Using Twitter to Establish SMS Marketing Campaigns

What is Twitter

SMS Text message marketing is growing at a tremendous rate. More and more businesses are beginning to realize the power of mobile marketing. Twitter.com provides a free and effective way for a business to get into mobile marketing.

Twitter.com is a free service that allows you to quickly set up a mobile text message marketing campaign. You can use twitter from either a, handset a web browser or both. It is scalable and dynamic and can be effective for any size or type of organization.

Twitter is designed as a way for individuals to tell the world “what their doing.” The service can be improvised by organizations to communicate with their members, employees and clients.

On its site twitter.com, has a public timeline of every message sent. You may choose to have your message displayed in this timeline or not. If your messages are not in the public timeline, you must manually approve each person who requests to follow your timeline (receive your messages). If you access your account online you can see every message you’ve sent and you may also see every message sent to you. It’s advisable to make your timeline public so that evryone, including those who do not follow you, can see your updates.

You can follow the timeline/messages sent by other twitter users of your choice. Others may choose to follow your timeline/messages. The service allows you block who receives your updates/messages and who you receive updates/messages from. These capabilities provide the foundation of how Twitter can be used to establish mobile campaigns.

Hopefully by now, you are beginning to see the power and flexibility of Twitter.com as a viable solution for your mobile campaign. The only limitation is that you may only have one account per handset (phone number) or email address. To overcome this, we suggest creating a free email account at yahoo or gmail. Note: If you access your twitter account from the web you must provide an email address.

Mobile marketing and mobile alerts provide an instant way for your organization to communicate. It is suitable for most any type of organization including: companies, schools, churches and municipalities.

Your message recipients must agree to receive your messages and you must provide a way for them to stop receiving your messages when they choose. Twitter provides a method for both of these functionalities.

Terminology

Here are few a basic terms that you need to know. Followers - these are the people who choose to receive your updates. Opt in – this means agreeing to receive your messages, by sending a message. Opt out – this means stopping the receipt of your messages, by sending a message. In both cases the message sender will receive a confirmation message. Keywords are the words that your recipients send as a message from their handsets. For example they would send the message “Follow darrylgee” to opt in. In this example “darrylgee” is the keyword. Keywords allow you to establish a unique list based on your marketing needs. “Lingo” are the commands used to control your twitter experience.

Tinyurl.com

Tinyurl provides a free tool you can use to shorten your long hyperlinks. This is very useful when you are trying to craft a text message that is 140 characters. You will notice that many messages sent on twitter contain tiny urls. We used the service to shorten mytextad.com from 23 characters to 20 characters - this is the shortened url - http://tiny.cc/fFHTQ . Visit tinyurl.com to shorten your urls’s. No account registration required.

How To Setup A Campaign

Twitter.com provides a cost effective and scalable solution for any sized organization. It is suitable in any situation where you have a group of potential recipients who have a need to receive instant communication from you. We will now explain and provide examples of how to set up a mobile marketing campaign.

Invite people to follow you on twitter. You do this by sending them a text message to 40404 with the message “invite 212-555-1212.” Twitter will then prompt them to accept or join twitter if they are not members.

Place an invitation on your company literature. For example instruct them to text the following to 40404: “follow your user name”

Once you have built up a list. Begin sending updates. 1 to 3 per day is reasonable for marketing purposes, but 10 is not. A minimum of 3 per week is fine, but 0 is not. Keep your updates to 140 characters or less.

For examples on what types of marketing works, join twitter and text “follow delloutlet.com” to 40404. To join twitter just text a username you want to 40404. The Dell outlet store does a great job of using twitter to market. Note - be sure to use expiration dates/times for your specials.

For complete details on how to use twitter visit - http://www.twitter.com.

Copyright 2008- Darryl Gee, mytextad.com