Ad agency pay per tweet programs

I had an interesting  question come to the blog.   How should you pay a PR or ad agency for doing your companies tweeting?  Some have suggested a flat fee per day others are floating the idea of doing an “Ad agency pay per tweet programs.”

Both raise some interesting changes in the way social media will be used and how to monitize the actions involved with keeping it ongoing. The bigger question is how much should you as a CMO decide to keep in house and how much should you outsource?  How much control do you want or how much over site due to privacy policies or regulation do you need?   What about the tweeting across the company, should marketing be the control valve or is it really a legal, customer service or operation function?

 I look forward to your comments as to how you are compensating your agencies for tweeting.

SEO gut check for CMO’s. How to check up on your websites back end.

SEO, meta tags, alt tags and other “web team” responsibilities leave most CMO’s in a blind spot of trust or of ignorance when it comes to their back end of the web site.  Simple questions that I ask such as:  Does your web site have a site map?  Blank look.  Are your meta tags in place, or still relevant..blank stare.  I don’t know, or why do I need to know, is the response I get from 99% of the senior execs with whom I speak. 

The question is, it is really important?  The answer is yes.  Not that Meta tags are weighed as heavily as they use to be, but it speaks to the competency of the team building, or maintaining your website.  If the basic building blocks are missing, you most likely have a staff training or education issue and are wasting lots of money.

The check up is fairly simple, if you know there are many domain tools that look at your site and give feedback.  Your web team uses these tools all the time, so should you.  An easy check up tool is www.whois.domaintool.com.  If you put in your web site name,  it will give you current meta tags, alt tags ect., and an overall SEO score for Search Engine Optimization. 

If you go to the right hand column and click on the SEO Text Browser, it will give you page by page feedback on what is missing from their perspective.  It will also give you a grade for each page, so you will be able to talk with the team as to what is going on and how to improve.

As an example, I just ran this tool on a client to see what areas needed attention, since they indicated at the meeting that the web consultant they where using had it all covered.  Result: No meta tags, no alt tags, a failing score of 56% for SEO since all the pages were designed as a .gif and could not be spidered by search engines.  Pretty web site with great design, not searchable, waste of money….not good.

This is also a great tool to peak in to the back end of your competitions website to see their score and what issues they have not addressed that you can use to your advantage. So do CMO gut check on your SEO and website, it may be the best improvement for no money you can do.

TweetSaver is a way to manage your Twitter tweets for search, tag and bookmarking

What to do with Twitter as a CMO?   Are you thinking how do I monetize ROI, manage and utilize our Social Media efforts with Twitter in a way that will allow me to optimize and manage our tweets more effectively? 

 Take a look at Tweetsaver- it costs $10.00 to $20.00 annually, and may be a good solution for finding a way with your Twitter program to do a central back up, allow a bookmark of your tweets and tag the tweets for organic search.  This will start to monetize your efforts on Twitter as content and SEO.  TweetSaver gives you a way to archive, search, tag and share all of the content that you are creating on twitter.

They say “One year of backups, searching, tagging, etc AND Save 50% for spreading the word about TweetSaver! When you sign up, we’ll send the following tweet on your behalf: I’m backing up, searching, and tagging all my tweets with http://tweetsaver.com, shouldn’t you?”

Here is the link to check it out:  http://tweetsaver.com/

Use Compete.com for your own and others web traffic stats.

Need a quick gut check on your website traffic and Alexa data is not what you thought or you cannot find yourself on Alexa, then try Complete.com.

Here is what their website says “Compete.com provides advertisers, agencies and media companies with actionable digital intelligence. Hundreds of clients, including the world’s leading brands, rely on Compete to help them create more effective websites and more targeted advertising campaigns.”

A lot of what you will want is in the Pro edition and not the free version, but for fast gee how do we stack up against xyz competitor this will do nicely.

Compete’s products include online media planning and measurement tools as well as digital research in the automotive, consumer goods, financial services, media, retail, telecom and travel industries.

Retweeting your own tweet.

Should you be re-tweeting your own tweet? Yes you can!  If you have a really great tweet that has driven a lot of clicks retweets by others or opens, then by all means retweet content.  Now if you are retweeting the same tweet over and over that is a no.. no.. . Try to build up a library of content for your tweets, so you do not repeat more that once per week.

However it is much better if others retweet your tweet, so use two accounts, one to tweet and one to do the retweet. Some prefer just to tweet again the same materials, some want the name @xxx to appear for more brand in the tweet.

Twitscoop combines, search, hot trends and buzz

I came across  www.Twitscoop.com while looking for a better search function than www.search.twitter.com .

It combines the best of many worlds: search, trends and buzz into one nice package.  They say it is a way of staying on top of Twitter, or what ever that means these days. Basically it is a gateway to Twitter and you really need to have a gateway.  If not, Twitters’ own functionality is very poor.

Twitscoop allows you to receive and send tweets, and find friends instantly, without reloading your page.  It also allows search and follow of what’s buzzing on twitter in real-time.

Their pitch is: “Never miss the buzz.  Watch the trends live on the cloud. Tweet from your account.  Twitpic images on the fly. Preview Twitpic images directly from Twitscoop. Track bit.ly stats.  Check bit.ly stats in real-time.”

The layout is very friendly for you non techy CMO types. So give it a try.

How many tweets should you do a day on Twitter?

The debate rages on as to how many tweets per day a person or company should do on Twitter and when is it too much?

My opinion is to look at the goals of why you are using Twitter as to how many is just right.  The main question to start with is why are you using Twitter?  Is it to grow followers, is it to sell product, is it for customer service, is it for an individual or a positioning of a product or service?

To grow followers:  3 to 5 tweets per day. Spread out the tweets to when you have something real to say or a photo to share.  If you keep growing followers and not loosing followers then keep to that number per day. If you are loosing followers, then it is either your tweets are boring to the follower, you have a lot of junk names on your list and you need to clean the list, or you will need to test one per day, next day two per day and then three per day and see which one works the best to gain meaningful followers.  Think of this type of strategy as personal communications to your entire base of friends, business associates as to what do you think and what they would be interested in you telling them.

To sell products: 2 to 3 tweets in cycles 4 times per day, seven days per week. Morning, lunchtime, dinnertime and late night or over night. The goal is to get as large a list of followers as you can, list quality is not the issue, but tweets quality is. If you sell, sell sell in tweets and there is no content you will loose followers fast.  The crafting of your tweets.  It’s so important that each one gives info in the tweet as a way of expanding your messaging to an ever growing audience for free.  Think of it as a free email list untargeted. Then think of what is a feature, benefit or other facts that would be a compelling reason for people to check you out.

To use for customer service:  Up to 20 tweets per day.  Or as many from which you get interaction.  Decide which ones will be direct reply and which ones are good enough info to tweet to all. Also use the search function to intercept tweets talking about you and reply.  If one customer is having an issue, others may too and this is an excellent way to stop bad customer service or PR issues.

Celebrity tweets by an editorial or PR team: Up to 15 per day. Be transparent that it is them or that you are doing it for them. Spread them out evenly during the 24-hour period.

Brand or service tweets as a campaign:  Up to 30 per day. Take out your FAQ’s, your contest or event and start tweeting them.  This will embed them into the organic optimization space for search. You’re not doing it for followers. Your embedding content into the twitter search functions to gain net new eyeballs to your event, service or brand.

What about those who do a series of twitters one right after another, because you can’t fit the message all in one twitter?  NO. NO NO You’re using the wrong medium. Place the info you want to get out in a blog posting, link the twitter about that topic to the blog and tweet out the key points in 140 letters.

Reusing your tweets and retweeting. Yes. Retweeting your own tweets is now common. Use a 48-hour rest period for high performing tweets before you retweet your own, or even better use same subject with different way of saying it. Quotes are popular to get retweeting by others. Use #Follow Fridays or #FF or #Everyday to expand your name @XXX to other, via others.