Everybody is chirping about Twitter, and I get it. To tell the truth, it’s my favorite tool. It’s always the right one for me. Twitter’s nature is so simple. At the same time, there’s a sophistication to its simplicity. There’s actually quite a lot of power happening there, so I’ve found it’s easy to underestimate the power beyond this little platform. More than anything, Twitter is super simple. Pop onto Twitter, read some quick messages, scan some links, post a link or two of your own, and move on. That’s it. The quick and simple way Twitter works makes it perfect for you. Here’s your chance to check in and share in quick bursts throughout the day.

For me, Twitter was the lightbulb moment. It showed me the real power of social media. Yes, there was the blog, and you know I think your blog is vital (because I told you it is … and it really is!), but the deal is, I was really interested in Twitter. And that’s because it is very short and quick. Expressing myself in quick bursts is easy for me. I think that way, and I’m sure the entrepreneurs who read this book will agree that ADD is a trait we share. A requirement of being an entrepreneur is to think and move fast. I could take that one little nugget I just found—and I find them all the time—hop onto Twitter, share the URL in fewer than 140 characters, and hop off. Done. I’ve worked my social network today!

But even better than the quick and easy way I could share what I was doing, was the extraordinary opportunity Twitter gave me to listen in on what other people were doing. I could follow people I did not know. I could follow authors whose books I had read or people I had seen speak at conferences. By following them on Twitter, I could have a look at what they were thinking about and doing throughout the day. Suddenly, I could look over the shoulders of countless people whose work I respected and see what they were paying attention to. What is important to these people? That very simple act of “following” gave me networking opportunities beyond belief. For me, that was a really, really big thing.

I often hear people say, “Facebook is where you go to lie to your friends. Twitter is where you go to be honest with strangers.” It’s poignant, and I think there’s truth in the observation. On Facebook you can create a robust image of your life. It’s your life as you choose to represent it in that public space. But because Twitter posts are short, Twitter doesn’t lend itself to sharing a lot of detail. It’s a pointing tool. You go there to see who is talking about what and what information is getting passed around. Then you share that information with your network, and it’s all in the form of short thoughts and tiny URLs.

As I’m sure you know by now, your Twitter comments (tweets) are limited to no more than 140 characters. How did the people behind Twitter come up with that rule? Well, that was pretty simple, too. When the platform was created in the latter part of the last decade, we hadn’t yet entered the age of the smartphone. We were still working with flip-phones, and texting was limited to 140 characters. So, there’s the big secret behind the magic 140 limit! What we’re going to do is look at how you can use those 140 characters—and trust me, you don’t need more on Twitter—to reach your social commerce goals in ways that are as simple and powerful as the world of Twitter.

When using Twitter, I especially like to activate the Second, Third, and Fifth Fingers (see Chapter 4). Truth be told, we could actually activate the whole fist with it, but I’m going to show you these three, because I think they give you the biggest bang for your buck. It’s hard to beat the immediacy of Twitter for helping you to manage your relationships with your customers, which is the Second Finger. You can respond quickly and directly to any negative comment with an open hand and offer to work out the details directly. Then we’ll get to how easy it is for you to share the things your King Consumers are saying about your business, products or services. It’s a lot like automatic user generated content, and that’s the Third Finger. Finally, as you probably have already figured, Twitter is fantastic for spreading the word about your products, business, and industry, so brand awareness, the Fifth Finger, is a given as you sprinkle Twitter with your thoughtful and interesting tweets. So, let’s get started.

TWITTER IS YOUR VIRTUAL WATERCOOLER AND A LOT MORE, TOO

Before I started this e-commerce adventure, I was like most of us. I’d worked all my life in an office environment. Sure, working from home for my own business is great, and I love it. But when I started, about ten years ago now, I really missed the camaraderie I’d found at my old office. My coworkers and I bumped into each other throughout the day on errands, coffee runs, or bathroom breaks, and the networking was free and easy. Don’t get me wrong, I’m loving life now, but I found when I first left the corporate world, I really had to work to maintain a network of connected business associates.

I tried local business groups, but back then, e-commerce wasn’t as prevalent as it is today. A lot of the other businesspeople I met through the usual local channels had trouble actually “getting” what it was that I do. I found the networking lacking, because I wasn’t meeting people who really shared my business model and therefore the issues and challenges I was facing. Oh, if only I’d had Twitter back then!

Today, Twitter will allow you to join any type of conversation you may want to participate in. Once you become an active participant, your network will expand as the people who follow you retweet your thoughts to the people who, in turn, follow them, and so forth. Build a following, and you have a direct, two-way line into and out of the world of your King Consumers, the products they use, your competitors they also shop with, the leaders within your industry, and virtually anyone else you may find interesting.

The ratio of friends and followers who will follow you back is staggering! I mean if one in ten or one in fifteen follows you back, now you know your ratio of follow-backs. So if your ratio is one in ten, and you set a goal of having one hundred people follow you on Twitter, then guess how many you have to follow first? 10 × 100 = 1,000. You would need to follow 1,000 people to amass 100 followers. It’s simple math, and that makes it all very, very simple. It’s true. The fastest way, and in my opinion the best way, to get people engaged with your brand on Twitter is to simply start following them first. You do not want to just wake up tomorrow and follow 1,000 people, that would not be a good way to do it. Twitter is looking out for spammers and might consider your sudden activity a spambot. What you would do is set up a goal to follow 30 or so people per day over the next month. Twitter is a more open form of networking, and the people you follow are most likely to simply follow you back. That is part of the nature of Twitter.

Find Your Choir and Sing Together

Once you have a following, you can start looking for the part of that following that will become your own personal little choir. For example, when I first began tweeting, I talked about e-commerce. I found there were those among my followers who would retweet what I tweeted and share my thought-bursts and links with their own networks. I began gathering a “choir” of followers that resonated. I retweeted them and they retweeted me, spreading my thoughts. My fellow choir members were other e-commerce people. They knew what I was talking about. They understood the lingo and the challenges of e-commerce. They were having the experiences I was having. All of a sudden there were ten people, twenty people, fifty people until, ultimately, at any given time, there were about 56,742 people who followed and interacted with me on Twitter (@ColdICE). Not all at the same time, okay? Let’s get that clear.

Do you remember the commercial with Heather Locklear from the ’80s? Figure 10-1 shows a still from it. She was talking about Fabergé Organics shampoo, and she loved it. She loved it so much that she “told two friends, and they told two friends, and so on and so on and so on.” Every time she said “told two friends” two more little pictures of Heather appeared. The visual image was unmistakable. And this is the type of “spreading the word” I’m talking about here on Twitter.

Let’s say I’ve got 1,000 followers and I have a 10 percent retweet ratio. This means from a network of 1,000 people, 100 of them will find my tweet interesting enough to retweet. Of those 100, each will find 10 within their networks who will retweet, and their friends will retweet, and their friends and, well, you get the idea.

Figure 10-1

So really, the incredible power of Twitter allows you to first find your choir and then teach them the song and let them sing. And as your choir recruits new members, what will be the first thing you’ll do? You’ll listen to them. Then you’ll use all that you’ve learned to craft messages aimed directly at your choir, the ones who will take your messages with them as they tweet. And, of course, as you speak directly to your choir, all of your other followers and their networks will be watching, too.

Now Make It Personal

Okay, so your network is growing and you’ve got your choir. Now you can move on to making your tweets and everything else you do on Twitter more personal. People use Twitter to interact with other people. Sure, they follow companies they like, but if you’re not Coca-Cola, Southwest Airlines, or Starbucks, then people aren’t necessarily going to interact with your brand. What they want is to interact with real people. So, humanizing our Twitter stream has intrinsic value because it allows our followers to interact with us on a much more personal level. That, in turn, makes them want to share what “Paul” just said about this, or what “Donna” just said about that. Anything you can do to make your interactions with your choir, your followers, and your King Consumers seem more human and personal will go a good way toward keeping them engaged and getting them to retweet or take another action you’d like to see.

I learned a lot about this from watching the way the entertainment industry uses Twitter. It used to be that people interacted with American Idol or The Voice through a single Twitter account. Now each contestant on these shows has an individual Twitter account. So no longer do fans have to be satisfied with following the show in general; they can personally connect with their favorite contestants and interact with those individuals directly.

Granted, you may not have quite as many followers as eager to interact with your staff as with the contestants on these shows, but that’s not the point. Let’s take the example of Kabbage Inc., the online-financing company based in Atlanta. This company has created Twitter accounts for each of its staff members. Each new employee gets assigned both a company e-mail account and a company Twitter account. Now employees are automatically ready to spread to new areas and gather followings for their company, just like the contestants on TV gather viewers for the shows they appear on.

Fortunately, it’s pretty simple to humanize the Twitter experience. If all of your tweets come from YourBusiness.com, followers won’t relate to you or feel any real connection. Instead, personally identify the human who created the tweet. You can do this with multiple accounts, or you can sign your tweets with a personal hashtag to make it clear that an individual created it.

Another way you can get your staff involved is to have them use their individual hashtags to identify their posts. This one came from #Barbara or #Becky or #Jimmy. Followers will begin to pay attention and be drawn to these individuals. Why? Because your employees will bring their own personalities to their individual tweets, which will build affinities among your choir for specific members of your staff. People love other people. We’re drawn to other people, especially in an environment like Twitter. Of course, let’s not forget, your staff will use their personalities to share your business tweets, so make sure they’re all properly trained on content matters, or have them send their tweets to you and post them yourself after scanning them. A good tool for that is HootSuite (a little more about this later).

Twitter and the Second Finger: Take Care of Your Customer

Twitter is the perfect environment to interact with your King Consumers and take good care of them. There are many ways to deal with customer relationship issues, but Twitter is the place many of your Kings will come to interact directly with you. And they visit you on Twitter with the expectation that you’ll respond. So you must. Once again, keep in mind when you engage a King on Twitter—you are not alone! The entire world is watching you and you need to be mindful of this when you respond to customers. Not only is everyone who follows you watching, but you can assume whatever you do is open for the whole world to see.

If a customer tweets negative comments, it is best to take that discussion off-line and make it private as soon as possible. Of course, the invitation to settle it directly is public, and that’s where you’ll shine. A polite response I use is simply, “I am very sorry to hear that, please contact (name, e-mail, or number, whatever) for immediate assistance with this issue.” Bam! Works every time. Now the world knows you are interested, empathetic, professional, and proactive about issues your customers may be having with your products or service. Instantly, you’ve turned a public negative into a public relations positive.

If you want to test the power of Twitter’s customer service response possibilities, just post a tweet about being dissatisfied with your cable company or your phone provider. Almost anyone can relate to being disgruntled with either of those industries at some point. As soon as you can tweet “local cable company X stinks!” you’ll get a tweet in response from customer service asking how they may help you. Now they know you’ll grumble and complain and that others will join you. They may offer some lame excuse and modest discount to settle it up, and you’ll most likely feel exactly the same way about them two weeks from now … but as an experiment showing the power of Twitter, it’s hard to beat.

SOMETHING TO TWEET ABOUT! PUT YOUR CONTENT INTO CONTEXT

Let’s bring back that 80/20 Rule I first mentioned in Chapter 8 and discussed in other parts of the book. You’re already using it, I expect, and that’s good, because there may be no other place where it’s more important than it is on Twitter. What I mean is that you’re going to have to make sure that at least 80 percent of what you tweet about—what you point people to, what you post—is not about sales. Just like on Facebook, you can’t throw sales stuff at your networks as your main communication. If all you post is “here’s 10 percent off” and “hey, use this coupon,” you’re doomed. If you constantly tweet that out to your followers, they’ll stop listening to you. They may not bother to stop following you, but they won’t pay any attention to your messaging.

Here’s what’s happening with them. They’re not in the mood to shop with you all the time. They like the stuff you sell. They probably share interests with others who also do. Give them content that’s interesting to those King Consumers, and you’ve got it made. You’ve got their attention. Now they’ll remember your 20-percent-off coupon later, down the line, because they’re paying attention to what you’re doing and saying.

When you post something and find it’s really interesting to your choir—you’ll know it when they start retweeting it—make sure you tweet that one more than once. Remember, people don’t tend to camp out on Twitter. It’s interactive, so people check it throughout the day. That means there are all different cycles during which people are on Twitter. You can use analytic tools (and we’ll get to those) to find out the best time to tweet things, but don’t overlook the off-peak times, too. You might reach a whole different group of people by tweeting then.

This timing strategy is especially great for sharing really big offers or contests. For those tweets, be sure you tweet twice a day. And if you really want to promote something, tweet about it on different days of the week. Suppose you want to promote a contest that will end in a week. That’s seven days you have to tweet twice a day, giving you fourteen interactions with your followers. You want to spread those fourteen slots between your peak times and your nonpeak times, sending them out to all parts of your Twitter following.

Get people engaged by asking them to please retweet. Everyone loves a contest or a big sale, so retweeting your offer to their networks will make sense to your followers, too. To make it simple, just add PlzRT to the end of your tweet. Those are probably the five letters that will get your content retweeted the most often. The letters PlzRT will absolutely increase the number of people who will actually retweet, and why? Because you asked. Remember the adage, “You have not, because you ask not.” Don’t forget, Twitter is a pointing tool, and giving your followers a contest or great sale to point to helps keep them active and engaged members of their own Twitter networks.

Make Your Content Count

People in the world of Twitter follow others because they’re looking for information and opinions from respected sources. You and the people in your organization often have the deepest knowledge of your products and the lifestyle they support. This knowledge spans broad subject areas, from the materials used in your products to the best ways to use them. Your customer service agents answer the questions all the time. And, all your employees have specialized knowledge in their own areas of expertise. You can leverage this knowledge and demonstrate not only your subject matter authority, but also your commitment to your products and the customers who buy them.

Once again we’ll turn to your FAQs. If you took my advice and used your FAQs as the basis for your first blog post, you have the first thing you can point to on Twitter. But before you go pointing away, why not use this opportunity to do some additional King Consumer research, using your Twitter expertise. I’m going to give you step-by-step instructions using my earlier example for the stop-snoring spray in Chapter 4, to show not only how I used Twitter to get involved with a community on behalf of a client, but also how you, too, can benefit from doing this on your own behalf.

The first step is to take a look at the stop-snoring FAQs and identify a few short phrases or questions people use to search information about this product on Twitter. If this is a new product or you still need more ideas about where to start check Wordtracker or Google’s keyword tool to see what consumers are searching for when they enter our keywords, “stop snoring.”

The next step is to take some of those short phrase questions and put them in the Twitter search box to find the real conversations consumers are actually having about them. I would enter them in the following format: “stop snoring” -http -www.

The quotation marks around our key phrase will keep stop and snoring together during the search. The -http and -www remove all of the tweets with URLs in them from the search. This isolates the search to the questions I am looking for. Go ahead, I’ll wait here.

Our immediate results make it clear that, the snorer doesn’t do this research. It is the partner who has to sleep with a snorer who is looking for a solution. That insight completely changes how I would recommend that my client write his or her sales copy.

Now I know who to speak to when I craft my responses to help these victims on Twitter and even on my website who simply asked a question and got a huge flood of “noise” in return. Since I know who my client’s real Kings are, I can simply begin to answer some of the questions I know they’re asking. And with these tweeted answers, my client can now begin to demonstrate authority in this area, and other Twitter users will begin to recognize this authority.

You can use content that already exists on the web to answer some of these questions. Remember the value of Twitter as a pointing tool, and don’t hesitate to post tweets pointing to good and reliable information about your products that you found elsewhere on the web. You know your subject area well enough to point these resources out. Pointing a thirsty man to the fountain is almost as good as offering him the water yourself.

The Law of Twitter Reciprocity

The law of reciprocity on Twitter is really just the good old Golden Rule. “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.” Nowhere in the world of social media is this more prevalent than in the world of Twitter. You saw how that works for gaining followers, but it’s also true for tweeting and retweeting.

You need to retweet what others tweet and engage in some conversation with your followers. They will do the same in return. Not everyone, of course, but a percentage of your following will. Since you’re working within a specific area of interest, you’re bound to come across statements that resonate with you and your business. Show your followers respect by retweeting them, and they’ll do the same for your posts. It’s part of the culture on Twitter, and you want to be a part of the group, not just a guy or girl who sells stuff.

This is especially effective when you find your followers talking about your products, your service, or things very specific to your industry. Give them a friendly retweet, and you will see a good number of your followers doing the same for you. Twitter users love to get retweeted so this simple act encourages your followers to make comments on your tweets. I make it a practice to retweet and thank any Twitter follower who mentions me or my organization. This lets them know that we are watching and appreciate their mentions. Everybody loves a cool shout-out.

TWEET YOUR VIPS RIGHT

Okay, so remember the story in Chapter 8 about the Las Vegas conference and the VIP line? What I didn’t tell you then was that I was in the VIP line because I was a speaker at the conference. This was great since it was a huge conference of about seven hundred people. I was happy not to have to stand in that long “regular” line.

When the start time came, they opened the doors and let all of us in the VIP line go ahead into the club. They had a separate area for us VIPs with its own bar, roped off and everything. Only the VIPs got service at that bar. “The regulars” were not allowed. They really rolled out the red carpet for their VIPs. They succeeded in making us feel special, because we all supported their event.

You can use Twitter to treat your Kings the way I got treated in Las Vegas. Set up a private Twitter account that’s just for your VIP Kings and treat them royally. Give them red-carpet access to early arrivals, customer support, or loyalty clubs—whatever! There are many ways to use this more personal and direct communication to create deeper interactions with these, your best customers and cheerleaders. Don’t fill this area with information aimed at any old “commoner,” like the posts about all your general stuff. Keep this conversation VIP all the way. Keep it red carpet and special, and they will pay attention.

I took one more lesson away from that evening at the Vegas club. Once they let us VIPs in, they started to let in the other guests and partygoers from the regular line. I noticed that the regular folks seemed to enter only in small groups. It’s like a few dozen come in and then no more. A little while later a few dozen more come in, and then it stopped again. Mind you, this is a big Vegas club, so why in the world wouldn’t everyone in the line have been let in at the same time? I decided to go outside and take a look, because I had some friends who were not VIPs, and I was waiting for them to get in.

I saw right away what was going on. They were using the line in front of the club for marketing! They didn’t want the line to disappear. They wanted everyone who went by to see this huge line because, the longer the line, the more people want to come in. So people are getting in line to wait to get into this rocking club, while the club down the street with no line can’t get anyone to step through its door! Why? Because we as humans want to be where the action is!

What’s all of this have to do with Twitter? Twitter is built on constant action. It’s hop on, share, hop off. Once you build your following on Twitter, your fan base will emerge from that following. You’ll engage your fan base with interesting content they can retweet to their followers, and you’ll get more followers. Plus, this whole time, you’ll continue to follow people you find interesting and the people who follow you, too. You’re on Twitter to interact, and this much interaction will show people that you are where the action is on Twitter. The more followers you gain, the more people will begin to follow you. It’s the law of attraction at work. The line in front of the club has a psychological effect on people. Twitter lets you create that same effect for your Kings. That’s a pretty good way to keep the line wrapping around your building.

YOUR TWITTER TOOL KIT

As simple as Twitter is—and now you know I wasn’t kidding about it being simple—there are still some great tools that will help you get the most out of it. I will recommend a few here, and some of them can be equally useful on other platforms, too. I find them especially helpful here on Twitter, but as we go through these chapters, we’re packing your social commerce tool box. Any good set of tools includes the versatile ones you can use in more ways than one.

1.  HootSuite: Simply put, HootSuite is the best place to begin with Twitter tools. Go to HootSuite.com to sign up for the free version. This will let you select and manage a total of five accounts on platforms including Twitter, Facebook, Linked In, Foursquare, Ping, WordPress, MySpace, and Google Pages. Your free account on HootSuite allows one administrator to control all of your accounts on these platforms. When it comes to monitoring what’s going on, you have real power here. You can stream search terms, hashtag feeds, and Twitter lists. You can monitor up to ten streams for each tab you create, and you can have twenty tabs with your free account. Note: As of this writing, there is currently no good search engine for Facebook. The only thing you can really do effectively with HootSuite there is to monitor the Facebook pages you manage.

2.  Social Mention: Here’s your place on the web for real-time searches. Your searches are free on the site, and you’ve got two good options for learning what people are “talking” about. You can search terms across everything, in which case you’re searching the “universe.” Or, you can select from among more than seventy-five different social networking sites to narrow your scope. Work on strong and precise search terms to get the best results.

3.  bitly: Come to bitly.com to create the itty-bitty URLs that make Twitter sharing so easy. Simply copy the real URL of whatever it is you want to share, and plug it into bitly. The result is a “bitmark,” a short URL that takes up only a fraction of your 140 characters yet still provides the link. That leaves you more room to comment on that valuable tweet. You can also use bitly to then track and analyze the number of clicks your tweet receives.

4.  Topsy: This is another cool tool that gives you the ability to track analytics and break them down by media. That way you can focus on tracking only pictures or only videos. Learn more about it at Topsy.com.

5.  Twitonomy: This tool was in beta as I wrote this, but even then … wow! What a cool dashboard to represent your Twitter activity! This is a great graphic representation of everything that is happening with you on Twitter. Check it out at Twitonomy.com.

6.  Twitter Counter: Let’s not forget the good, old, faithful Twitter speedometer to measure your followers. Just because it’s free, automatic, and just because it’s always there, doesn’t mean it can’t provide valuable insights. So use it.

SUMO LESSON

Here’s a little lesson that Brad, my coauthor Deb’s husband, shared. He’s Deb’s usual coauthor, and he’s spent a lot of time on all the social networks throughout his career. Having spent many years following trends in emerging technologies, he’s been an early adopter for lots of great new trends, from telecommuting to e-commerce to social media and more. Brad was a very enthusiastic Twitter user, and he spent a lot of time building a network of followers. Since he lives and breathes the act of gathering information, he frequently posted links to interesting and cool articles about the publishing industry, e-commerce, and a good number of other interests he pursues.

After more than a thousand tweets to many hundreds of followers, Brad’s enthusiasm started to flag, because he didn’t even know if anyone was reading his tweets. He saw he was getting a few retweets, but not many. He even tried getting his news out early in the day to see if he could become a go-to source for morning headlines among his followers. Without much concrete feedback, he was thinking about ending his Twitter activity and spending his time sharing elsewhere. That’s when he happened to a have an exchange with an editor he was working with. He mentioned to his editor that he was a little frustrated with Twitter and was thinking about not really posting much there anymore. The editor responded quickly: “Please don’t do that! I always read your posts, and I’d really miss them if you stopped.”

Without analytics, which Brad hadn’t felt too compelled to use until then, he didn’t think his tweets had any particular impact at all. In a random conversation, he quickly learned that, even if he didn’t hear back about it, the value of what he was sharing on Twitter was keeping the attention of his followers. Not only that, but just by sharing a bit of his knowledge and personality, he was building trust and respect among colleagues and coworkers. That’s a lot of value for a bit of tweeting!