Top 4 reasons to participate in Twitter Chat

Twitter Chat

In the last few months, I seem to have caught up with the Twitter Chat bug. For someone who's is making foray into the social media marketing world, it is an apt form of communication and learning.

What is a Twitter Chat anyway?? 

When you have spent some time on twitter, you do come across situation where information is exchanged between individuals. Suppose you group these individuals, throw a topic and let the thoughts flow, there goes Twitter Chat :). In an ideal situation, it goes like:

1. Setup a date/time

2. Suggest a topic

3. Setup #hashtag, in order to help people follow the conversation

4. Send out invites

But end of the day, the biggest question that arises, how does it help ME??  I have been lucky enough to have exchanged ideas & befriended some of the great individuals in the Social Media world using twitter chat. Here are my top 5 reasons, you should be part of Twitter Chat:

1. Engagement

One of the clear advantage of being a part of tweet chat is the increased engagement. When a topic falls into your sweet spot, you are bound to get sucked into the discussion. Various chats encourage you to post questions, which gets answered by the panel or other participants. One of the best forms of engagement in real time.

2. Build Intelligence

For instance, the recent chat we had at #Toolschat on Kred. I have not yet adopted Kred since the great fiasco of Klout and there were participants with similar concerns over the scoring. Participating in the chat on that day, helped us build intelligence about Kred and also similar enterprises - PeerIndex and likes. We were able to uncover the pulse of the various users of Kred and guess it helped Kred to gather feedback informally, which may help in future investments.

3. Focused Followers

If you are in the game, where you fret on the number of followers, my advice, this is not the place. But in case you want to follow or get followed by key individuals in your space - do attend the chats, regularly. Here's a place where you get to interact with like-minded individuals and engage with them beyond the chat sessions.

4. Promotion

The above example of Kred, exemplifies the power of Twitter and Twitter chats. It's your time to be in the limelight. As an enterprise, you might want to sponsor a Twitter chat or be a guest panel on a day & tell the participants how your product(s) can help them. It will be a chance to educate potential customers about your products and one of the best methods to serve information and source feedback.

Well, we have IBM  coming to #GetRealChat on 5/1. Be there on Twitter at 9 PM EST and follow the hashtag.

As part of my regular activities, I participate in the following chats:

a. #BlogChat

b. #SocialChat

c. #PinChat

d. #SMChat

e. #GetRealChat

Let's engage there.

You might also want to check out the Mashable's 15 Essential Twitter Chats for SMM

 

Has Twitter Chat helped you?? Share how?

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How Pinterest can help Emerging Markets

Pinterest

Over the last few weeks I have been glossing over the fact that Pinterest is driving much of the social traffic. It has been a site which has generated a great amount of (p)interest in the social world off the last few months & well, I was kind of lured to visit. Just as we saw a huge amount of noise created by enterprises to launch their brand pages across Twitter, Google+, Facebook - this year start seems to be devoted to Pinterest.

What is 'Pinterest' ??

The first thing that stuck me was that the site is still not officially open to all & is strictly invite-based. Not that it would be an issue as I have never heard anyone's request turned down, but I agree, its a better way to keep off some unwarranted noise.

Started by Cold Brew Labs with an intention to share images based on themes, Pinterest helps users curate images from various website using its 'Pin it' button or by uploading the image & is shared over its canvas (pin-boards). It basically is a platform where images can be shared & marketed.

While I was waiting for my request to be approved, which was done over a due course of time, I took some time off to ponder over the facts (from Mashable):

Pinterest -

• is the fastest to reach 11.7 million unique visitors in Dec 2011 (comscore)
• Has 10.4 million registered users (Source)
• Averages 1.36 million users daily
• Has 68.2% users as women
• Has a healthy 3.6% referral topic, better than Youtube, Google+
• Estimated unique visitors to Pinterest.com increased by 429 percent from September to December 2011. (via Monetate)
• Top interests in the U.S.: crafts, gifts, hobbies/leisure, interior design, fashion designers/collections. (via Ragan.com)
• Has seen 289% increase in apparel retail traffic between July - Dec'11

Looking at those stats, you're sure that it would be an interesting business proposition to put your wares on the Pinterest platform. 

 

Volkswagen USA

Have a look at Etsy or Volkswagen USA boards on Pinterest & it will be easy to gauge the kind of potential Pinterest has and it would make sense to to have your items displayed there.

And the one market that can obviously leverage on the social channels was the "Emerging Markets". Small & Medium Enterprises (SME) in those markets can certainly gain a mass following outside of their geographies by having a display over and above their own portals.

Pinterest offers a very simple way to get you onboard & start pinning (the equivalent of displaying & linking product photo).

1. Get an account. Simple go to the Pinterest site & "request for an invite". Enter your preferred email id & you should soon have a link from the team to proceed with creation of your account.

2. Create a content strategy. Gregory Pouy's presentation shall help you decide on the strategy.

3. Create Pin-boards. Login to the account & start creating pin-boards based on your product themes - Weddings, Formal Wear, Casuals, Gift ideas. It will help you manage the product lines & an easier track back.

Etsy

4. Pinning to Portal. Each image on the pin-board can be linked to your portal. Also, like this user, you might can also display the price on the pin-board & get the viewer to visit the website to transact further.

5. Promotion.  Link the pin-boards to popular social sites like Twitter, Facebook or Google+ and enterprise can achieve better mileage for their brands.

6. Feedback. Create a board where users can re-pin your products & based on the products shared, the enterprise can determine the demographics of the users & promote the range of products in a particular geography. eg. A user in the Middle-East, Asia tropical region shall not be looking to buy woolen clothing designed for colder climates. Such information can be leveraged while creating pin-boards.

I believe this are good times for the SME in the emerging markets to grab some eye-balls & create a generous fan base. With the kind of growth Pinterest is going through, it has to be part of the content strategy for enterprises in these markets to leverage it over & above the conventional portals & other social fan pages.

But yes, there have been concerns over privacy & copyrights over the images being shared which I believe would be thrashed in coming days.

Needless to say - "Go ahead...Needles are waiting to be pinned" !!!

So, do you find some of these strategies exciting?? It would be great to hear your views & learn about other successful ideas and how they are being implemented.

Let me know through comments & will be glad to engage in the conversation.

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How to increase your Twitter Followers - Top 10 ways

Twitter has been a terrific place to share information and links to information. But to have your content read, you need to have a large pool of followers.The greater the number of followers, the more influential your content is.

Today I shall list down few steps that have helped me to increase the number of followers:

#0. No one likes an egg- head (yes, I have deliberately number it 0 as this is the most important step)

Egg-head is the default image that Twitter give. Maybe you have liked it & would not want to change, but we would like to know the person sharing content. No pets, no monuments and no scenic locales. We would like to know YOU.

#1. Get a short bio

Give a brief description of yourself, your interest/passion. Potential followers do read the bio besides reading your content.

#2. Share your internet footprint

Provide like of your blog or company URL or Facebook Page. They should know what else to follow. Also, these turns out to be a good SEO exercise. Ensure that you put up the "tweet" button or "Follow me on Twitter" button on those sites

#3. Follow the leaders and build connections

Whatever your choice of subject, follow the leaders & get an understanding of what they share. This will give you a fair idea of what the acceptable norms of content sharing is within that domain. But do not stop yourself at just following the leaders, build connections with other users whose content you find interesting

#4. Start sharing content

In a given day, you would be reading a lot and gathering information on your choice of subject. Share all these meaningful content. Preferably, it should be links, because given the 140 char limit of Twitter, you might not be able to convey the entire message. So, lead your followers to information. Use the URL shortening services like bit.ly, ow.ly or goo.gl and many others. Twitter has recently started shortening the URLs using its own t.co service too

#5. Tweet Regularly

This step should in fact be high up the order. Remember, your followers are expecting information from you. Keep sharing, and once you share regularly, they will know where to look out for any new happenings or get information on the subject. You can use services of Hootsuite or Tweetdeck to schedule your tweets

#6. Repeat your Tweets

Something that I learnt very late, and this was while listening to Guy Kawasaki. Do repeat you tweet, as you would never know which part of the world is following you. A tweet in the US day time would hardly be seen in the timeline of someone in India, unless it is repeated in their day time.

#7. Engage within the domain

Try to get yourself heard. Engage in the various conversations happening over Twitter & share your point of view. Chances are, few of the readers will like it & start following you.

#8. Do not SPAM

Whatever your reason of joining Twitter, make sure you do not SPAM the followers. This is a strict No-no.


#9. Ask questions

Another form of engagement is to ask your followers some questions or set up a poll. You can then share the results over your blog.


#10. Thank followers, re-tweeters

But make sure these are done as direct message. Other followers are not interested in whom you have thanked & once you reach a certain number of users, your timeline shall be filled with these messages instead of the content incase they are public messages.

Thanks for reading through. I can be reached on Twitter @malharbarai

Do leave your comments & I would be happy to engage.

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