Today I was fortunate enough to attend a breakfast seminar on social media with a very distinguished panel consisting of Guy Kawasaki (Alltop), Nick Halstead (Tweetmeme), and Mario Menti (Twitterfeed).
In addition to getting a good basic overview/plug of the above services from a functional point of view, my biggest takeaway from the day was how well Guy Kawasaki used them all to generate Twitter followers, leading to traffic, page views and ultimately advertising revenue for his latest venture, Alltop. Alltop is a news aggregator that covers several hundred topics and there’s more to come.
His take on Twitter is that it’s purely a marketing tool. And in order to scale it to his current success through a constant stream of high quality tweets that appeal to a broad audience (he has over 170 000 followers), he needs to employ tactics that his detractors (as he jokingly refers to as “social Nazis”) feel are not what the social web was built for. So how does he do it?
The Five Step Recipe of Guy Kawasaki’s Twitter Strategy
- Guy himself regularly Tweets (@GuyKawasaki) about things that fit in to the categories of Alltop, making extensive use of scheduling through ObjectiveMarketer to maximize its effectiveness
- Four additional “ghost tweeters” tweets through his personal account. These tweets can be identified as they have the ghosts initials appended to the tweet
- Twitterfeed is set up with a handful of different feeds from trusted 3rd party sources as well as his own blog to create a constant flow of quality links on various topics and themes
- The Alltop site employs the Tweetmeme button to encourage a viral effect through retweets
- Outbound links in tweets are framed with an Alltop header that has a button for visiting the site. This apparently achieves an average 1.5% click-through rate to Alltop.com
At first it might not seem like rocket science, and of course not everyone has a personal brand as strong as Guy Kawasaki which contributes to achieving this sort of scale. But what Guy Kawasaki certainly has – that in my mind makes the biggest difference to his success – is what everyone else also can also produce; a clearly defined objective of what he wants to achieve through Twitter.
Commercial Social Media Success seem to all start with the simple question – Why are you Twittering?
A page viewed as linked from Guy Kawasaki's Twitter account, with the Alltop header (highlighted with a red border) complete with retweet button and a link to the Alltop design category page
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