As social media is playing a more active part in many organisations, WebCertain MD, Andy Atkins-Kruger decided to hold a Twitter Training session, the idea being to maximise website traffic and to enhance company engagement with their audience. After all, social media is a cost-effective marketing solution with real time search benefits.

As I use Twitter for work purposes to gain industry knowledge and promote WebCertain, I decided I should go and get as much information as possible to help build my knowledge on the micro-blogging site, so I put my name down to attend.

The training session lasted 4 hours, split into 3 sessions:
• Session One: The context, History and Background
• Session Two: Your Twitter Presence and Reputation
• Session Three: Expanding the Twitter Remit – 3rd Party Tools and Q&A’s.

We discussed what we all wanted to gain from the training, with the majority of the group having very little or no experience with Twitter so it was great to hear what everyone wanted out of it.

Session One covered: ‘What is Marketing Today’ where we looked at the various popular brands which used marketing effectively between 1950 – 2000 and what is and would be influential from 2000 – 2050. With regards to inbound marketing we looked at; Blogs, SEO and Social Media (which are more likely to generate leads?)and how social networking is a cost effective marketing tool. Also, how using Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to promote your website will generate leads and sales.

Twitter’s history was something I hadn’t researched before and was interested to know how this phenomenon began… Back in early 2006 the blogging based company Odea (which was created and owned by Biz Stone and Evan Williams) began a project called Twitter from a brainstorming session and came up with a new type of SMS messaging service, an internal project for employees to share information. Odea thought that the concept could possibly be used on a wider basis and Twitter was launched in July 2006, being launched at the SXSW Festival where the crowd loved it! It went from having 20,000 followers to 60,000 followers in 1 day!

The business model issue:
An important point which Andy raised was about funding. Twitter currently is operated by Venture Capitalists, so what actually will happen when this funding runs out? All (most) social networking, blogging and micro blogging sites are currently free for personal and professional use, so where will the funding come from? Will Twitter limit the amount of corporate accounts and make companies pay for more? Or will companies have to pay to advertise? Will Twitter users have to pay for APIs which are currently free (up to a point)? Do you think sponsored Tweets will be the way forward? We came to the conclusion that as there is no revenue as there is no business model…

Session Two: This section started off by discussing why people use Twitter:

Andy went on to talk through creating an account and the jargon (DM, RT etc). Then we got onto the ‘reputation’, following and followers and how many people do the ‘follow-unfollow’ trick because they think it makes their presence look better than average, but does it really? I think it depends on the following:

The primary objectives of building your online reputation are:
• Supplying interesting facts / views
• Linking to useful content
• Re-Tweeting interesting information
• Asking questions and giving something back of value
• Using keywords in your tweets – people do track them
• Plus a very high volume of tweets does equal success!
‘What not to do’: Don’t over promote yourself!

A good point which was made is that Tweets don’t last for very long, depending of course who your followers are. So automation could be the way forward to ensure your tweet is ‘seen’ especially within the different time zones – therefore not limiting yourself to the zone you are in. Using automated applications by 3rd party organisations is needed (I think) to boost your tweets success which in turn will develop your following.

Section Three: Third party software is something I had briefly used before, mainly Twitrobot for automating tweets and tr.im for shortening URLs. So Andy opened up a whole new world of APIs I had never heard of or used before, here are a few:
• Twhirl – can manage multiple social media accounts like Twitter, FriendFeed and Seesmic Video. Shortening of URLs using, digg.com, bit.ly and twurl, this can be used in an array of languages.
• TweetDeck – links with Facebook and MySpace, can manage multiple accounts and split the people you’re following into categories to make it easier to view .
Other applications we talked about included: Twitrobot, TweetBeep, Tweetlater.com, Trendistic (shows twitter trends) ….

I also discovered that you can track your posts which have links in them, so you can find out how many people RT and viewed the article by using Topsy.com.

To use Twitter successfully and create a good following I think you need a mixture of automated tweets with personal tweets, use interesting information/links and follow people who will be of interest to you.