All this month is the Social Media Success Summit presented by SocialMediaExaminer.com. This is a purely online conference that has some of the biggest and most respected names in social media conducting sessions and panel discussions. I am one of 2000+ “attendees” at the conference so I will share some of the social media tips and tactics I pick up along the way as well as my opinion on some of the topics being presented.
Here are some interesting nuggets from the social media guru and former Apply Fellow Guy Kawasaki during his keynote titled “How To Use Twitter As a Marketing Weapon.”
- search.twitter.com is one of the best (and free) social media tools on the web
- Utilize OR when searching on Twitter to see results about several topics at once – like “coke OR pepsi“
- Use the Twitter advanced search to see what people are tweeting about a certain topic within a specific area such as “football near:philadelphia within:25mi.” This is great to look for prospects for local businesses or regional sales teams.
- You can use Google to search in Twitter usernames or real names and also in the Twitter bio field. This is great for brands to use to find potential new people to follow since people use the bio to share what they do and their interests. For example, in Google type “intext:”bio * photographer” site:twitter.com” for all people that mention the word photographer in their Twitter bio.
- Follow @CleverAccounts to learn about new and exciting ways businesses and people are using Twitter worldwide. This account is run by a team at Twitter.
- Guy shared a little known fact about Dell and all the social media case studies written about them. Back when they had only 2,500 followers they made $500,000 in revenue from Twitter and now with 1.6 million follows they have made $1.5 million in sales from Twitter. Still a big number but it shows how it isn’t always the size of the following that is important but how engaged each individual person is.
- Guy often gets criticized for repeating all of his tweets a lot in a 24 hour period. To this he says go watch CNN for 2 straight hours and tell me if they don’t repeat news stories within that time. I couldn’t agree more with him on this and with time differences and the amount of people that quickly check Twitter on their mobile devices, it is definitely worth it to repeat some of your best tweets to make sure all your followers have an opportunity to see them.
That is all for now. I’ll be providing some summaries all month from certain sessions from the Social Media Success Summit 2010 so stay tuned.
