Microblogging Your Way to Greatness

By Eric Brown Apr 24, 2008

After having discussed the basics of microblogging, we here at CMSWire decided it would be a good idea to cover some general practices that will enhance your microblogging experience, increase your results, and create more enjoyment for you.

Not only will these practices aid you in your quest for followers and friends, they will help make your microblog into a marketing tool that is usable in a variety of ways.

5 Best Practices for Microblogging

Add your Pownce feed to your Tumblr account so you only have to post once. Then use Twitterfeed to add it to your Twitter account. Beware: Twitterfeed is a free service, like Twitter, and is therefore subject to unplanned outages.
Use Tools to find friends and followers. There are two other applications that will help you expand your network: Twubble - which looks at your friend’s friends and recommends other people you could follow, and Twits Like Me - which looks at your updates and finds other people talking about the same thing.
TwitThis: Let others use their Twitter accounts to spread the word about you. With this handy little tool they can share what they find on your site with an automatically created short url and their own description right from your blog posts.
Stay on Top of Your Twitter: We recommend using Twhirl, found at www.twhirl.com. Twhirl creates widget like plugin for your desktop. You can update and configure various items, and monitor multiple accounts at the same time from Twitter without your browser. You can also update your Pownce account directly from Twhirl simultaneously.
And Last but Not Least: Remember to reciprocate the follow. Try to follow others that are following you. It builds good repoire, but as spammers invade the Twitterverse be sure to take a few minute to verify the person you are following is in fact a person and not a script.

One way some are trying to use Twitter for marketing is by using TweetClouds as a keyword research tool. TweetClouds allows you to enter a username from Twitter and then it outputs a cloud of top words or two word phrases that appear in that Twitter account.

It does have a couple of very basic filters for replies and del.icio.us tags along with outputting a single page that you can link to. The cloud contains mostly niche related jargon, simple frequently occurring words, and tiny urls.

After doing some looking and considering the nature of short posts in microblogging, it becomes apparent that this would only be an effective marketing tactic (or data gathering tactic) if you were in a business where you did not know a lot of jargon.

The time it would take to produce even a little bit of usable data isn’t worth the effort and what you are apt to get are common conversational phrases, links, and industry or niche related jargon that is common to those already absorbed in them.

What Others Are Saying

Don’t just take our word for all of this. We are not the only ones who think microblogging is a viable marketing venue. There has been buzz from around the web in terms of using various microblogs and techniques mentioned above from some top web marketers.

Jack Humphrey, top blog marketer, discusses the viability of microblogging in a variety of posts at his Friday Night Report and also has a full program available to get access to his tips on social marketing.

Jason Drohn of JD’s Blog says by using microblogging: “You now have a direct, one on one connection with that many more people!”

On WebStrategy, Jeremiah Owyang (jowyang) discusses various tools for web marketing and productivity. He calls Twitter: “…extensible, and many third-party developers are creating tools around the simple data being exported for a variety of unique applications”. He also gives a list of Twitter tools he recommends that all Twitter users use, whether for personal or corporate use.

Again, don’t take our word for it. Spend a little time with a microblog, gather some followers, and see for yourself what microblogging can do for you!