inbound marketing

Hubspot, after calmly rolling with extensive audio troubles, delivered a very nice “Twitter for Business 101″ webinar this afternoon. How to Use Twitter for Marketing and PR was hosted by Rick Burnes, Mike Volpe and Ellie Mirman. You can watch it full-length below or skip ahead for some highlights.

How to succeed on twitter:

1. build your network
2. engage with community
3. track & analyze your results

Decide how to manage business vs. personal accounts. They choose to keep them pretty separate, others choose a different mix. I’d add: that may evolve for you, over time.

Businesses on Twitter should:

• follow everyone back, so folks feel listened to. They gave the example of @barackobama vs @hillaryclinton. I’d add: this also lets your Twitter community contact you privately, which I think is a good idea for business.
• show off your employee Twitterers, like HubSpot and Zappos do
• follow Comcast’s example of how to respond to customers via Twitter. (Ed.: Little-known fact, Comcast listened to Twitter for about 2 months before they famously responded to blogger Michael Arrington’s woes. Good practice to imitate.)

Twitter is so important to Hubspot that when hiring, they look at whether the potential employee is engaged on Twitter, and even what their follower count is.

Measurement: Four ways to measure and track your Twitter activity:

1. Follower count (but they acknowledge that measure is of limited value)
2. Their tool Twitter Grader
3. Look at @replies – is your audience engaging with you?
4. Visitors to site and leads

Tools and resources:

• Listening – they use their own proprietary software and keyword searches to listen to conversations that are relevant to them
• URL shorteners – like tinyurl.com, bit.ly, others
• Desktop clients – Twitterific, Tweetdeck,
• Mobile access – applications and SMS
• Publishing – Twitterfeed can automatically share RSS
• Tagging – #hashtags and other agreed-upon keywords

Unfortunately these notes are from “attending” via audio only, as Citrix‘ GoToWebinar crunched under the load of 3700+ registered attendees. A fast-thinking attendee caught this neat screenshot explaining what Twitter is. The full slide deck is now on Slideshare:

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