The SEO News Blog from Pat Marcello

For those of you who love Twitter, but who are also marketing mavens, you’ll be really interested in a new application that I found out about today. It’s called “Market Me Tweet,” and instead of having your tweets say, “From TweetDeck” or “From FriendFeed” or whatever, what if they could say “From Your Business Name” with a link to your business?

How cool is that?

I tried it out today, and it totally rules.

The set up isn’t click and do, unless you’re already really Twitter techy and have set up apps before, but there’s a great video that walks you through the process, step-by-step. After watching that, it’s really a no-brainer.

So, you open the little app on your desktop and voila! Tweet and brand, my friends. Tweet and brand.

And the best part? It’s free.

Here’s the link: http://easyseotricks.com/tweetbrander

You totally need to go and get it!

(And since this is free, though I am an affiliate, I’m NOT being paid to tell you this.)

I have around 3,000 followers at Twitter, and I love them all!

Uh-huh… Right. If you believe that, you’re really naive.

I don’t know most of them.

But guess what?

They follow me because they DO know me, and because we’re in the same niche. They see my Tweets on someone else’s page and they follow me. My messages mean something to many of them, if not most. I have an “organic” list.

Oh sure, there are lots of softwares out there that will get followers for you automatically. They work great! Except for a couple of things:

1. Twitter doesn’t like that. The powers want natural connections to form just because. Twitter is a relationship building tool, NOT a business tool, though you can use it as one if you do things right. People get their accounts shut down all the time for doing stuff that Twitter powers don’t like. Start using some of this software and your account could be a casulaty.
2. Consider this: People who see something you’ve posted and like it are much better followers, right? They want to see what you have to say, and will probably put you on the list of Tweeters they follow as “Friends” in Tweet Deck. I know I do.

So, what’s better?

Having tens of thousands of followers that don’t give a hoot about you or thousands of followers that want to see what you have to say?

I’m guessing the latter.  If you want to build relationships with folks and show them that you know your stuff…

Organic is the only way to go, IMO. YMMV.

Let me hear your thoughts!

You know, I really love Twitter, and I want to provide some great stuff for my Tweeps. Only problem is that I have little time. I can’t do a lot of surfing and posting. So, I do it about once a day at the end of the day, when I’m really tired.

But…

I found a way to automate my Tweets and still give my Tweeple some very cool stuff through the power of Yahoo Pipes and TwitterFeed.com .

First set up your pipe. To do mine, I chose some IM blogs… This one, of course, and DearTellman.com and ListBuilding Blog. I then included some SEO and blogging blogs that I really enjoy reading.

Then, go over to TwitterFeed and set up a free account. Permit it to have access to your Twitter account, and then, add the feed for the Yahoo Pipe.

Last, set up in “Advanced” settings how often you want to have TwitterFeed post to your Twitter account. I have mine updating every hour with 2 Tweets. That keeps me in the game!

And all I have to do is post to my blog. TwitterFeeds and Yahoo Pipes takes care of the rest.

Wow.

Ah, yes… time for another post about… TWITTER!

Aren’t some of us spending inordinate amounts of time there?  I was at a conference with Carrie Wilkerson–the Barefoot Executive, who has like 52,000+ followers, and I thought she was going to wear out the keys on her Blackberry, I swear. She’s amazing.!

I’m lucky if I get to tweet a few times a day, and really feel inadequate there to be sure. But I try to offer blog posts and such to help people along the way, as well as retweeting cool stuff and communicating with the followers on my list and the people whom I follow. ‘Course I follow just about everyone that follows me. Why not? It’s only respectful. The only ones I don’t follow have no avatar and are obviously trying to scam the Twitterverse.

And then, there are those who follow you and then, unfollow you right away just to build their Twitter list. That’s really sleazy, in my book. And I used to hunt those people down and unfollow them back. Sheesh. It’s what they deserve, right?

But it’s nearly impossible. Qwitter works sometimes. I’ll get a whole bunch of emails for a day or so from Qwitter, and then, pffft!!! NAda.  I’m hoping that nobody is being an ass, but somehow, I’m thinking not. There will always be as many asses as there are chairs and you just have to run into one every now and then, right?

But to track them manually?

Here’s the thing: You can’t trust Twitter! When it looks like there are a bunch of people who aren’t following you, it might just be that they are following you and that Twitter is messing things up. Unfollowing them will do you a world of  hurt People who are following you don’t like it when you unfollow them. They take it as a personal affront.

And, you can’t use the services that tell you who the people are who aren’t following you back. They mess up because Twitter messes up, and tell you so in their terms of service.

What’s the solution?

Even though it might piss you off, you have to go about your business and just not worry at all about the people not following you back! It really doesn’t matter, does it? I mean, sure… it would be nice to nuke the nasties off the face of the planet, but there are just too many things to do in a typical entrepreneurial day, right?

The moral is: Don’t waste your time worrying about who’s following you or not following you. Use Twitter for the fun application that it is, and make lots of friends that are interested in the same things as you are. That’s really what’s important and what will keep your Twitterverse clean and clear. Just Tweet away and ignore the rest. There just aren’t enough moments in the day.

I was reading through my feeds today, and came upon a post from Marko Saric’s How to Make My Blog blog and he was talking about all the traffic he’d got from one post. Of course, it was about Twitter, and it outlined some of the great Twitter plugins available: Top 5 Twitter Plugins to Incorporate into Your Blog.

In it, Marko outlines WP Twitip ID, which allows you to add a field to your comment form for your commentors’ Twitter IDs.  This is cool for your commentor because it links their Twitter username to the comment and to their Twitter profile. Nice! So, I installed that one.

Another is Twittar, which allows the commentor’s Twitter Avatar to be shown next to his/her comment.  Kind of nice. And there’s TweetBacks, Tweet This, and Twitter Tools.

You can check them all out on Marko’s blog. But here’s the thing. They all do very cool things, but they’re not for blog beginners. Well… except for Twitter Tools. Anyone can use that one. It’s a pretty standard plugin.

But if you don’t know how to edit your theme files, the others are advanced. They’re not hard. You just need to put snippets of code where you want the items to appear, but one of them, TweetBacks, for example, takes a little more finesse.

Yet, I do have some advice.

If you’re not really into editing the PHP files, don’t be scared to get in and try it. That’s how I learn to do things. I just forge ahead, and do things because I know I can go back and fix them, if I screw up (and I have done that more times than I care to mention).

Save your theme. If you mess up one of the files, you can just go to your saved theme files and upload the clean file to your theme folder. For instance, if you screw up comments.php, just go to your saved theme and upload the original comments.php to the theme folder on your hosting account. Just like new!

Never be afraid to try things. That’s how you learn.