Yep. That’ the rumour.

So stop worrying about how many followers you have on Twitter. It’s pointless.

Start worrying about how many real relationships you have on Twitter. That’s what matters.

Why? Because you can’t pay your mortgage with Twitter followers.

Twitter knows this and they’re planning some big changes that will shake up the social media world for the better.

Measuring actual influence

Twitter is rumoured to be considering a replacement metric for the follower count that would more accurately reflect how influential a user is. One of the problems they are looking to address is that while you may have 100,000 followers… how many of them are even real people? How many of them actually saw your last tweet? And how many responded in some way to it?

It’s the extent of your reach and the intensity of your interactions that really drives influence online not the broadcast capability. Twitter has recognized this and frankly needs to address it in order to stay relevant.

So what’s Twitter doing about it?

I think you’ll see Twitter move towards a metric system more along the lines of Klout. The recent moves by Google+ to add Google Authorship and by LinkedIn to add endorsements seems to validate that influence and impact matters more than follower counts.

Twitter has also made substantial moves towards locking down their API which will allow them to better monitor usage and interactions and therefore have more insight into metrics associated with influence.

While they may retain the follow count metric, it certainly will not be the measure of Twitter success it once was.

So what does this all mean?

Great things for those that are using Twitter for what it was designed to do. Communicate with other people.

Bad things for those who routinely game the system to drive up follower numbers or even pay for followers.

Great conversations, content and a true voice will lead to an active and engaged audience. Their attention, participation and trust leads to real influence and to what really matters.

We’re already good at figuring out who is worth listening too. What we need is better tools to help us sort out the signal from the noise.

Yep you’re busy. You have a business to run. You have customers to serve. You have a new product launching and you need to get the world out. Service revenues are down this month and you need to drum up some new business…

Are these excuses why you don’t have time for Twitter?

Nope.

They are all perfect reasons why you NEED to make time for Twitter.

Twitter is a quick and easy way to connect with, inform and talk to customers in real time. It’s also a great way to scale your business fast.

You: But where and how do I get started?

Me: With this 7 step plan of course.

Step #1 – Get out of your comfort zone

Embrace the unknown. You have no idea what you’re doing. That’s ok. Get over it. I’ll let you in on a little secret…. Neither do I. Social media is all-new for everyone and there are no “experts”. Just be yourself, learn as you go, talk to people and you’ll figure out what works best for you and your business.

Step #2 – Introduce yourself with a great profile

Complete your entire profile. All of it. It’s extremely valuable real-estate. This sounds super obvious, but it’s amazing how many people don’t actually do it. Who are you? What do you do? And most importantly, what can you do for me? While your profile is technically about you, the smart folks in business know that answering “so what” and “who cares” is the key to keeping a customer’s attention. So… who are you and what can you do for me in 3 short quick sentences. Go!

Step #3 – A picture says a thousand words

Twitter only gives you 160 characters to describe yourself, but a picture says a thousand words! The very first thing you should do once you create your Twitter account is upload a picture of yourself. Nothing says either “I’m a newbie” or “I’m a spam bot” more than using the default Twitter egg. Nine out of ten people I know on Twitter would probably agree with this if I bothered to ask them. The 10^th would be a newbie or spam bot of course. Use a clear, professional looking picture of yourself. No wedding photos, no candid or group shots, no fuzzy out of focus ones from the last year’s Christmas party. If you don’t have a good headshot, pay the $50 to get one. It’s your first impression on Twitter. Make it count!

(more…)

Until recently I had no idea how replies and @mentions really worked on Twitter. Yup. And I wrote a book on Twitter. See, there is no such thing as and expert when it comes to social media.

Here’s what you and I need to learn to tweet, reply and @mention like a pro:

#1 when you reply to someone on Twitter with and @reply only people following both you and the person you are replying to or mentioning will see the tweet. This way if you’re having a long and detailed discussion about which Star Trek Captain was the coolest (Kirk) with someone it won’t show up in everyone’s Twitter stream unless they know and are following both of you. So get social!

#2 If you RT a Tweet and add comments it will break the conversation threat. Twitter and many third party apps will let you follow a conversation so you can see the back and forth discussion. Many people choose to reply as a RT which has two negative effects. First of all it starts a new conversation so people will not be able to see your tweet if they are following the original conversation. Second, your reply will be visible to your entire Twitter following which you may or may not want to happen (especially if you’re arguing for Picard).

#3 If you start a tweet with a Twitter handle i.e. @kevinamage you’re just swell, Twitter thinks you are sending a reply or @mention and will only display that tweet to people following both you and the person you are tweeting about. If you want to start off a tweet by mentioning someone and your want your tweet visible to everyone, then all you have to do is stick a dot in front of the Twitter handle like this .@kevinamage you’re super awesome!

At one point or another, every business has made the same comment about social media: “How do I measure the return on my investment?” Allowing employees to take time on social media to talk about the business has real costs, and employers want to be able to quantify those costs with real numbers.

So how does a business measure their return on investment for time spent on social media? According to Social North Chief Idea Officer, it starts with setting goals.

“You have to be really clear what the goals are at the very beginning.”

Setting those goals doesn’t just mean the amount of actual dollars in hand that are expected once your business engages people through a social media platform like Twitter. There is much more that has to be taken into account to truly measure the value of integrating social media into a business marketing plan.

(more…)

Twitter Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

When we think of Search Engine Optimization, most of us think about our website and how to get ranked on the 1st page of Google. But how many of us are thinking about optimizing our tweets? Social Media is becoming more important not just in our day to day lifestyles, but in how it influences PageRank for both Google and Bing.

Who are you? SEO really wants to know!

In your Twitter profile, your bio is actually the meta description of your Twitter Page. This makes it an important aspect of SEO on your Twitter profile.

Make sure you’re including relevant keywords here that relate to the general content of your tweets, as well as your website. We sometimes overlook this, and put in funny cute descriptions of what we do and who we are instead of keyword optimization. So check out your profile bio and consider the above when crafting your next update.

Using bit.ly for more than link shortening on Twitter

We have all used bit.ly to shorten our links within our tweets. But did you know that it is also incredibly important in terms of SEO? URL shortening services such as bit.ly use permanent 301 redirects to your content. That means your original URL benefits from the SEO juice, and not just the tiny URL itself. (In other words, when someone clicks on the bit.ly link, your web still gets the SEO credit.)

(more…)