What the heck is Twitter?

What the heck is Twitter?

- The water cooler of the 21st Century in 140 characters or less

- building relationships to shortcut degrees of separation (aka Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon)

- build a brand

- monetize your following

How to fail at twitter:

- don’t tell anyone you are using it

- always talk about yourself / always be selling

- don’t follow anyone

Complementary Tools:

LinkedIn: The power of groups

Facebook: migration from MySpace

YouTube: if a picture is worth a thousand words… what about a 30-90 second video?

Skype: free calls across the globe show how flat the world really is

Blog: Use WordPress or TypePad to share messages that need longer than 140 characters to explain… I use Twitter to direct viewers to my blog

Power Twitter User Mantra: Like me, know me, trust me, pay me (don’t get them out of order and immediately ask your followers to pay before you have built the foundation of like, know and trust)

The art of the tweet:

- ask questions – ask them what they know

- provide answers

- pithy sayings

- share news

- provide links

- give compliments

- retweet generously

- re-comment others to follow

- recommend media

- twitpic – tweetie

- conduct contest and giveaways

- market: blatant or subtle

- share video – YouTube

- customer support desk – conflict resolution – promote goodwill – 24-hour assistance – public display of quality service – social proof

- Study: Comcast & Home Depot as they are really good

Tools:

- SocialOomph (was TweetLater) (auto follow all those that follow you – schedule Tweets for delivery sometime in the future)

- TwitPwr (has analytics)

- TweetDeck (run multiple Twitter accounts & also updates Facebook)

- TweetBeep (keep track of conversations that mention you, your products & your company)

- TwitPic (share a picture by providing a shortened url)

- Twellow.com (real estate, mortgage, bank)

- ExecTweets (Microsoft product: Find and Follow Top Business Execs on Twitter)

- BubbleTweet (video on your twitter feed)

- Book: TwitterPower includes a boot camp

Compiled by David Repka. If you thought this was worthwhile… please send me a link request on [davidrepka@gmail.com] and LinkedIn follow me on Twitter @davidrepka