Hi All:

As you may know, I'm a little bit crazy about the Twitter. I love it. I think Twitter is super cool for meeting neat people and keeping up with what they're up to, and telling them about my cat, but I've also been delving further and further into the ways that companies and individuals (for me - that's usually publishing companies and individual authors) can utilize Twitter and Twitter apps and analytics to better communicate with their customers and get feedback so they can improve their products and services.

This past Wednesday I participated in a webinar for Product Management View, about Twitter that was aimed at product managers who are new to using Twitter. During and after the webinar, there were a lot of questions from participants, and I've shared some of the questions and my answers below. I am a huge fan of Twitter as a tool for improving relationships between companies and customers. And, I think there's a lot of potential for marketers and customer service people (and product managers) to do some great things with Twitter -- but there's also potential for them to mess up big time if they use Twitter for evil and not for good.

So, it's a little mini mission of mine. If you have questions about using Twitter to connect with your customers and potential customers, feel free to ask me. What I know I'll gladly share. What I don't know, I'll gladly try to find out answers for or find someone to refer you to. In the meantime, below are some hopefully helpful answers to some of the questions asked about during/after the webinar. All the best. ~ Kat.

Twitter Stuff:

On Hashtags:

There were lots of questions about HashTags and since she has done a great job of summing up HashTags and resources for info on hashtags, here's a YouTube video by Mari Smith that will help you make the most of hashtags (plus she has a neat accent so it's fun to listen to her). -- there are some other great videos regarding all kinds of "howto's" on youtube - so take a look around. You can find out a lot and get some great demos.

Are people sorted by categories you can look up to find folks with similar interests, target an industry or job function?

For me, best way to categorize people is just to start following someone you know has similar interest or industry -- then check out profiles of those that they are following, as well as reading a few of their tweets. You can also search by topic using Twitter's search capability.

Could i set up an RSS Feed to make following someone easier?

Yes. And Twitter pages have a default RSS feed so you can just click on the icon to add that twitterer's feed if they haven't disabled it.

How long until Twitter gets hit with the spammers, and if not, how come? Will searching twitter streams ever replace Google?

Twitter is already hit by spammers, and Twitter's management is incredibly vigilant in disabling spammer accounts. You can easily block anyone you don't wish to receive tweets from or be followed by. There is already a LOT of speculation about Twitter as THE next big search tool.

What automation and integration tools are available?

Lots - check out this post at BloggerDesign.com for a few integration tools to integrate Twitter with your blog.

Can you go into the diffs between Facebook & Twitter in target use, audience, user demographics, purpose, etc?

I'm not a huge Facebook user, so I can only offer anectdotal/experience views on this. Overall, the Twitter audience is trending a bit older than Facebook and similarly or a bit younger than LinkedIn. The purpose for most on Twitter is to find and follow those with similar interests (be they personal or professional or both), regardless of whether you know them in real life. Facebook users tend to use Facebook more stictly for following those they have personal relationships with in real life, ie: friends and family. And LinkedIn is for strictly business.

Must we follow others to be credible? Do we need a large number of followers?

There aren't any rules about how many people you need to follow, or have follow you in order to be credible. What you might want to do is consider your purpose for being on Twitter. If your primary purpose is to monitor other people's tweets, then you certainly don't have to be followed back. And if you mostly want to just send out your own tweets, you don't need to worry about following others. However, a lot of people check out who you are following and who is following you in order to decide whether they want to follow you or let you follow them. So, it can have an effect on how you are viewed by others.

Do I have to listen to other peoples drivel?

(Why do I have a sneaking suspicion that this question is directed at me?)"One man's drivel is another man's cup of tea!" If you get no value from tweets your are subscribed to, just click "unfollow."

Can I post a picture on Twitter?

YES! So glad this question came up since I meant to talk about this in re: to using Twitter for reporting from events. Twitpic is a fabulous service/app for posting pics and it's integrated with a lot of other apps (like Tweetdeck and Tweetie for iphone) so you can send pics from within those apps. It's great to be able to take pictures at conferences, tweetups, etc. and share them with others on Twitter. Another great service is flickr - which a lot of people are already using -- If you are a Flickr user, you can migrate images from your TwitPic account to Flickr with a service called Twitpickr. Lots of people have been snapping pics of presenters' slides and posting them. You can also snap pix of attendees/audience to give followers a sense of what the mood is at an event.

How can a Product Manager (or anyone interested in connecting with audiences) use twitter to leverage connection to an interested audience and create loyalty and affinity?

Twitter is great for putting your ideas/content out there in front of your audience quickly and often to demonstrate that you are a thought leader; someone to watch. It's also a wonderful place to find others who are interesting to YOU, and to exchange ideas - get feedback.

Check out this blog post by Jennifer Frahm where she provides a nice "case study" of her experience on Twitter. Another neat and recently launched Twitter tool is called HashTweeps. The idea is that you enter a hash tag, and HashTweeps will dig through Twitter's search results and return a concise list of all the Twitter users who have tweeted with that tag. It's a handy way to track down who's been talking about a particular topic or event (or product/brand).

If you are twittering on behalf of your company is it appropriate to add personal tweets?

Personally, I love to see the human side of people who make up a company. It's interesting and helps me understand more about how a company works, why decisions that are made about marketing or products or services are made, etc. One person I follow who integrates personal with professional/company-related tweets really well is Michael Hyatt of Thomas Nelson Publishers.

It's not a bad idea to also have a strictly company-related twitter account that you or others in your company tweet from JUST about the company and things related to your industry -- with your company logo as the avatar.

How important is it to have a blog if you are twittering about?

For me it hasn't been important. In fact, Much of the reason that I created my blog was so I could have a non-work related URL to send my twitter followers to if they wanted to know more about me. So, for me, Twitter prompted me to start a blog rather than the other way around. Here's a cartoon on the subject that I found amusing.

My tweet name is 14 characters. Should I make shorter, does that change anything for my followers or who I am following?

You might want to make your twitter name shorter - if only to give you more available characters for your messages (in most Twitter apps - Twitter names are included in the 140 allowed character count).

How do you setup alerts whenever someone mentions you on twitter?

TweetBeep allows you to keep track of conversations that mention you, your products, your company, etc. with hourly updates -- it will also keep track of who's tweeting your website or blog, even if they use a shortened URL (like tinyurl.com).

Twilert is a Twitter application that lets you receive regular email updates of tweets containing your brand, product, service, well any keyword you like really.

What's your opinion on using Twitter w/hashtags for gathering market insight? Could you provide an example?

There are lots of ways to gather marketing insight via Twitter. Yung-Hi Lim authored an excellent post recently in Social Media Today entitled "8 Excellent Tools To Extract Insights From Twitter Streams" that I would highly recommend.

What is the best Blackberry app for Twitter?

Twitberry has most votes from my friends.

Has anyone read or written any good work on developing a twitter search strategy to discover product feedback?

Again, there are lots of posts and resources online for this, but one of my favorites is this slide presentation on Twitter by Ogilvy PR. Even without the commentary, the slides are great on their own at offering some super good tips on tools and strategies for discovering product feedback via Twitter.

Other Good Posts/Blogs for Twitter Tips:

• Twitip
• Mr. Tweet