Hazel House Marketing 2.0

YouTube and Vimeo help videos go viral. Once you have a channel, start uploading your videos. From there, embed them into your blog and share them with your Facebook fans, Twitter followers, and everyone else in your digital network. If they are as catchy as this one, they could go “viral!”

Social media has put a new spin on how politicians connect with their constituents

Truth is, we’re not so sure about current Twitter figures like the size of their user base and other details about their overall demographic, but we’re willing to bet that practically everyone with access to the Internet and have established their identities online have set roots on the microblogging service. We can thank celebrities like Oprah Winfrey , Ashton Kutcher and Wil Wheaton among many others for bringing Twitter to the mainstream.

Naturally, where people flock in huge numbers, marketers and advertisers are sure to follow.

Anyone can easily sign up and start tweeting; after all, once set up, all you need to do is summarize your thoughts in neat 140 characters and then send them adrift to the Twittersphere. But there are a few extra steps to optimize Twitter for brands intending to use it to reach and engage with their followers. Here are some of them.

Twitter Profile/s

Nowadays, it’s common to find brands represented on Twitter, but one may not be enough to satisfy your client base and your overall marketing strategy. For instance, Whole Foods has over 150 Twitter accounts under its belt. Naturally, they’ve delegated a @WholeFoods profile to represent the entire company. But to further lay specialized focus on their customers per location, they’ve also created Twitter accounts per individual branch in every state in the US and Canada. This allowed them to address customer service issues in real-time and actually engage with people within their different locations.
Aside from these, the company also has three accounts for the store’s larger areas of gastronomic specialties; their wide variety of gourmet cheese , their selection of wine and beer products, and a tweet for sending recipes .

Profile Settings

When creating a Twitter account intended for social media marketing, never forget to personalize your Twitter page by going through your Account Settings.
Privacy. For starters, never protect your tweets. This limits your reach and discourages other people from following your brand on the microblogging site—because nobody wants to hit the Follow button first reading the existing tweets and viewing other embedded content.

Bio. Tell the world who you are, even if you are an internationally recognized brand. Leaving this blank could leave people clueless as to who you are, what you’re about and what you can offer. You’re only allowed 160 characters to do relay these though, so carefully think of brief but creative write-ups to fill this space.

Links. Enable your e-mail to be publicly displayed and make sure to include your brand’s URL. These will give your followers other ways to connect with your brand while sending more traffic to your Web site.

Brand Images

Twitter won’t allow you to remap its interface but it will, however, give you some semblance of customization to visually establish your brand’s identity through your photo and your page’s background wallpaper.
For photos, it is common practice to use your company’s logo, but there are other cases where you can use other images as long as they still align with your marketing approach. However, you should avoid putting severely outdated personal photos (like those taken during middle school), pictures of your pet or the face of your favorite celebrity. These are big no-nos for branding since they could misrepresent your brand. Similarly, avoid images with disturbing content (like nudity, controversial images, etc), groups of people and distracting animated GIFs with blaring colors. These are also big no-nos as far as decency and aesthetics are concerned.

These same rules also apply when creating a background for your tweets. You can either go and grab one of the ready-made backgrounds off sites like TwitterBackgrounds or Free Twitter Designer , or for better design freedom, simply create one yourself. Aside from photos or the company logo, include contact details, some of your company links, and a more comprehensive (but not very wordy) brand profile.

Article by Social Media Marketing