I recently discovered Ping.fm (http://ping.fm) and it seems like a very powerful and straightforward service. With the huge amount of Twitter or “Micro-Blog” “competitors” out there, an individual or organization needs to keep up with the times significantly by utilizing each of these services or creating a bespoke Marketing Mix using its preferred services.

With Ping.fm, you can register accounts from Twitter, to Facebook to MySpace and that list goes on. When you have each account registered, you can “ping” any message you want to any or all of the accounts.

Now here is the best part:

Do you remember earlier, when we talked about recurring tweets using Tweet Later?

When you register a Twitter account onto your Tweet Later account, look at the drop-down list on Tweet Later and you will see “Ping.fm”.

Do you see where I am going with this?

You can actually set up recurring tweets to “ping” messages from Tweet Later to Ping.fm and then onward to your social media sites registered on Ping.fm.

This is an incredibly powerful tool. If you have tons of users registered with each of your social media outlets linked to Ping.fm, there is no easier way to get your message out to all of your followers across many different platforms.

Personally, I love it but it can be time-consuming to build your profile and product/service awareness on each of your accounts. My recommendation is to choose a top 5 that you really enjoy using and monitor them closely. Don’t forget, for each you will need to implement the mix of recurring feed and manual tweets for each and every account. When you have each account registered, you can “ping” any message you want to any or all of the accounts.

Check the following account and its rise to fame using the exact system mentioned above.

http://twittercounter.com/socialmediadan

Sweeten the tweets

So, we know how to do it but what do we actually do?

Grab the URL of your site or landing page. Head over to bit.ly, login and shorten that URL. Once you have your shortened link, open notepad (or text edit if you are on Mac) and paste it in there. You’re going to need to see this link a lot over the next few minutes, so this will insure you don’t lose it.

Quickly open your browser and copy the URL from bit.ly into the search box at the top, the part that starts with “‘http://”’ and press “enter.” If you are taken to your website or landing page, fine, move on. If not, return to bit.ly and start again.

Go to tweetlater.com and login with your credentials. Click on “Tweets” in the menu and then on “New Tweet.”

NOTE: At this point, you need to think of some tweet that is going to really catch the eye of your followers. Try and answer the following questions each time you create a new tweet. Even though each tweet is 140 characters or less, it should never be a short process, so give it some real thought and make sure you can answer these questions before you go to type the first character:

· What do your followers want?

· Do they want it from you?

· What cost are they willing to pay?

· Where am I going to send them?

· Should I “serve” or ‘sell’?

· If I step into the mind of my customer, what am I looking for?

Once you have these questions answered, you need to come up with an enticing tweet. You can always steal testimonials from other users and add your link at the end.

This is one I borrowed from a happy user of twi.tter.me:

RT @ socialmediadan Danny has built an awesome resource in twi.tter.me and offers outstanding … http://bit.ly/HkCN2

Now, with your own tweet ready, enter it into the “tweet” box on Tweet Later.

The best time, we know, to publish tweets is between 11am & 2pm US Pacific time, so choose a time in between that margin that best suits you and if you are in the UK or otherwise, please allow for time differences.

So you want tweeps…

Market Research

twitter

Question: “What’s the general consensus on Twitter? Love it or hate it?”

FTMama Love it. Trying to use Facebook because other people do, but it’s messy and increasingly unreliable.

mike_online i love twitter and i hate some people who are in it… perfect! lol…

6AlKal6 After a couple of weeks, I quite enjoy it. I find most of it very interesting and informative. Not a lot of rubbish.

R_Arblaster RE: twitter – love it.

DMariaScaglione I love Twitter! Awesome info, people and it’s fast as one wants. I only wonder if people are doing well $$$ here?

Once again, Twitter (http://twitter.com/) is at the center of your Marketing Mix. This means that almost all the traffic and lead generation for your product will come from Twitter.

One single tweet posted to your targeted group of followers, or “tweeps” as they’re referred to on Twitter, can produce up to 85% of clicks from your total followers in only 12 hours. If you have a new Twitter.com account, it is paramount that you start to build your followers as quickly as possible, making sure that those followers share common interests relating to your product or service.

I’ve put together a system for gaining targeted Twitter followers. If you follow it each day, you will have a multitude of followers within a short space of time, presumably within the 90 day quota of this document.

Twitter system

My system is very easy, with methods proven to work.

It does take a bit of work and dedication to the job but it definitely pays off and quickly.

With only about 25 minutes a day of your time, in a few weeks you will amaze yourself with the results you will start to see. I am speaking from experience. And you can step by my Twitter account to see what I mean. So if you really want to learn how to build up a mass follower base, read on. It’s not hard and anyone can do it.

Let’s say that you have an account with very few followers to start. Here is how you get them coming to you:

First thing to do is find a user on Twitter who has significantly more followers than you. Look for someone on Twitter whose follower list numbers in the thousands. For my experiment, I chose John Chow, a leading “Make Money Online” blogger, because we share similar interests. You can pretty much bet your mortgage that the people who are following John are interested in blogging, making money online, affiliate selling and general internet marketing, which is what I’m all about as well.

Three more Twitterific applications

Once you’ve found a Twitter user who fits the criteria (or two or more), head over to Flash Tweet (http://www.flashtweet.com).

This application has just had a massive overhaul, which makes it more stable, faster and much easier to use.
I would recommend signing up for the 14 day trial. You will more than likely find (especially if you have more than one Twitter account) that this site and its uses will bring a whole host of benefit to your projects.
So complete the registration process and sign in.
You’ll need to add a Twitter account to get started. So enter your Twitter login details. When you are presented with a navigation list, click on “mass follow.” When you are on the next screen, enter the screen name of the user whose followers you are going to copy. I entered “johnchow.”

NOTE: If you want to find the name of a user on Twitter, either search for their name in Twitter search (you can navigate to this, once logged into your Twitter profile) or you can look for mentions with an “@” symbol in front of them for in the Twitter language, this is also a user’s name. You can also contact any user you like on Twitter by placing an “@” symbol before the user’s name and typing your message. The “@” symbol allows for that name/username to act as a link to that person’s Twitter profile. For example, my name is Dan Whitehouse and my Twitter user name is presented as “@socialmediadan” So, once on Twitter, putting @socialmediadan in a search will bring up my name and make it “clickable.” Nice!

Then, just click on a page number starting from 1, press ‘follow all’ and then hit go. It will take a few seconds to complete but after you’ve done that, you have added 100 followers, just like that. Twitter allows a maximum of 1000 followers a day, so watch it and do not go over. I always follow 9 pages each day just to be on the safe side.

So, you have added almost a thousand followers to your account in just a few minutes. Logic dictates that 40% of users will follow you back within 48 hours, due to all of the follow-back applications available to work with Twitter, such as Tweet Later and so on.

Head on over to TweePular, (http://www.tweepular.com/); another cool app that is in “beta”, meaning they’re still working on refining the application. However, it works very well. When you are in Tweepular, enter your Twitter username and password again. Watch the funny bird do the “moon walk” and then you’re in. Click on “no follow love.” The application will then present you with a list of users who have not followed you back. Check “unfollow all” and hit “go.”

You may have to do this a few times to get all of them. Once this is done, you will have about 40% of the original people who followed you following you back, which by anyone’s books will be around 400.

…So, 400 new followers every 2 days!

You’ll also want to monitor how many people you are actually adding each day. For this you can use twittercounter (http://twittercounter.com/). It shows you a graph of how many followers have affected your account in the last few days. It’s really very cool to be able to quickly monitor your progress and see how you’re doing. If you want proof that this system is working, check mine out:

http://twittercounter.com/socialmediadan

Remember there are many different systems out there for gaining followers. The bottom line here is to ask yourself: Does your Twitter success revolve around mass followers or meaningful connections? Take a second to read this before you answer:

http://staynalive.com/articles/2009/06/19/twitter-declares-checkmate-on-twitter-gamers/

How long did that process take? Around 15 minutes, max? It’s not too hard, is it? Just have a “cuppa” while you’re doing it.

Make money with Twitter

Want to know how to make money on Twitter? Well, you have come to the right place.

There are many people who still do not understand Twitter and how it works. So, if you are one of those people, still unsure of its uses, I shall explain what it’s all about, how to use it and what the real benefits are for individuals and businesses that use Twitter.

Imagine, for a moment, that there is an earthquake or some form of natural disaster anywhere in the world. You can log on to your Twitter account, type in “earthquake”, for example and Twitter would find people talking about this particular incident.

You would then see real people discussing and posting about this event in real time. Many people do not understand the significance of this – you can do it for almost anything.

Try it out, when you have a minute, for your favorite football, soccer or any sporting event. There are bound to be a handful of people at least, with iPhones and such, “twittering” away, discussing and talking about that event in real time.

For businesses it’s a whole different story to make money on Twitter. It’s all about the number of followers you have.

I, myself and a few others, work very closely with Twitter and have it at the center of our Marketing Mix. We realize the value of Twitter as a marketing tool and we try to utilize it to its full potential every day.

Conversion ratio

With however many followers you have on Twitter, you’re never really likely to get more than around 1% conversion ratio from your followers. In this instance, conversion ratio means purchases from “click-throughs” on the link in your tweet. This is because Twitter users are not primed and ready to buy, unlike a PPC (pay-per-click) scenario, where users are actively seeking out the products you are trying to sell. Additionally, if you take the time to build up targeted followers, you’ll get an even better conversion rate.

Having said that let me take you back to the point about followers. If you have 1000 followers and an average product price of $30, try tweeting to see what sort of a conversion rate you get. You can discuss how to improve this with like-minded people on the forum.

John Chow, mentioned already for his fame as the “Make Money Online” blogger, recently posted a tweet selling an affiliate product and made over a $1,000 on just that one tweet. John Chow is a very, well-respected blogger, being one of the top 10 in the entire world and having nearly 20K Twitter followers at the time of writing this book.

Do you see the potential of this method of marketing using Twitter as your base and are you starting to see you and your own business’s potential to make money online utilizing Twitter?

Ok then…

Let’s say that you’re one of the top dogs on Twitter and your account has over 1.5 million followers, like good ol’ Mr. Kutcher (@aplusk on Twitter.) If we go back to that 1% conversion ratio and implement it into this scenario, that’s 15,000 sales. If your average product price is $30, that’s $300,000 just from one tweet! You can definitely make money on Twitter with this system!

NOTE: I know the majority of us are not going to get anywhere near 1.5 million followers, not anytime soon, anyway but anyone can get 100, 000 within a period of six months. There are many tools out there that can help you gain followers and none are completely automatic. Trust me, I have tried them all to date and written some pretty shocking reviews about the ones that claim to be “automated.”

Having done the legwork to present the good ones to you, here are two sites that will definitely help you in your quest to make money on Twitter:

http://twi.tter.me

http://www.twitter-bomb.com

Increasing your Twitter tweet click-through ratio

Getting the most from your tweets is a funny old game. You need to be able to send your tweet at the right time, with content you know will be appealing enough to your followers while using keywords, which can benefit both you and your followers. Sites such as Twollo (http://www.twollo.com/), will find and follow you as a result, based on the keywords you are “tweeting” about.

Danny Whitehouse SEO

I reel them in, you cook the fish..

Posted in December 2009 …

The TRUE power of pIng.fm