likes that you get from other networks such as Facebook and Twitter helps your post rankings and exposure within Stumbleupon which has over 10 million members. To get the maximum benefit ensure you take the time to enter the correct key words/tags and description.

Step 5: Increase your Twitter followers by:

1.       Post your twitter link on signatures in forums, emails, your business card etc.
2.      Leverage your other social networks to gain followers, for example, promote on your  Facebook Fan Pages your twitter account and vice versa
3.    .  Post your twitter link on your blog, website, offline marketing material, social networks
4.       Find people in your niche and follow them
5.      Try to get on as many lists as possible
6.       Approach people who are in your targeted area and who have a large amount of followers and ask them to retweet your tweets (try to build a rapport with them before you bluntly just ask them)
7.       Introduce yourself to likeminded people
8.       Create competitions/contests
9.       Engage with your existing followers, start conversations, re-tweet others, they will then recommend you to their followers and re-tweet your tweets

Would you be willing to sell your Facebook data?

In one of recent poll KDnuggets asked: Would you be willing to sell your Facebook data to advertisers?

Half of the voters would not sell their Facebook data at any price. The other half were willing to sell for market rate or a high amount. East Europeans were the most willing to sell, while West Europeans were the most privacy conscious.

Here are the poll results: 

Would you be willing to sell your Facebook data to advertisers?
No, at any price (114)	50.2%
Yes, for $10 or less/year (3)	1.3%
Yes, for $50/year (5)	2.2%
Yes, for $100/year (17)	7.6%
Yes, for $200/year (5)	2.2%
Yes, for $500/year (33)	15%
Yes, for Market rate (49)	22%

The following table shows the regional breakdown of 225 voters, with bar height corresponding to the number of voters from the region, and bar width: % willing to sell (at any price). The US/Canada voters were split 50/50. The East Europeans were the most willing to sell, while the West European were the most conservative. 

Region (voters)	% Willing to sell
E. Europe (19)	68%
Other (AU/NZ, Latin America, Africa, Middle East) (19)	63%
US/Canada (105)	52%
Asia (30)	43%
W. Europe (52)	37%

Marketing Maturity Model for New Media

An enormous wave of diversity has hit the shores of digital marketers. With the fast and furious adoption of Facebook, Twitter and smartphones, consumer demand for social and mobile channels has hit marketing like a tsunami, catching many brands unprepared to manage expectations in this new digital landscape.

According to a Forrester’s Study digital interactions have moved from being primarily site-centric just a few years ago to being splintered across multiple channels and devices. The study yielded three key findings:


1. The Splinternet (term coined by Forrester) disrupts the marketing landscape, but adapting to a multiple channel environment is critical.
2.   Marketing strategies need a reboot to meet expectations of sophisticated consumers.
3. Multi-channel success requires understanding of unified customer behavior across all channels.

Entering a marketing channel without plan of measuring the ROI or ROETI (Return of Employee Time Invested) will be an unwise decision. Since last five years companies are experimenting with spend in Digital Marketing channels like Social Media, SEM and Mobile Marketing. In absence of well defined deliverables, they have always been hesitant in committing significant marketing dollars on this channel.  As for my understanding marketing needs a threshold budget to start showing significant effect. If you have an outsourced vendor for your organization you certainly need to know the maturity model for the different channels.

Advertisers can measure the success of their marketing effort using following three step CWR process:

Crawl: This is an operational reporting stage, where brands measure what matters to a company's key performance indicators, such as adoption of apps or acquisition of fans.

Walk: Testing and targeting allows brands to apply insights from measurement to build engagement and improve the customer experience.

Run: Nurturing users with targeted marketing results in conversions and revenue, providing brands with a true picture of marketing effectiveness.      

 Figure 1: Social Media Marketing Maturity Model

With rise of usage of smartphones, user has started consuming a lot of data on go. Companies have started investing in their mobile presence and started opting for responsive layout for their web presence. Setting up a plan for measurement before launching an app or a mobile ad campaign is key to a successful endeavor.

  

Figure 3:Mobile Marketing Maturity Model