Many U.S. Senators and Representatives are tweeting opinions, updates, images, documents, etc. these days, and Twitter can be a very useful, if not an essential tool, to learn about what’s going on directly from each member, especially regarding controversial legislation such as SOPA. An easy to use but powerful web tool (it's also free) named PolitickerUSA can save you a lot of time and effort informing you as to what members of congress are tweeting about right now. In one location you can quickly access the non-stop real-time stream of tweets from Senators, Reps, President Obama, go [...]

Related Topics: How To: Twitter | Search Engines: People Search | Search Engines: Real Time Search | Twitter: Search

The role of the online community manager (CM) was born out of the need for brands to connect with relevant people in a meaningful way. To establish authority and offer value to a relevant community by way of sharing awesome, complimentary content, to solve problems as they arise, to monitor and moderate topical conversations—that was the Social Media Community Manager Job Description, and in many ways, still is. These forms of engagement, if meant to be worthwhile, should always be tethered to actionable marketing key performance indicators (KPIs). In that respect, CMs aren’t just ma [...]

Related Topics: B2B Search Marketing | How To | How To: Twitter | Intermediate

This week, Twitter launched the instant follow button for websites to make it even easier to connect visitors to Twitter accounts.  This button joins the dynamic Facebook Like button that allows for logged in users to instantly connect to the social site without leaving the website. The main benefit of this new button is that now instead of two clicks, users only require one click and aren’t taken off of your website. But Where Should I Use The New Follow Button? The addition of yet another new button has many webmasters scratching their heads trying to figure out where to put the [...]

Related Topics: Features: General | How To: Twitter | Twitter

Where the standard Tweet button gives you little control over the button’s appearance, functionality or call-to-action (you can Tweet, Tweet or Tweet) you have virtually unlimited options when encouraging users to follow you on Twitter. This is because the following action takes place on Twitter itself, rather than on your website:  you’re essentially encouraging a user to click on a link. As such, there’s more optimization and testing opportunities. Call-to-Action Your call-to-action can take the form of a text link, a linked graphic or both. This gives you the opportunity to crea [...]

Related Topics: Beginner | How To: Social Media Marketing | How To: Twitter

The official tweet button from Twitter is easy to implement, aggregates direct tweets and retweets in its counter, and includes a mechanism to encourage following (discussed below). These features almost certainly outweigh the slender benefits of employing third-party tweeting tools (the main benefit being more flexibility in styling the tweet button's appearance). There are a number of things that can be tested in order to improve the number of Tweets a page receives. Display Type The Tweet button is available in three versions, all versions sharing the same color, size and label (“Tw [...]

Related Topics: Beginner | How To: Social Media Marketing | How To: Twitter