Tag: twitter - Page 3

It feels like the birth of the sweeping social media phenomenon occurred just five seconds ago, with Pinterest’s viral growth to dizzying heights, Facebook’s takeover of Instagram and Twitter launching the new network, Vine.

The new medium is continuing to grow and evolve, spawning a new phenomenon of its own: visual social media.

Like moths to a flame, humans are innately drawn to visual elements including images, photographs and sensational design. As more of us are increasingly mobile and engaging with social media on smartphones, viewing an image is far less tedious than squinting to read a few lines of tiny text on a moving train.

By Christopher Niesche - smh.com.au

EVERY small business should have a prospect list - a database of existing and potential customers where the business can focus its marketing efforts.

But it needs to be more than just a list of names and email addresses. It has to contain people who are in the target market for your products.

Here are tips on how to build up a prospect list.

Yesterday at a breakfast hosted by Business Chicks, hundreds of women tweeted quotes from guest speaker Ita Buttrose.

The hashtag was #businesschicks and #itabuttrose. It's impact was for all to see, as the event was trending somewhere in the social media sphere and people who had never heard of Ita Buttrose from all over the world, were joining the 'trend' and retweeting tweets related to her speech. Such is the power of a #hashtag and of course, my favourite social media platform, Twitter.

What is a hashtag?

A #hashtag is a symbol or a metadata tag used on microblogging social networking sites Twitter, identi.ca and Google that is followed by a keyword phrase without spaces. It ties the conversations of different users into one stream, which you can find by searching the hashtag in Twitter search or by using a third-party monitoring tool like HootSuite.

All tags are case insensitive and can become trending topics if enough people start using it and virally spending the 'word'.

When trending goes viral

A hashtag can go viral very fast. Take for instance the re-launch of Big Brother. The tweeting went ballistic on Twitter and many popular tweets were displayed during the show. The hashtag #BB trended through the entire episode. Just like when #thevoiceau was on. It trended as did all of the judges. Who didn't tweet something about #joelmadden #keithurban #seal ?

What can small businesses do to get their messages across on Twitter with hashtags

It's hard to judge, but popular hashtags for small businesses are: #smallbusiness #entrepreneur #inspiration #success - make up your own one but make sure it is clever and you never know where it may go.

The reality is that on Twitter or any other medium it is not critical to 'trend' on a topic. What is important is the information that communicate and the story that those 160 characters tell.

Twitter is awesome for business. Seriously awesome. Even this week, a new client signed with Marketing Eye on $24,000 for the year via following me on Twitter. I love it! A small investment in time for a great return. It helps promote the Marketing Eye brand globally, encourages people to go to our website, increases the number of people who read our marketing blogs and engages at a level that 10 years ago, we would not have been able to do.

But, there are a few things that annoy me about twitter.

Once I lost 1000 followers in a day. I quickly looked back at all my Twitter posts only to find that I didn't write anything that was particularly offensive or would warrant this type of dramatic reaction from my followers.

I genuinely thought someone had hacked my account but couldn't understand why. Who would waste that much time deleting followers.

But the culprit was someone I did not suspect. Someone I had a lot of trust in. It was...

Marketing Eye received a ranking last week on Twitter and it had me thinking...

 

The U-turn in Public Relations: Why the media has to change its ways.

The entire purpose of Public Relations is to communicate with the public, whether at a government, organisational or individual level. Therefore, it only makes sense that if we now all turn to our computers to talk to each other, then journalists and PR companies need to do the same.

If you mention the word ‘Twitter’ to a room of PR people, I’m sure it would generate a huge buzz of opinions. After all, it is one of the most fundamental changes in how media works today. Instead of sending out press releases, the publicist can now just send a tweet to a journalist through their twitter account with a link to a press release, landing page, video or social media experiment, and instantly have the journalists attention.

As an advocate for Twitter and someone who has benefited immensely in terms of sales and following from this platform, I have to say yesterday was a very sad day in our relationship.

Google for Small Business

If you haven’t sent off your details to be included in the latest social network craze, Google , then you should do so – immediately!

With more than 25 million people joining in the first month, since its launch at the end of June, Google may very well, become the most successful social network of all time.

Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, YouTube and a good website that ineracts with your customers, on all levels - tis the small business marketing machine.

It's true. Small business, may be a BIG business online if your machine is well oiled and working efficiently, generating the results that you expect.