To run an effective Twitter campaign, you need to first of all decide what it is you want to run it for – is it increasing the brand awareness? is it getting traffic to your site? is it selling something? (and yes, obviously if some people buy a car over Twitter then somebody actually succeeds in selling this car). Think what people potentially interested in your services would tweet about – and no, if you are a service offering resume writing help to those who do not want to write their own resumes for whatever reason, searching for tweets containing the word “resume” will not bring you your potential customers but rather competitors offering the same services, so be careful what you target not to end up selling to your own competitors. Once you have defined and found your potential customers, start interacting with them without just bluntly pushing your product down their throats – this is something that just doesn’t work on Twitter. So find the right approach, find the opportunity and then become really useful for your potential customers.

On the other hand, do not be completely silent – just creating a Twitter account won’t do you anything. If you decided you need a Twitter presence, then be present – so that your customers can notice you.

(Already after coming up with the idea of this post, I noticed this great post by Lee Odden explaining how to plan a Twitter marketing strategy – this is a must read and an additional source of tips for a successful Twitter campaign.)

Most businesses probably won’t be able to afford a full time person running their Twitter marketing campaign – so automate, there are tools in place for this, but automate wisely. Do not just run things on autopilot, unless you’re a blackhat running hundreds of accounts (but even then, use your head when setting things up). Review everything that is done by tools, and do not forget that your followers will want to see a real person behind your Twitter account, not just a bot.

For some businesses social media may not work at all unless they are really creative (if the nature of your business is such that involves certain privacy concerns, addressing a problem people are not comfortable discussing publicly – plastic surgeons, male enhancement, etc.). For some businesses it may make sense looking for partners or affiliates, not clients. In either case, I (as well as my multiple clients) have seen proof that Twitter marketing works – but to see it work for you, you need to start thinking out of the box instead of just repeating what everybody else seems to be doing on Twitter. The better you identify your needs and needs of your target audience on Twitter, the higher are your chances for success.

There is an abundance of tips, articles, or even books written about Twitter. Do they all help? No. Why?

Problem is, very often Twitter marketing becomes a numbers game (which in most cases is a wrong measurement anyway).

Unfortunately most twitter ‘gurus’ teach how to increase the number of followers with no regard to relevancy – while this may work if you’re offering the products or services of most general interest suitable for almost everyone, it won’t work for anything more specific. How many vendors can insert their products into the following statement: ‘every twitter user needs …’? If you can not then the sheer numbers game is not for you.  Many people who used to make money with AdSense learned this lesson when they switched to affiliate marketing – if you want to convert your traffic make it targeted (same with Digg, and same with twitter – social media is no different).

Chasing the followers reduces relevancy – it causes a snowball effect. By chasing the follower numbers, you make yourself susceptible to increasing irrelevancy because other users whose primary goal is chasing the numbers have little regard to relevancy. The more people you follow and the more people follow you, the more noticeable you become – and automatically, you become a target to those irrelevant followers. Think of popular tweeters like Scoble or Chris Pirillo – sure many of their followers follow them because they are genuinely interested in what these users tweet about – but how many just follow them in hopes they would follow them back and hardly ever care about their tweets?

On the other hand, I have bitched about Paypal a bunch of times – and never got any reply. Meanwhile, Paypal does have even a bunch of Twitter accounts – a separate one for each country plus a few for specialized services. Twitter marketing (or even, Twitter reputation management) gone wrong, indeed. Also, my post about Technorati on here which also got tweeted never had any reaction from Technorati folks – although it could be pretty damaging for them. For the record, Technorati also has a Twitter account.

All of this gave me an idea of an experiment. I’d like to analyze how responsive this kind of large online companies are on Twitter by tweeting different stuff they may be interested in reacting to. Surely I will be primarily targeting the companies I deal with directly – so I could use a little help from my readers. Please suggest who else I should probe – or even take part in this experiment and report your results. In a couple months, I will do a follow up post and analyze my findings.

1. How to set up a Facebook fan page that works
2. 5 Things That Don’t Work on Facebook Pages (and 5 That Do)
3. Olive Garden on Facebook:How To Not Use Social Media
4. Does Your Facebook Page Have a Pulse?
5. Facebook Fan Page Marketing Tips
6. 5 Essential Apps for Your Business’s Facebook Fan Page
7. Facebook is probably a must for you if you are a French Internet marketer – in France, Facebook has an audience 213 times bigger than Twitter (this one is in French) – thanks for this one @NadirG
8. Facebook Preparing to Launch a New Toolbar
9. Is Facebook Prepping Up Something Against Google Analytics – and How to Add Google Analytics to Your Facebook Fan Page
10. If you’ve been living under a rock:
    Facebook Gives ‘Like’ More Love, ‘Fans’ the Boot
11. Facebook vs. Google: The Billion Dollar Battle to Be Your Default Social Profile
12. Now a bit more sinister: Facebook changes continue to chip away at privacy (and more on this issue here)
13. And even, oh shite, Dear Internet, Meet Facebook Status Optimizer (Boom, Mind Explodes):
    

    Facebook Status Optimizer (FSO) automatically posts status updates on your behalf that are algorithmically written to ensure your status updates beat the competition and appear at the top of your friend’s newsfeed

Enjoy and feel free to share if you have come across more interesting Facebook articles.

I’ve yet to see if it’s any good for business as at the time of this writing the “Marketplace” it has is down for maintenance. This is not your typical SEO-exploitable network however as profile pages are only visible to those logged in – hence no link value. So it can be the purest experiment in benefitting from traffic/connections within the social network itself alone, no side effects whatsoever. I bet it can be good for local businesses though, as you automatically belong to the network based on your location you have defined when registering. There are also groups that people can create themselves and these have a nice potential as well – I have joined a few SEO-related groups and started one of my own. Groups are good for finding contacts – a process that is otherwise not so straightforward. Events are clearly another locally targeted feature (or else online targeted – why not?). I will play more with all of these and report if I find anything interesting.