CheapTweet Blog

Last year, I wrote a post of Twitter tips for retailers, outlining some of the best tweet practices I’d seen retailers and other merchants engaging in on Twitter. Since then, Twitter has evolved and I’ve had a chance to refine these tips. It seems like it’s time for an updated post. So, here it is – my thoughts on ways retailers and other brands/businesses can write effective tweets that encourage followers to click through and retweet.

Of course the following tips are meant to be taken as general guidelines, based on what I’ve seen to be effective in many cases. These are certainly not hard and fast rules and will not apply to every Twitter account or every situation.

Many of the guidelines I listed in the last post still apply. In particular, I included the following tips in the previous post, and I think they all continue to hold true.

Call your followers to action. Encourage your followers to do something. Be descriptive and active in your tweet language.

Tweet diversely. Yes, you want to post links to your store, your blog, or your website, but include tweets about other stuff, as well. Post links to other interesting articles or sites, post some tweets without links, reply to others – just mix it up. Most people don’t want to follow a boring or spammy feed.

Use keywords. Make sure your tweets include keywords that will help you be found in search. Not only do people use Twitter search to find other Twitterers, but tweets are also indexed by other sites (like CheapTweet, which is indexed by Google), so keyword-rich tweets will help people find your profile, both on Twitter and off.

Be succinct and retweetable. Just because you have 140 characters doesn’t mean you should use all of them. Try to keep your tweets to around 120 characters so your followers have room to easily retweet you.

Include unique links. Don’t just tweet the same link over and over. Use a URL shortening service like bit.ly to shorten unique links for each new tweet. This is especially important if you’re tweeting about different products or pages.

Now I’d like to add to that list. Here are a few more tips for making the most of your tweets.

• Include one short link at the end of your tweet. In general, only include one link per tweet. It’s such a short space; more than one link (or more than one hashtag) clutters your message. Also, to keep the tweet text clean, put the link at the end of your tweet, not in the middle.
• Respect social site boundaries. Avoid contaminating your Twitter stream with Facebook, FriendFeed, MySpace, etc.. links.  If you have content you want to share with your Twitter audience, share it on Twitter; don’t force them to go through your Facebook page to find it. The more steps it takes to get to the product you’re selling, the less likely people are to click all the way through. If your customers want to interact with you on Facebook, they’re probably already connected with you there.
• Tweet often. As Twitter grows, your followers are likely to be following more people, which means their streams fill up quickly. It’s easy to miss one tweet when you have hundreds of others to catch up on. So if you’re running a big sale or have important company news, tweet about it a few different times. And keep your stream updated – if your last tweet was several days or weeks ago, you won’t get as many new followers.
• Vary your tweets. Don’t post the same tweet more than once. Yes, it’s good to remind your followers about a sale or repost important news (see previous bullet), but it’s not good to tweet the exact same content again. Reword before reposting. If you include a new shortened link with the new copy, you can even measure which tweet gets more clicks and learn a little something about what your followers find interesting.

These are just a few of the practices I’ve seen that can help improve your tweet clickthrough rates. If you have other tips for writing effective tweets, I’d love to hear them!

As you’ve probably seen over the past few days, Twitter has done a massive rollout of its new lists feature. If your account doesn’t have access to it yet, it will soon. Twitter Lists allow anyone to create a list of their favorite Twitterers in any category they want, and follow those people’s tweets in one place. These lists can be public or private.

As a business on Twitter, you’re probably already using it to talk with customers, share deals and news, and stay up-to-date with your industry. The Twitter List is another feature that can be incredibly useful for you and your customers. You can use public lists to curate collections of helpful resources that both engage and support your customers. Here are five types of Twitter Lists a business should make.

1. Company Accounts.

Make a list of your employees and other corporate accounts, if you have any. This makes it easy for customers to find the rest of your Twitter accounts. This is particularly useful if you have a number of corporate accounts or a group of employees on Twitter. This gives your brand a more well-rounded personality and gives customers multiple points of contact with you. As an example, here’s a good list of Dell employees and corporate accounts.

2. Complementary Businesses.

Make a list of other merchants your customers might like. What other products might your customers be shopping for? Make it easy for them to find those products. If you sell carpet and flooring, for example, you could create a list of other home decor retailers  (think paint, window treatments, furniture, etc…). We made a list of brands offering deals on Twitter.

3. Industry Thought Leaders.

Who are the big thinkers in your industry? Are there publications and media outlets writing about important industry news? Think of what resources your customers might want that relate to the kinds of products you sell. For example, if you own a bar, you might want to create a list of beer bloggers to help your customers learn more about beer and brewing. @AllGoodBeer has a great beer news list.

4. VIP Customers.

Say thank you to your biggest customer advocates by including them in a list. Customers love to be heard, and being included in a Twitter list makes anyone feel valued. Recognize your best customers and most vocal supporters with a list. Keep in mind that as of right now, Twitter lists have a limit of 500 people. To say thank you to the people who have helped make CheapTweet succesful, we’ve made a list of CheapTweet Stores and a list of Etsy sellers with popular deals on CheapTweet and are working on more.

5. Local Friends.

Wherever your headquarters are, whether it’s a big city or a small town, make a list of some your area’s most interesting Twitterers. Include both businesses and people, and try to get a representative but diverse sample. Lists of local must-knows will be helpful for Twitter newbies and interesting to even the oldest Twitter veterans. A good list of local Twitterers could even attract new customers, as well as reciprocal listings. For example, we love the Austin American Statesman’s list of 50 people to follow in Austin, Texas (CheapTweet’s home base).

Twitters Lists are brand new and we’ve already seen a number of creative uses of this feature. What can you do with it?

This week, we teamed up with Perpetual Kid to give away 20 $25 gift cards to PerpetualKid.com. Now that the contest is over, we’d like to congratulate the winners! Enjoy your gift cards, everyone.

The full list of winners:

@mch710
@melohyellow
@gratziella
@angiesmusings
@empalomo
@madisonsmixtape
@smittenbeauty
@one_of_three
@jaesdesign
@sarahspann
@silkdress
@lisalmg
@jensaysrarrr
@jktang
@mom2chunkymonky
@catnmouse
@thriftyjinxy
@condoblues
@moonrock
@bkitchman

Thank you to everyone who entered! And be sure to keep following both @CheapTweet and @Perpetual_Kid to get updates on fun new products and all the latest deals.

Yesterday there was an article in the Wall Street Journal about contests on Twitter, which is oddly well-timed, because we’ve been talking about this a lot in the CheapTweet offices lately. What’s the best kind of Twitter contest and more importantly, how effective are contests on Twitter?

The types of Twitter contests

Right now – and this changes quickly – there are four main types of the simple Twitter contest: sign-up forms, follower gathering, retweets, and hashtags. There are certainly others, but these seem to be the most popular at the moment.

Sign-up forms are a fairly old-school tactic that encourage people to sign up to be entered to win a prize. It’s a quick, easy way to build your contact list for newsletters and company mailings. People can be hesitant to enter email addresses or even Twitter names for fear of spam, so be clear why you’re collecting contact info and what you will do with it.

Follower gathering is a Twitter version of the traditional “when we reach X goal you win” promotion. In this case, participants are eligible to win when the target Twitter account reaches a certain number of followers. Followers are encouraged to tell their friends to follow the target account.  The more complex contests involve multiple goal tiers with increasingly valuable prizes.  Sometimes these can seem like blatant popularity contests, so think carefully with your wording of contest rules.

Retweets are one of the best forms of viral marketing on Twitter. They are fast and simple and they put your message in front of your followers’ followers.  The goal is to get your followers to promote your promotion for you. Everyone who retweets the promotional tweet is entered to win. The trick with this kind of contest is to make the promotional tweet as interesting, valuable and transparent as possible. People don’t want to spam their followers any more than you do.

Hashtags are another way you get your followers to promote your contest for you.  On Twitter, a hashtag is a hyperlinked keyword. Any word that starts with a pound sign (#) becomes a hashtag, which becomes a clickable link to all other mentions of that word. It’s instant advertising; if that hashtag shows up in someone’s Twitter stream, that person can click on it and see everything everyone else has said with that hashtag. If someone sees a particular hashtag often enough, they’re likely to use it themselves. This type of contest can work very well, as Moonfruit saw recently, if you allow users to tweet whatever they want as long as they use the hashtag. The catch here is that they might tweet negative or totally unrelated things with the hashtag.

What we’ve learned so far about Twitter contests

The Twitter contest is typically a fairly inexpensive and fast way to build awareness of a brand or Twitter account. Prizes don’t have to be expensive (though, like in any other contest, better prizes get better results), and these contests take minimal effort to oversee.

A good example of a recent successful Twitter contest is the #moonfruit promotion from early July; anyone who used the #moonfruit hashtag was entered to win.  At the height of the contest, the Moonfruit Twitter account (@moontweet) had more than 47,000 followers. Two weeks later, and they’re down to 33,000. That is still a huge number, considering they started with just about 400 followers.  Moonfruit gave away 10 Macbook Pro laptops to earn those numbers, which is a pretty hefty prize, but they’re reporting increases in site traffic and paying customers.

We’ve done several Twitter contests in partnership with CheapTweet sponsors, and they’ve worked well. We see increased traffic to CheapTweet.com and more Twitter followers. In fact, we like contests so much that we’re running one right now with Perpetual Kid (which happens to be one of our favorite websites, as well as a CheapTweet Store).  We try to only promote companies and products that we like and we hope our followers will like. And we try to space contests out; we don’t want to flood our stream with contests and giveaways. People like free stuff, but they don’t like incessant advertising in their Twitter streams.

So, do Twitter contests work?

The short answer is yes, they can work. The long answer is well, they kinda work, for a limited time. The even longer answer is they work well considering the time and effort it takes to run them, and are a great way to get some fast and often significant buzz on Twitter, but it can be short-lived.

I just don’t think the simple retweet or hashtag contests have much life left in them. My Twitter stream is filled with contests and promotions, which is fine for now. But I think we’re quickly reaching the saturation point for the kinds of contests we’ve seen so far. This is not to say the Twitter contest is dead, but they will have to change form to remain effective. It’s what we’ve seen for everything on Twitter so far – what works in the beginning is not going to work a few months later.

So, if you’re thinking about running a Twitter contest, do it now! There’s still plenty of opportunity to find new followers and expose your brand to a large, new audience. But as fast as things change on Twitter, I expect that the “retweet or use this hashtag this to win a prize” contest won’t be as alluring in a few months as it is now.

PerpetualKid.com and Cheaptweet.com have joined forces for a Gift Certificate Giveaway, exclusively on Twitter this week.

Win a $25 PerpetualKid.com gift certificate!  We’re giving away $25.00 gift certificates to 20 lucky winners who follow both @Perpetual_Kid and @CheapTweet on Twitter.

When: Starting today (Monday, 7/20/09) and ending at 12:00 p.m. EDT on Friday (7/24/09)
Where: Twitter – of course!
How: Follow these simple steps.

1. Follow both @Perpetual_Kid and @CheapTweet on Twitter
   
2. Tweet the following: “I entered the @Perpetual_Kid and @CheapTweet Midsummer Giveaway just by following them! http://bit.ly/QjFZr #PerpetualKid”
3. That’s it! You’re done!

On Friday (7/24/09), 20 winners will be chosen at random to receive their $25.00 gift certificate to PerpetualKid.com! Winners will be notified by Twitter, so keep checking your Twitter account on Friday. Good luck!

In case you missed any of them, here’s a recap of the (hopefully) interesting links we’ve posted on Twitter the past two weeks.

A comparison of credit cards vs. debit cards from @bargainr [hint: he likes credit cards better]

How to take better baby photos: Expert tips on taking better pictures of little subjects from the NY Times

An article from Retail TouchPoints discussing various social media campaigns by retailers, mentions @wholefoods and @cotweet

Some useful tips on how to deal with difficult customers from @JCKMagazine

Here’s a guide to using Twitter #hashtags from @mashable

A recap of the interesting stories and articles we tweeted about in the past week.

Here’s a very useful article with helpful tips for selling crafts online from @interspire.

This week’s seller interview is with jewelry designer @getglam. Vera is amazingly talented – don’t miss this interview!

We got some insight into how to pay as little as possible to insure your jalopy from The Consumerist.

Mashable posted a list of their top 10 Twitter SEO tips. Some of these are very important considerations.

And since CheapTweet is already indexed by the major search engines, we want to make sure your tweets are being found. So we wrote up a few Twitter tips for online retailers.

A recent ReadWriteWeb article about Twitter traffic revealed that Twitter only sends a small amount of traffic to online retailers. According to Hitwise data from the UK, about 5% of Twitter’s downstream traffic goes to retailers. A lot of that is due to the fact that retailers are just starting to figure out how to best utilize Twitter, a generally social (and not commercial) channel, to drive traffic to their e-commerce sites.

So, what’s a retailer to do? Is Twitter worth the time? And if it is, how should you use it? At CheapTweet, we certainly believe Twitter is worth most online retailers’ time, provided it’s used effectively. Here are a few Twitter tips for retailers.

Your Profile

• Always include a link to your store. Give your followers something to click on!
• Write a brief bio. Be sure to describe what you sell or do so new followers will know what to expect.  Don’t leave this area blank, no matter how self-explanatory your Twitter name might be.
• Include a picture or logo. Many people will not follow Twitter accounts with no picture. Include something visual for people to remember.
• Take advantage of the background. You can upload an image to the background of your Twitter profile. Consider something with your company’s colors or include an logo, photo or more text to describe your store.

Your Tweets

• Call your followers to action. Encourage your followers to do something. Be descriptive and active in your tweet language.
• Tweet diversely. Yes, you want to post links to your store, your blog, or your website, but include tweets about other stuff, as well. Post links to other interesting articles or sites, post some tweets without links, reply to others – just mix it up. Most people don’t want to follow a boring or spammy feed.
• Use keywords. Make sure your tweets include keywords that will help you be found in search. Not only do people use Twitter search to find other Twitterers, but tweets are also indexed by other sites (like CheapTweet, which is indexed by Google), so keyword-rich tweets will help people find your profile, both on Twitter and off.
• Be succinct and retweetable. Just because you have 140 characters doesn’t mean you should use all of them. Try to keep your tweets to around 120 characters so your followers have room to easily retweet you.
• Include unique links. Don’t just tweet the same link over and over. Use a URL shortening service like bit.ly to shorten unique links for each new tweet. This is especially important if you’re tweeting about different products or pages.

Promotions and Interaction

• Provide special Twitter-only offers. Your followers are a dedicated group of customers; reward them with special offers. Tweet coupon codes, limited-time deals, contests and giveaways.
• Tweet about promotions a few times. Twitter is a fast-moving medium. Don’t expect that your followers will see a tweet the first time you post it. Don’t post it three times right in a row, though; post it at different times over a few hours or days to be sure different groups of followers will see it.
• Engage followers. Think about unique and interactive promotions you can do on Twitter. Be engaged with your followers – ask questions, start conversations, answer inquiries.
• Post links to sales and news. Make sure you tweet about any sales or discounts your store is running, even if they’re not Twitter-only specials. And let your followers know what’s going on with your store and your company.
• Monitor your brand. Set up an RSS feed of the Twitter search for your company and product names. This way, you can keep track of what people are saying about it and respond quickly (and helpfully).
• Experiment! The best part of Twitter is that we’re all still figuring out how to best use it. Don’t be afraid to try new promotions and ideas, see what works and use that knowledge for next time.

Just like other channels, using Twitter effectively means providing relevant and interesting content and participating in the conversation. If you have other tips for retailers on Twitter, we’d love to hear them in the comments!

Here’s a very helpful CheapTweet how-to for retailers from @SusanDickenson of Home Accents Today.

If you’ve ever wondered why you can’t find yourself in Twitter search, this explanation from Twitter might help.

Check out our latest seller interview. This week we talked with Jenifer Bryan (also known as @lucybluestudio), an artist and designer in Austin, TX.

As always, Mashable comes up with a useful list of social media resources. This one is about five ways Twitter can save you money.

And, in case you missed it, we’re extremely excited to announce the launch of CheapTweet Stores with @Overstock, @DealTaker and @VRdeals!

A recap of the interesting stories and articles we tweeted about in the past week.

First, a bit about what’s new with CheapTweet. Better search, deals in your city, new blog features and more!

Here are some very handy tips from @wisebread on how to keep summer electric bills low.

We discussed a somewhat controversial Slate article about how Etsy might be peddling “a false feminist fantasy”

@SavvyAuntie will be live-tweeting for TNT  during their new show Saving Grace. There’s a good writeup of her sponsored tweeting on Mashable.

We’re trying to learn a bit more about our followers. If you haven’t done it yet, would you mind answering a few brief questions?  It’ll take 30 seconds.