Twitter Best Practices

Twitter has gotten a lot of press lately. A lot of people are new to Twitter and are somewhat confused about how to use Twitter.

I've been on Twitter for quite some time and I would like to share with you some of my thoughts on Do's and Don'ts of Twitter.


Twitter Do Nots

* Don't use it as a vehicle to spam your followers. This is not like a mailing list. People want to know more about you, and what you do throughout your day...tips, news, ideas you want to share. I've followed (and subsequently unfollowed) a number of internet marketers and found their practice not to my liking. Most of their tweets are: "I'm selling my stuff for 50% today only." "Buy more of my stuff here". "Buy more of Bob's stuff (I am making a commission from this link)".

This is the quickest way to turn people off. It really shows your followers (and would be followers) your true colors. These people are not about growing their social capital (and good will) but are in it for a quick buck.

* Don't over tweet. While some people are too shy to tweet, some go overboard. Sending 10+ tweets a day tend to wear your followers out. Keep to the relevance of your topic. It's one thing is you are using it to keep in touch with your friends and family, it's another as a marketing/corporate communication tool.

If you have relevant and helpful things to tweet about, by all means.

All I am saying is...respect your follower's time. Take a few minutes to ask yourself "is there value in this tweet for my followers?"

* Don't Spam Follow. There's a growing practice of people Following others with the hope of getting a reciprocal follow. It's not a collectible card game people. The people who do this thinks that having a few thousand people following them means big bucks in their bank account....I don't believe that this is a wise strategy. I would rather real people follow me rather than an artificial crowd of "bots". It's just me.

* Keep your Follow list small. I actually read and care about the people I follow. When I see someone following 3000 people...I know they are not serious about the people they are following. How can you? If it takes you 1 second to read one tweet...and if everyone on average tweets once per day, that's 3000 seconds PER DAY or 500 minutes (over 8 hours) to read. This seems like you're not real or genuine.

Twittering Done The Right Way
Now let's talk about how to use Twitter the Right way; especially to grow your business and make money.

* Share real content and value with your followers. For example, "I've found this really cool widget that saved me a lot of time.." By sharing this sort of information, your followers will come to appreciate and respect your tweets.

* Keep it balanced. Balance your tweets between heavy information with light tweets...for example, "I'm heading out to lunch with Paul. Paul's a great guy who specializes in...."

* Give people credit. Sing other people's praise. If someone does something cool, tweet about it. They will appreciate it, and may in turn follow you.

* Comment often on other people's posts. People like to know their tweets are being heard. It's amazing how much engagement you can ignite by just commenting on someone's tweet. Try it.

* Produce content. Write blogs. Submit your stuff to e-zines. Post on newsgroups, Ning, Facebook groups, etc. Put a twitter signature so people can follow you. In fact, it might be better to just put a twitter link than your website. Add it to your email signature

* Ask questions. Enage your followers. If you are at a supermarket and can't decide between product A vs Product B...tweet about it. "I am looking for...what do you think ?" "I can't decide...which do you think?"

* The world's a stage. Try to make your tweets funny or interesting...Again, give your followers value.

* Have a detailed Bio. Give concise and relevant information about who you are in your bio. Specifically what industry you belong to. What your interests are. Answer this question: "why should I follow you?"

* Post once in a while. Put a reminder on your calendar to post once a week. It really only takes less than 2 minutes when you make a habit of doing it. If you are a beginner...just post something mundane. Like "I am heading out to the supermarket" It's OK.

* Be sure to link to Facebook and Linkedin. Most people are on Facebook and Linkedin these days. Be sure to use the Apps within Facebook and Linkedin to connect your tweets so that tweets from Twitter automatically updates to your Facebook account so your friends on Facebook can see it too.

* Ask people to re-tweet your posts. If you write a newsletter or a blog and you think the content is worth spreading, then pre-make a Tweet for your readers and ask them to "re-tweet" your post to their subscribers. Check out the bottom of this article if you don't know what "re-tweeting" means. (Thanks to Michael Rubin. www.twitter.com/merubin)

Summary: Twitter Best Practices

It's pretty simple really, follow Jesus' Golden Rule: Do onto other's what you want others to do onto yourself.

Imagine chatting with a group of friends or business associates. Ask yourself, "would my comments be appropriate in this group?" If so, tweet it. For example, "Wow, I saw Iron Man, it was a great movie." would be appreciated.

Another suggestion you might want to try is to follow some people who I consider have high social equity on Twitter. Follow these people:

Mari Smith: www.twitter.com/marismith (I love her tweets!)
Robert Grant: www.twitter.com/robertgrant
Kirt Christensen: www.twitter.com/kirtchristensen
John Reese: www.twitter.com/johnreese

Do what successful people do. Copy these people's best practice.

Finally, don't force yourself to tweet. Do what comes natural. I sometimes go for days without tweeting. Some times, I tweet 3-5 times a day. It's all good.

Do you have any other ideas or suggestions? Please add to this post.

You can follow me on Twitter at: www.twitter.com/georgetran

Please help me spread this post.
Please "Pay it Forward". If you find this useful, please re-tweet this in your twitter blog:

"Great article about Twitter Best Practices: http://twurl.nl/4k5znz"

10 Things to Look for in a Social Membership website Solution

Most social network solutions are advertising based revenue. While this works for companies like Facebook and MySpace, a more realistic revenue model would be to use a hybrid social network but with membership fees instead.

If you are looking for a membership solution, here are 10 things to look out for. Of course, these are just my opinions and I'm sure there are other features I haven't thought of. Ideally, your solution should have some, and preferably all of these.

1) Easy Installation and Management - Yet flexible and powerful
The solution should be easy to install and setup. Most open source solutions are relatively easy, although you will likely require a “geek” to install in on your own server.

The assumption here is that you have your own server. If not, it is fairly inexpensive to rent a server. Virtual servers can go for as low as $59 per month. Do a search on “web collocation” to find a good host provider. I’ve used Aplus.net, and they are a pretty good outfit.

Make sure that once installed, the software is easy to configure and customize. In other words, you can change your logo, set up new membership packages on your own without needing a geek to do it for you.

Hosted solutions in general are easier to install and all you need to do is to customize it.

2) Easy and Convenient User Experience
Some solutions are prettier on the eyes than others. Also, your solution ideally should make the users feel comfortable and be intuitive. Users should not feel lost, or overwhelmed with too many things on the screen.

In some instances, it is better to have "too little" items present than too much as people can get easily confused and intimidated. If users feel frustrated or confused, they will be more likely to leave your membership site.

You should look for a solution that has an intuitive user experience.


3) Social Media
As of 2008, videos are becoming common place. Your solution should be able to support streaming videos. Videos are useful for teaching concepts and ideas, or just talking to people. You could record a tutorial video teaching people on the perfect golf swing and make these available for "members only".

Simularly, your users will want to upload their own videos too. Your system should ideally support this also.

Of course, videos come at a heavy price. You will need to properly plan for server space to support this. Videos need to be re-encoded to support streaming format...and encoding takes tremendous server resources. Not to mention the disk space required to store all these as well as the bandwidth to support it. For a smaller membership site, a single server could serve this purpose, but for larger networks, you will likely need to build a cluster to handle load balancing.

Having a hosted solution will negate the need to worry about these concerns. The trick is to find the right solution that support this.


4) Customizable
Make sure the solution you selected can be customized to support your business needs.
There are two axis of customization you need to investigate: Image and functional.

With an image customization axis, you have a degree of control on the layout, the colors, the images you can customize to fit your image brand and site’s appeal.

With a functional customization axis, you have control over the feature set of your solution. For example, if the solution does not support a shopping cart, and if it is important for your business, that you can have that function programmed in. Most Open Source solutions support this, although some off the shelf software does not.

While both axis of customization are important, you will need to prioritize what is more important for your business model. Of course, the ideal solution will have high customization in both but you will more likely have to pay for it in the price tag.

5) Integrates a detailed Member Profile and Search function
Make sure your solution supports the Web 2.0 paradigm and the ideals of a social network. People expect these features in their solutions. It strengthens the building of bonds and community. Most membership solutions are based on the old "BBS" forum structure (for those who are not familiar, BBS stands for a Bulletin Board System as popularized in the 80's and 90's).

Having a detained member profile allows members to put in a detailed write up about who they are, what they want, what they are looking for and a way for others to connect with them….much like Facebook. Unfortunately with many existing membership software solutions, they fall short on this area as their focus is in the membership access control, and not on the user experience.

Ideally, members can locate each other based on interest, location, industry, and profession…to mention a few criteria.

6) Integrated e-Commerce
Perhaps you sell books, CDs or DVDs. Why not have these available on your membership site for your members to purchase. Better yet, why not have the ability to offer "members only" prices that are substantially cheaper than "retail"? This gives people an incentive to become a paying member.

It is even more important to have this function integrated if your system supports an integrated affiliate tracking system. This way, when a member buys something, the referring member gets paid a commission.

7) Event Calendar and Registration
This feature is important for someone operating an information marketing/seminar company, event promotions such as concerts or conferences. Having an integrated system for your members to buy tickets right from your social membership site, and track commission is a powerful way to market your events.

Having an integrated event calendar means you don’t have to wait for your web master to update your event calendar all the time.

8) Integrates an affiliate tracking and payout system
Having an integrated affiliate tracking system is a powerful and effective way to grow your social network as it gives your users a financial incentive to refer their friends and associates to your network.

Imagine saying to your members, "refer your friends to join our network. Should they decide to buy a product from us, come to one of our events or upgrade to premium membership, we will pay you a commission."

Unfortunately, very few membership systems have this feature.


9) Classifieds/Reverse Classifieds
Ideally, your solution offers a classifieds system for your members to post ads. This gives your members…particularly your paid premium members an incentive to stick with your network….and gives your free members an incentive to be premium members so they can post ads and gain clients from your network.

Some systems support a Reverse Classifieds system where members can post “I am looking for” ads. Why is this cool? Imagine if you can have a place for your members to post ads such as “I am looking for an investor”, “I need tickets to next week’s Madonna Concert”, “I need to find a mentor in Marketing”.

10) Free and Paid Member hybrid
Most systems fall into one category or the other;

if it is a free network, it is called a social network - like Facebok and Ning.

if it is paid, it is called a membership network.

An ideal solution is one that supports both a free member and a paid member. This way, your network can grow by attracting free members and then upgrade these to become paid members. Ideally, your solution should also support multiple membership package definitions such that each package has its own access rules ie. "who has access to what".

Other Considerations

In addition to these features, you should also keep in mind the following important infrastructure considerations.

Scalable Secure Server Maintenance and Backup
If done right, your network will grow. Be careful that your server can handle your growth from 10 people to 10,000 people…or more. Make sure your hardware has a RAID drive array so it can still be operational should you experience a drive failure. Without this, even if you have a backup…restoring from a down drive can take you offline for days...and this could destroy your business.

You will also need to install a firewall. Most solutions will require you to store your client’s credit card numbers on your own system (so you can charge them month after month). This also means your system will be a target for hackers. You will need to hacker proof your system to ensure maximum security. It is advisable to hire someone familiar with internet security to audit your site.

Of course, backups are crucial. Your solution should have a backup solution that is NOT backed up to the same drive as your main machine. This is because should you experience a drive failure, having the backup on the same drive will be disastrous.

On of the benefits of using a hosted solution such as Ning is that you don’t have to worry about this. Frankly it’s a pain in the behind to deal with this and it is not a productive use of your time and energy.



Ongoing Maintenance and Development
This is the most important part of the puzzle and often the most neglected. Companies treat their software as one off projects. This is not true. When deploying a solution, be sure to have a budget for maintenance and bug fixes. Not all software is 100% bug free, if you use Open Source…you may run into bugs and need to hire people to fix it.

Also, keep in mind that your needs (as well as the needs of your customers and the environment) often change. Companies often hire a team to deploy a solution and let the team go, then 6 months later; realize they need some other feature. It is difficult to track down the same team as they may have moved onto other projects.

This is one argument in favor of hosted solutions as they will always be there to handle your needs as they change.

If you are looking for an affordable, yet powerful social membership platform, you might want to check out our solution at www.i360connect.com. It has most of the features described here and you can get started with as little as $2.

10 Compelling Reasons to Own a Membership Business

There is a growing number of information marketers who are realizing the power of owning a membership business due to its residual income nature compared to a traditional ebook sales model. You see, traditional sales model is based on a transactional model. This means, unless you have another product to sell to your customer, they are no longer paying you money. This means as a marketer, you have to charge a high upfront cost for people to get access to your information. By operating a membership website, you can make your product a lot more affordable to more people. In other words, if you charge $99 for your product, you might want to consider charging only $14.99 per month for people to access your portal instead. This way, within 7 months, you will have broken even and the rest is pure profit.

Credit for some of these points goes to Jay and Sterling from Internet Business Marketing podcast.

Here are the 10 compelling reasons you might want to consider:

1) It's a business in a box.
It's like owning your own cash machine. Especially if you set your site up right to encourage user generated content, your users will create content while you benefit from the membership fees. Your users would appreciate you for putting together the space for them to network with each other.

You can set it up to also have volunteer/user moderated content to ensure proper standards are met. Your moderators will receive special benefits from you, like priority access to other content or being able to attend special events hosted by you for free.

With the proper marketing and membership site infrastructure, you could even make your site grow on its own by encouraging members to refer other members to your site, and paying commissions for those referrals. This cuts down marketing costs and increases your profits, as well as putting your business on autopilot.

2) Residual Income
With your users paying you month after month for the benefits of being a member, you will receive a residual income from your membership business. This changes your business from being strictly transactional to one which focuses on bringing ongoing value and developing a deepening relationship with your clients.

What does this mean?

• It Breaks the Customer Churn.
  Instead of spending money chasing new customers month after month, you can focus on servicing the clients you currently have. It is easier to sell to people who have already opened their wallet to you than to someone brand new. Remember, people buy from those they know, like and trust. Selling to your existing customers is easier because they already know, trust and hopefully like you. Of course, you will want to bring more people into your network through marketing, but this will give you a base of dependable income.
  
  
• It Breaks the Product Creation Cycle.
  Instead of producing product launches month after month to push to your clients and encouraging them to “get the latest product” or the latest product upgrade, you can focus on adding value to your members and network. This also means you do not have to “sell” constantly.
  
  
• It Breaks the Event Churn.
  Some businesses promote seminar events, day in, day out. This is extremely taxing and involves extensive traveling. By bringing people into your private social network you can not only create residual income for your business, but enables you to launch mega events. Thus you can bring in a lot more people and may only need to hold these events once or twice a year.
  
  
• It Breaks the “Pitch Fest”
  Instead of constantly promoting products and inducing “social fatigue” to your list, you can reserve promotions for only the very important or more profitable opportunities. People don’t like to be constantly “pitched”. Having a residual income business model allows you to earn a healthy living without “cheapening your brand” through constant joint venture marketing.

What this ultimately means is that you can now focus on delivering good products and continually adding it to your membership site. The people who stay inside your club can benefit from your ongoing product creation. You no longer need to "re-sell" products to them.

Stop for a minute and ponder on the beauty of this model. Everyone wins. You win, your clients win and your affiliates win (they love getting paid on residuals too).

3) Residual Commissions for Your Affiliates
Let me ask you this. Would you rather be paid one time upfront for your referal or month after month? Most people would rather be paid month after month because it is less work and more money in the end.

If you can provide a residual stream of income for your affiliates, they will love you. They will be more inclined to cross promote your products to their people. In fact, if you can say "look, I've been paying Bob $10,000 a month for the last 3 months because he sent a broadcast to his list for my program." You are going to get people's attention.

4) It Strengthens Your Brand
Listen, fans need a place to hang out. Whether you are in the internet marketing space, knitting, coin collecting, you want to hang out with other people in your special niche. People like to network, share ideas, get feedback, help others and be helped. It's human nature.

By creating a space for people to talk about your product/brand/company, you strengthen your brand, and customer loyalty. Especially when you show good customer service and have a good product that you stand by. Invariably, in any business, you are going to encounter the occational bad apple. Should that person complain about you in your membership area...others will likely come to your defense...without you having to lift a finger. That's powerful.

5) Deliver Value to More People
If you operate your business on a consulting basis, you are trading time for money. You might even charge $10,000 per hour....but as soon as you stop working, the money stops flowing. By operating a membership site, and systematizing your information, your clients can help themselves. This way, when they want to talk to you, you can charge a lot more for your time.

Operating a membership site also establishes you as an expert/authority on the subject matter.

6) Easy to Create a System
There are literally millions of things that needs attention when operating a business. Whereever you can automate and systematize your business, you can save time and money. By putting your information and process onto one place, it is a lot easier to "McDonald-lize" your operation.

Create operational procedures and manuals so you can pass on mundane maintenance tasks to volunteers, assistants or secretaries. This frees you time to do other more important tasks, including time with your family.

7) Multiply Your Value Proposition
When your clients come to your social network/membership site, they have the opportunity to network with people local to them, share common interest as they do, be able to get advice, tips, and ideas from other members...this gives your network tremendous value.

As I mentioned in an earlier blog: 10 Secrets to a Successful Membership Site, people join your membership site for the content BUT THEY STAY FOR THE COMMUNITY. This is a critical factor in fighting membership attrition.

Your members can find mastermind partners, joint venture partners, accountability partners from your network. They can find clients, investors, business partners from your network. All these things they previously can not get from just buying your product.

8) Product Research
Want to launch another product but not sure if it's going to work or not? Ask your social membership site. Ask them to participate in the creation process so that the product launched will be exactly what they want.

Pay attention to their frustrations. What's not working for them? What's that "magic wand" that will make their pain go away. Without tapping into a community, it's a lot harder to find out what your people like and don't like.

Perhaps there's a feature of your product your clients don't like. How would you know about it without having a place for them to voice their complaints? This is your opportunity to continually improve your products and offerings.

9) Leverage Social Proof
In an age of decreasing trust, people want proof of success. By having your social network/membership site, you can highlight and showcase success stories from your members. You can ask for testimonials from your members a lot easier than if they were a one time buyer.

Especially if your membership site has some sort of a free membership or a free trial, your new members can experience the benefits of membership...thus easing them into a relationship with you and with your community.

10) Survival
If you don't do this, then your competitors will. This is your opportunity to re-engineer your business and leap frog your competitors. Be an industry leader. Take advantage of the first mover advantage. Once you are branded as "the industry's leading club (within your niche)"...it's hard for others to follow.

This is classic evolve or die. The social networking movement has changed the way people communicate. The businesses that change and take advantage of this will thrive. Those that resist, won't.

This is an excerpt from my book: The Social Marketing Manifesto. This book will retail for $29.95 and will be released early 2009. As a special offer, just sign up for my A-List newsletter, and I will send you a copy for free. Being a subscriber, you will also recieve pressing industry news. And, no, I will not spam you. I practice what I preach.

Sincerely
George

What is a Private Social Network?

Most people know what a social network is. It's a network where people come to discuss about general topics, and it allows people to get to know each other, their interests as well as find out who their friends are.

So what is a private social network, and why would owning a private social network be beneficial to your business or organization.

Below is a presentation that explains this further.



As always, your feedback and comments fuel my content creation. Please let me know what you like, don't like and how this can be improved.

Sincerely
George

What is a social network?

Well, if we're going to talk about social networks, we should start by defining what is a social network, and how do they work in basic terms.

Social networks such as Linkedin.com, Facebook.com and Myspace.com has 2 key characteristics:

1) Member detail drill down - You get to know more about the member, their interests, and their friends.

2) Friends referring Friends - This is key to their growth. By creating a social environment that encourages friends to connect with each other, social networks grow very quickly.

Below is a quick video that explains social networking. Enjoy.



Please comment on this as your feedback is valuable to me.

Is Internet Marketing Dead?

Social Media/Social Networking has certainly changed the way consumers interact with companies, especially in the area of information marketing.

Back in the days of old, customers are sent to a squeeze/sales letter page, and the expectation is they would either buy from you or give you their email address. While this model is still the prevailing sales model for many websites, more and more people are waking up to the fact that as consumers change their habits, so too do marketers need to evolve. Those who don't may flounder by the way side.

Social networking, social marketing is a hot topic. Everyone is talking about it. It seems like it's pretty overwhelming. It's hard to get one's head around all these new concepts. Where does one even begin?

This blog is designed to help you navigate the complex landscape of social media and explain basic concepts to help you grow your business and improve sales.

If the tried and true method of Internet Marketing 1.0 is evolving, one needs to understand what Internet Marketing 2.0 means. Below is a brief video that explains the difference.



This is an interactive blog, and your feedback and input is greatly appreciated. In other words, please post a comment....good or bad. Ask me questions.