Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Columnist Chris Kerns takes a deep dive into the profile descriptions for millions of Twitter users to bring you insight into why you need to look beyond just tweets to target your audience.

Social media is as much about sharing information as expressing a certain kind of image to the rest of the world. Being able to choose the moments we want to share (and leave out the ones we’d rather not) gives users the ability to curate a public perception — a mix of who we really are and who we want to be.

But these self-identifying labels are not just in messages; they’re also in our profile descriptions. Some people choose to list their job, others an allegiance to a favorite sports team. By looking at profile descriptions for millions of Twitter users, we can see some interesting patterns emerge about how groups of people describe themselves....

The days of the 30-second restriction for videos on Twitter are over, Twitter announced on Tuesday alongside other coming changes to videos on the platform.

Twitter users can now tweet videos up to 140 seconds long, matching the same amount of characters users can post in a single tweet.

Not only can you post videos over 2 minutes, Twitter will also be making it easier to find more videos to watch with a new viewing mode....

So, what do you think? Let’s end that cycle today. 

First, you need to tidy up your Twitter timeline. (stop tweeting crap no one wants to read)

And second, you're going to start using visuals on Twitter the right way.

Deal?

Here’s 21 ways you can use visual marketing to brand your business and captivate your Twitter audience.

Do you use Twitter to find prospects?

Looking for a better way to organize relevant conversations?

You can use your favorite RSS reader to monitor customized Twitter searches, Twitter lists, and hashtags that relate to your business.

In this article, you’ll discover how to set up RSS feeds to easily monitor and manage a steady flow of Twitter leads.

Often we get asked: How did you grow your Twitter followers to such impressive numbers? Why do my accounts not grow as much as I want them to? Why do I get nothing out of all my marketing efforts? Why do people not talk about my product in social media?

And most of the time the answer is: It’s the Content – or the lack thereof.

What do you post if you do not have interesting content?If you have no good content to share on social media, you either cannot post as often as you want to (and should be) or you sound like a self promotional tout. Social Media Marketers can only post as often as they want if they have the amazing content to share that makes their posts powerful enough.

And when your social media updates fail to be useful (like interesting content) – why should others care or even share them?

Of course social media is also about conversations and interaction and not only about sharing content. But your options in social media are very limited if you yourself cannot start the conversations you want to have with the right content....

Twitter lists are very powerful.

As your following grows, using the list feature is crucial. Twitter lists are a way for you to group Twitter users together. You may choose to create your lists or subscribe to others lists or both.

If you’re unsure how to create a Twitter list you can learn how right now.  Quick tip on naming your Twitter list, be creative. List can show up in Google Search so name your list for keywords pertinent to your business or service.

Everybody loves an underdog. David versus Goliath… Your local bookstore versus Amazon… Marty’s Fish, Milk & Bait versus WalMart. All these battles, famous or not, tug at our heart strings. Trouble is, if you’re a small business owner, you know you need to do more than just tug at heart strings to make your business work. You need to actually get people in the door. You need to get them to buy things. Then you need them to come back.

Social media has long been hailed as a marketing equalizer. In many ways, it is. It’s free to create an account and free to post and to build your following (Facebook changes aside). But it’s time to get more specific about how to use social as a marketing equalizer. So here are 9 techniques SMBs can use to beat big corporations on social media....

Today, hashtags are everywhere. Even if you don’t use Twitter or Instagram, you can’t miss them on billboards, TV ads, even on product packagings: Big budget campaigns want to push their custom hashtags in every possible touchpoint they can put their hands on.

Smaller businesses can’t use the same tactics as the bigger fishes, and usually don’t have the dmeans, or even a good reason, to create and promote their own hashtag. But they can still use hashtags in many useful ways; the most obvious is to use relevant tags when you share interesting content on social media, so that you can reach a bigger audience. Finding the best hashtags for that can require a bit of research, but the good news is that having such a list will allow you to kill two birds with one stone....

To actually grow your business with Twitter, it's not enough to merely tweet for the sake of tweeting -- you've also got to measure your efforts, and analyze them to see your performance.

While the latter may not seem like the fun part, it's actually where all the magic happens. By figuring out what's working (and what isn't), you make more informed strategic decisions -- and hopefully work your way to be more successful down the road.

This post is all about what that magic can tell you. Below are five takeaways I've found from analyzing HubSpot's Twitter account. Try out some of these strategies on your company’s Twitter account, and run your own analyses to see if they work for you, too....