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Twitter Gold with Tweetlater Keyword Alerts
By Todd | December 1, 2008
Even without the recent addition of keyword alerts, the free tweetlater.com service is one of the best Twitter.com tools on the web. Keyword alerts, however, simply puts tweetlater over the top as one of the coolest tools for the social marketer.
First, if you’re not on Twitter then all I can say is go check it out because you’re dating yourself. Twitter is like plugging into the chit chat that flows all around you in your virtual world. It’s not easy to explain and is really only appreciated if experienced.
Tweetlater has been around for a while now and their claim to fame has always been the ability to do three things
- Schedule tweets. Say you’ve got a product launch, or an event or a series of tweets that need to go out on schedule. Rather than leave this to chance that you’ll remember, or just to be more efficient with your time, you can schedule tweets for a later time
- Auto Reply. If someone decides to follow you the auto reply will send them an automated welcome message. You can customize this to thank them for following you and to tell them about your url
- Auto Follow. The auto follow feature lets you automatically follow those people back who chose to follow you. It’s a reciprocity thing. If they want to hear what you have top say then perhaps you want to hear what they too have to say. And of course it makes it much easier to grow your followers!
The new Keyword Alert feature Tweetlater recently added lets you specify a set of keywords you’re interested in and Tweetlater will “listen” in on the twitter chatter scanning for your set of keywords. When it finds them it will send you an email digest with all the tweets containing your keywords!
If you’re not seeing the coolness let me explain. Having a gazillion followers means nothing if these followers are not at all interested in what you’re interested in. If you tweet about a new golf ball that adds 20% distance to your drives only golfers are going to care. So wouldn’t it be nice to have followers who are golfers?
Rather than simply following people at random hoping they’ll reciprocate to build your list, why not look for people who are actually talking about your niche and then go follow them? If their tweet that raised the alert happened to be a question you can honestly answer why not help them out?
In short, the tweetlater keyword alert feature is NOT meant to be a way to spam people more effectively, but to give you away to engage those who are genuinely interested in what you’re interested in.
For instance, I see a tweet about someone asking about the best golf balls. I happen to market golf balls. I don’t just send them a sales pitch. Instead I first reply to their question without any marketing pitch so I doesn’t seem like a twitter spammer and then I follow them afterwards. Odds are they’ll follow me back because I gave them something useful and now my follower list contains one more qualified prospect I can engage with.
If you’re new to Twitter you might want to checkout an earlier post I did on link cloaking with tinyurl and budurl. With budurl you have the ability to track the clicks you get from the links in your tweets giving you more analytic power than a Jedi Knight.
You’ll also find a great post by Scott Fox that briefly describes twitter and includes a podcast on how to use twitter to grow your business. Twitter Marketing - Scott Fox interviews Rich Brooks
P.S. And don’t forget to follow me on twitter 
Topics: Productivity, Social Marketing |
Hi Todd,
Thanks for mentioning my recent podcast about Twitter Marketing.
Lots more free info and podcasts about online marketing and e-business strategy here:
http://www.scottfox.com/my_radio_show or at http://www.ScottFoxRadio.com.
Best,
Scott Fox
Scott Fox, Author of Internet Riches’s last blog post..They’re talking about YOU in the Reputation Cloud! Part 3 of 3 in the Next Generation Marketing Strategy Series
Hey Scott, no problem, it was a great podcast.