By Dawser Al Hadidi
For all those with “Twitter” accounts! Twitter is a responsibility! Once you gain your first follower, you are accountable to entertain his ears with your Tweets.
If you are big, small, medium business, or a celebrity figure! You have got to use it! Your first and utmost goal is to increase your followers and not just any followers, remember I spoke in my article “Road Less Travelled” about technologies’ blessing which allows us to target ads and messages to the right people! Twitter is no different, you really want to gain the right followers, and make sure they are increasing, in Twitter’s case both Quantity and Quality are equally vital to the success of your Twitter life! You also need to make sure that the gap between your followers and following is not that far, 100 to 200 maximum. If it is more than that it suggests you are not interested to listen or interact with other Tweeps, and this certainly defeats the purpose of Twitter being an interactive and collaborative social media platform. In this case I say please “lose it”! On a technical level it will get you into trouble in future keep reading to understand why…
Twitter best practices to increase followers are not yet that defined, however, you must work hard to grow your followers, and I believe organically is the best way. I grew my follower organically and now I feel safer and more confident that they listen to me and my influence numbers have massively spiked up from 0 to 39 according Klout. Yes! This is what you want. You want to influence people, get your message out there!
One very important piece of information you must know is that Twitter monitors accounts for aggressive following and follow churn (repeatedly following and un-following large numbers of other users). Usually some people do that to draw attention and gain followers so they start following people and then unfollow them a short while later. Twitter considers this a spam technique and will suspend the account that uses this practice that’s why I always believe that automated following services is not effective in that sense, as it may cause you to unintentionally commit the follow churn!
There is a limit on the number of people you follow enforced by Twitter; you are only allowed to follow 2000 people, however, you can increase but this depends on the ratio between your following and follower, example you will not be able to follow 10,000 people if you have 100 followers,
Twitter has a very good reason for imposing such rules; these limits improve site performance by ensuring that when Twitter send your message to all of your followers, is actually meant to reach those followers and it’s not just throwing message to large numbers, It’s basically a healthy way of disabling spam on their server.
You should not feel bound to follow who follows you, but make sure you respond to their “@messages” and interact with them when needed. Again I repeat that Twitter is not a passive media, it is no more broadcasting messages to the mass! Twitter is targeted and interactive.
Another good rule of Twitter do not “tweet too much or too little”! Meaning you are allowed 1000 Tweet a day limit set by Twitter, 250 Direct messages. Use them… They are yours.
A healthy Tweep will Tweet 5 – 10 Tweets morning, 10 – 20 afternoons, and 20+ at night, do not exceed your limit. And always leave at least 5 seconds gap between each Tweet, remember people are following many others and they need time to catch you Tweet thread. You can read further about Twitter ethics in my previous article.
One last and not at all least do not disappear from Twitter, you are only allowed 24 hours of absence! Twitter is an engagement media engaging your followers is a must to maintain your Twitexitance.
Have you ever wondered what would it be like to know what your customer really wants? Reading his brain and watching every move to deliver what he needs at the right moment! Well Behavioral Marketing allows you to do so!
Behavioral Marketing or Targeting is a marketing method; it is a web technology which allows tracking user behavior by following his navigation pattern and interaction path. This valuable information about a user’s website visit is then used to target advertising to his needs and optimize the website services to align with user’s requirements.
“Behavioral targeting is advertising’s attempt at supplying you with specialized ads developed from your Internet history”. Tech Republic Definition
Behavioral marketing is not being effectively used in the Middle East; main reasons not effectively employing this beautiful and miraculous online marketing practice are:
Apparently watching the pattern of user’s behavior and registering his activities on the website can get marketers to know him better and therefore satisfy his needs and in return get yours fulfilled! So behavioral marketing actually promises better conversion rates and guaranteed ROI not to mention increase of open rate for email direct campaigns.
Through employing the right technology and efficient marketing analyst marketers will be able to design the ad campaign in relation to the user’s behavioral data, therefore capture his attention, and drive him right in the funnel and getting the desired results! Money well spent!
There is however a privacy in association with the cookie technology issue (cookie is information in a shape of a “code” that a Website puts on your computer’s hard disk after agreeing with your browsers default settings so that it can remember something about you at a later time) this directly connects to the behavioral marketing which is still under debate, I personally think it is irrelevant! Do you think the super market is private? Your gym, Shopping malls even banks?! They all have their ways of knowing customer behavioral and therefore target advertisement to suit his needs! So where is the privacy issue! And if there is actually a privacy breach in this sort of marketing, then let it be! Let’s ask the users do they wish to be bombarded with irrelevant advertisement or they would rather get exposed to the right and targeted type of ads tailored to their needs!
As a marketer you can choose to target your ad to a specific behavior, Example, if a visitor is browsing through IT content most of the time, it’s likely that he is interested and maybe working in the IT domain, so targeting latest IT inventions ads for this particular user will encourage click through and possibly leading to a sale!
I must say that behavioral marketing has become essential in these difficult economic times. US and Europe has been effectively using behavioral marketing for several years , according to Forrester reports, behavioral targeting adoption has massively grew from 10% of European advertisers in 2007, to 26% of in 2008., Middle East publishers must look into it sooner than later and I promise it will relieve the distress cause by economic meltdown.
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