Outbox Takeout » Twitter

Outsourcing your social media marketing

Kate McMillan — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 13:00:56 +0000

Recently I wrote about the importance of delegating when it comes to running your business & maintaining your sanity. Among the tasks that may be delegated is the generation of blog posts, Tweets and Facebook content. While there is nothing quite like your authentic voice, and you probably should add your own personal touch from time-to-time, it is possible for someone else to easily add some targeted content to your social media outlets with great success.

By establishing the keywords that bring the most relevant information and people to your attention, someone else can take the reigns when it comes to posting news that position you as an expert, making fruitful connections, and bring your product or service to the attention of those who may need it. With just a couple of hours a week, someone can handle your social media, and also track its effectiveness through analytics to be sure that future efforts have a greater chance of success.

Not only will your social media impact increase because someone will be dedicated to it, but you’ll maintain a single voice with the added benefit of collaboration. Collaborating with a social media expert will bring new content not only to the attention of your audience, but to you as well. They can track mentions of your business, and promote your triumphs!

Finding someone to work with is as simple as finding someone who is willing to understand your business and how you see it evolving… it might be someone you employ already. If you find someone who is comfortable and familiar with social media, you’ll achieve traction more quickly — but anyone who is passionate about what you do will be a great help.

Twitter Branding: Creating a Custom Background for Your Twitter Profile

Kate McMillan — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 02:09:36 +0000

You’ve probably seen Twitter profiles from users who have a custom Twitter background. A custom Twitter background is a background image that has some information about them, maybe a photo, information about their website, etc…

Realizing that their brand can be extended not only through the content they author, but also through the way their profile looks on services like Twitter, they had custom background images created:

This is a relatively small investment for brand synergy, and helps people already familiar with your brand know they’ve found the right person on Twitter to follow. Remember that people aren’t usually reading your Twitter feed on your Profile page, they’re reading it on their Twitter Home page, or another Twitter application (like Tweetie). So, we’re really just talking about first impressions – like when someone clicks through a reference to you in another tweet, or clicks through to your Twitter profile page from a website – people will make the decision about whether to follow your feed very quickly. Their decisions will be based on whether the content looks interesting/valuable – don’t forget that part of that perception is based on the way your profile looks!

Some things to keep in mind when creating a custom Twitter background:

Your background image will be aligned with the top-left of people’s browser windows – which we all know range from low to high resolutions. To prevent overlap with your Twitter feed, you want to optimize your design to work for the most popular resolution for most Twitter users, which is 1280px wide or more.
You can choose for your background image to tile across the page, or just be a single image. In most cases, unless you’re using a repeating pattern with no information on it, you’ll want a single image. This means you want to pay special attention to the right and bottom boundaries of the image – making sure they gracefully integrate with the overall background color.
Like with any web page, you want your background image to load as quickly as possible, so keep the filesize as small as possible.
Remember – it’s just an image – your links & contact info won’t be active, just informative!

Contact me if you’re interested in having a custom Twitter background created for your profile!

Tweet Your Blog

Kate McMillan — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 01:57:20 +0000

I’m sure you’ve seen all those people on Twitter who tweet their blog posts, and you’ve probably also seen blogs where they either link to their Twitter account, or show their tweets right there on the page. How do they do it? How *do* you connect your blog and Twitter?

Here’s how:

Push blog content to Twitter: Twitter Feed
Put Twitter content on your blog: Twitter Widget for Blogs

Did you know you can do something similar with Facebook? If you have a Facebook account, and especially if you have a page or group there for your business, you can have your Tweets automatically update your Facebook status, and have your blog content show up there too:

Blog content on Facebook: Networked Blogs on Facebook
Twitter updates your Facebook status: Twitter application for Facebook
And this selectively updates your Facebook status: Selective Twitter

And while I’m offering suggestions on how to single-source updates to multiple platforms, Ping.fm will update multiple platforms at one, from just about any device or service! And Minggl does something similar, but using a Firefox toolbar (love that!).

Keep in mind, however, that you don’t ALWAYS want everything to go everywhere or people might start to think of you as a broken record… it is true that people tend to stick with their favorite service so they may not see that you posted the same thing across multiple accounts, but if someone is researching you, they certainly will. And sometimes it’s just a nice thing for those who follow you to get a personalized message about a blog post you wrote. So, go ahead, automate your social networking life… just don’t forget to add a little bit of your own voice sometimes.