How To Make A Custom Twitter Background

There are a many websites that allow you to create a custom Twitter
background for free. The one that I am most comfortable with is
Free Tweet Designer.

It’s important to create a custom Twitter background for several
reasons. Here are some of them:

1. It shows that you take your tweeting seriously. If you don’t care about
providing quality tweets you probably won’t take the time to create a
custom Twitter background. Here is a link to a post on why you should
take Twitter very seriously for business.
2. It provides additional space in which you can include important
information. Make sure to include your company name, telephone number,
address, website, and any other relevant information you wish display.
3. It gives you the chance to showcase your services or products.

It’s not difficult to create a custom page. Here is an example of a Twitter
background I created for a Chick-fil-A unit in Pensacola, Florida.

I hope you find the website useful.

Thanks for reading,

~Joshua Lyons

Say Goodbye To Long And Ugly URLs

Have you ever copied and pasted a link that was so long you couldn’t
send it in a tweet; or maybe it was so long that it just didn’t look good in the
email? Here is the solution.

Go to tinyurl.com and paste the long url into the provided field. After
this is done click on “Make tiny url” and a new [short] link will be
provided. The new link goes to the same web page as the long link, but it
won’t take up your character space.

I hope you get a lot of use out of tinyurl. This post ties in well with my
Twitter category which gives advice on what to tweet, how often to
tweet, and other general Twitter tips.

Thanks for reading,

~Joshua Lyons

P.S. Since posting this entry I have had about a dozen comments from
people recommending  bit.ly.com. as well. I checked out that site and
I am impressed with it. I would encourage you to check out both sites
and see which one is more comfortable. You’ve got options!

P.S.S. Here is a well written article about the concerns/pitfalls of using
shortlinks from tinyurl, bit.ly, and similar sites. It’s worth a read.
http://www.metaltoad.com/blog/url-shorteners-must-die

Are Social Media Your Minions?

This post is very different from everything else I have done on this
blog; but it should help drive home the point that social media platforms
should work in unison and not independantly.

Here are three of the best minions I have ever had working for me. I have
given each one some orders. They are as follow:

Minion #1: Twitter – Twitter, when someone runs a Google search there will
be 10 results on the first page. Your job is to make my name, my
reputation, and what I have to offer appear as all ten of those top search
results. By doing this we can knock all opposition off the first page of the
search results.

Minion #2: Blogs – Blogs, your objective is to continually give the world great
information. Tell them what they want to hear and give them a longing to
come back to see what you have to say next time. Then, create interest and
desire within the reader. Persuade the reader that we are awesome and that
they will do anything for us. Convince them that they need us!

Minion #3: Facebook – Facebook, your mission is to direct our fans. If we are
needing to push them to our blog and feed them information you will give
them incentives to go there. If we need people to go to Twitter, to help
increase page rankings, you will convince the fans that they need to go to
Twitter. Do whatever is necessary to guide the world in the direction we
desire.

By having my minions work together I can create an effective plan for world
domination. If they do not work together I will be left with a team of
minions who are aimlessly trying to do something but will not be able to do
so effectively.

1. Use Twitter to get your company, products, and services all over the first
page of Google.

2. Use your blog to inform your target market and to create a desire for
what you have to offer.

3. Use Facebook as a way to guide your fans to do whatever it is that needs to
be done. This could be retweeting your tweets, posting comments on your
blog, giving feedback about a product, or something else. Facebook should
be used to direct your fans.

By making your social media platforms work together you will find your
social media campaigns to be much more successful than if they are not
working together.

Use your minions and rule the world!

Thanks for reading,

~Joshua Lyons

Cheat Your Tweets – Become More Popular

I wrote a while back about what type of content you should
use for your tweets. Since that posting I’ve come up with some valuable info I really want to share.

You want to provide interesting info but you can only find so much
info related to your industry. I would suggest
using interesting content that is not just industry related. For example,
use animal trivia for your facts, something you find interesting for
your tips, humor for your quotes and Darwin awards for your
links. Just make sure to include your
name and keywords before the rest of the tweet.

Here are some examples of interesting tweets that could help
you with your ranking but aren’t industry related.

·    Joshua Lyons: social media – Did you know that mosquitoes have
47 teeth?!! #animals #facts #mosquitoes

·    Joshua Lyons: consultation ~Simpsons “Don’t worry, getting eaten by a crocodile is like falling asleep, in a giant blender.” #quotes #funny #Simpsons

Try to leave enough room at the end of the tweet so that  people can easily retweet you.

I’ve noticed that this has worked much better for me because this type of information is more popular with the followers and it is easier to find random information than it is to find industry related
information.

Just don’t forget to use your keywords.

Thanks for reading,

~Joshua Lyons

Here is a link to my other Twitter content posting.

 

The Easiest Way to Get More Traffic

Get traffic!

It doesn’t matter what kind of site you have. You must
get traffic to your site!

If you don’t get traffic you might as well not develop and
maintain an internet site.

What is the best way to get traffic to your site without having to
spend a million hours on Twitter and Facebook to let people know about
your site?

Before I answer that question I’m going to talk about Twitter and
Facebook for a minute.

Twitter is great because there are so many people out there who use it. If you send a tweet there could easily be thousands of people who see it!

Twitter has about 160 million monthly users. Granted, only a
few of them may click the link to your site; but still, that’s better than
nothing. That’s free traffic!

Facebook is great for virtually the same reason. Facebook has about
500 million active users [Check both of the links above for stats.] When people comment on Facebook the comments are not as ignored as they are on Twitter.

Twitter is like almost blindly hunting with a shotgun and Facebook is more like hunting with a scoped rifle.

My advice for getting traffic to your sites without having to work too hard is to add tweet and like buttons to your
pages. [I would add the like button to my blog but it’s not
available for WordPress.com.] *There is a like button that is automatically built into WordPress.com.

This is important because every time someone sees something they
like they can shoot the shotgun and rifle for you. This means
you have people encouraging their friends [people you don’t even know] to visit your site.

All you have to do is post interesting content, add a couple of
share buttons and let your visitors do the work for you.

I would still recommend doing your own tweets and
Facebook status updates to let people know about your updated content, but don’t do it alone. Let your visitors help you.

I’m sure you will see how helpful this is. Also, keep an eye on what
people are tweeting. This will help you have an idea of what
type of content your visitors like. Keep this in mind as you prepare more content for your site.

Thanks for reading,

~Joshua Lyons

P.S. Check out my Facebook and Twitter categories and “Tweet” them if you like them. I’d like more traffic so feel free to fire the Twitter shotgun and Facebook rife for me. =)

Why You Shouldn’t Let Everyone Follow You

Let’s pretend you own a high-end women’s sunglasses store. A mysterious yet magical man comes up to you and tells you he will drive some traffic to your store. You can either have a flood of traffic in one day but cannot
select the traffic demographic or you can have a custom picked list of fashionable women, but would have to wait a whole week. Which would you choose?

Obviously you would choose the second option. Why spend time selling expensive women’s glasses to a crowd of men, children, homeless and uninterested people?

This same principle is true with using Twitter.

If you are wanting to have a successful Twitter campaign you need to locate your primary target audience and find out how to effectively communicate with them.

You want to have as many followers on Twitter as possible but there are some key points to remember.

1. If you follow too many people at once you could appear as a spammer. Limit yourself to no more than 1oo followers a day.
2. You want to keep the follower/following ratio close. Not more than a 10% difference.

Takeing a little extra time to find your target market is well worth the effort.

Develop a quality following.

1. Go to Twellow and follow your target audience. Follow 50-100 people a day.
2. Know your key audience so that you can craft tweets that will be of interest to your followers and will likely be retweeted.

The benefits:

1. Get Google and Bing to index your tweets more often by having your followers retweet your keywords they like.
2. You can effectively monitor your followers (target market) and get to understand their needs and wants. [You can’t do this if your followers are not in your target market.]
3. Increase your brand awareness and get more customers.

Final tip: Lead your Twitter followers to your Facebook account. Facebook is where you can build the strongest relationship with them. Think of Twitter as a business card and Facebook as a one-on-one dinner.

Happy follower hunting!

Thanks for reading,

~Joshua Lyons

Twitter Tips – Things You Should Know

“If excellence is an option why settle for anything less.” by Mike Gorman. If you are going to use Twitter you should use it with excellence. Here are some tips that can make the difference between mediocre Twitter use and excellent Twitter use.

• Make sure your bio includes keywords. Google looks for keywords in the bio. Because of this you should try to include as many keywords as possible in this section.

• You can create a custom Twitter landing page to prevent people from seeing a bunch of random 140 character tweets. You may have great content on your news feed, but the first impression a potential customer gets should be controlled. You are able to ensure that your first time visitors will see what you want them to see by creating a custom Twitter page. This is the same principle that can be found from the “Don’t let people see your Facebook wall!” post.

• Make every follower you get count. Don’t get followers just for the sake of getting followers. Get followers that can benefit you. This could include industry peers, customers or some other specific niche audience.

• Use a profile photo. People relate better with humans than they do with inanimate objects and logos. Do you want to relate well with your audience? Use a human face for your avatar.

• Use Twellow to find your target audience. Twellow is the “yellow pages” of Twitter.

• A word of warning, don’t become follow happy. If you follow too many people too quickly your account could become suspended. You are thought to be spamming “If you have followed a large amount of users in a short amount of time;” by Twitter.com.

• How not to get suspended – The Twitter Rules

• Putting a Twitter feed on your website can help with your website search engine optimization.

• Here’s a link to get a twitter widget

• Here’s a video about Twitter and website SEO

I hope these tips help you  as you develop your Twitter presence.

Good luck with your tweeting and on Friday I’ll explain the importance of custom selecting your social media followers and fans.

Thanks for reading,

~Joshua Lyons

Schedule Your Tweets in Advance

It’s important to tweet relevant information as much as possible, but sometimes it is hard to find the time to login to Twitter and type your tweets. You can overcome this problem by typing and scheduling all the tweets you want at your convenience. This can be done by going through a website called Hootsuite. The following is an explanation of how to set up Hootsuite and schedule your tweets:

1. Go to Hootsuite.com
2. Click on Sign up now
3. Select Basic free (Unless you want to purchase a different plan)
4. Fill in some basic account info.
5. Click Create
6. Select your style
7. Allow Hootsuite to connect to your Twitter account.

After connecting with Twitter you will be directed to the settings window. If you wish to explore this page you may but it’s not necessary at this point.

After closing this window you will see an owl in the upper left corner of the site. Beside that owl is a text box. Type your message in the box.

If you wish to add a link to your text you can make a shorter URL by pasting the original URL in the shrink box and clicking shrink. This will give you more characters to use for your tweet. [You are limited to 140 characters per tweet]

Now, click on the calendar icon between the shrink and send now buttons. You can select your date and time and then click okay.

Make sure your Twitter profile picture on the right of the text box is selected and click schedule.

Congratulations! You have finished setting up your Hootsuite account and can now type and schedule all the tweets you want at your convenience.

I hope this helps you as your business launches into the realm of tweets.

I look forward to sharing with you again next Wednesday.

Thanks for reading,

~Joshua Lyons

Tweet Content: What Your Business Should be Tweeting

You want to have great content that will make your appear to be an expert in your field and will also be of great interest to your readers. First I’m going to give you some tips on getting great content to share. Then I will explain how to make your tweets benefit you.

One tweet should include a tip that could benefit your customers.

Example – If I’m in the signage industry I would tweet that “You should avoid pressure washing your car if it has vinyl lettering on the side.”

One tweet should include a quote that would be of interest to your reader.

Almost everyone in my target audience is employed. Therefore I use quotes that involve work. The quote will have to be short enough to include both the name of the author and the quote itself.

One tweet should be a link to an article or video.

This could be a link to a relevant article or maybe a video. It should lead the reader to something interesting to read or watch.

One tweet should lead your reader to an interesting fact.

If you’re in the movie industry you might tweet that “Today is Brad Pitts’ birthday.”

These tweets are of course not set in stone. It’s rather challenging to find a ton of interesting facts for the signage industry. It may be much easier and just as interesting to tweet a link to the “Pic of the Day.” (Photos of the best or funniest signs made)

Spend a few hours at the beginning of each month and select tips, quotes, articles/videos, facts and/or something else of interest.

Now that you have selected your tweets you can sit back and just post them each day.

Every now and then you will see something interesting that you think could be a good tweet. Feel free to go to Twitter and tweet it. It never hurts to share good information. Just don’t try so hard to post something that you start posting junk. Don’t post stupid content just for the sake of posting something.

How to make your tweets benefit you:

You want to make sure that every tweet has you business name and a keyword that you want to be associated with. This is key!

For example: “Signage Company Name: Vinyl lettering: Vehicle wrap tip: You should avoid pressure washing your car if it has vinyl lettering.”

Personally I don’t care about the tip. I care that my name is in the tweet along with keywords. (Vinyl lettering and Vehicle wrap) The reason for the tip is to get my audience to retweet my name next to some keywords. This is what Google is looking for. It wants to see that people are interested in what I have to say.

I hope this helps you feel more comfortable with what to tweet and I hope it helps you with your Google rankings.

Thanks for reading,

~Joshua Lyons

How Many Times Should I Tweet Each Day?

Yes, Twitter is valuable because it can make your Google ranking go up, but how often should you tweet?

I would recommend tweeting four times each day. You may tweet more if you have enough content to do so.

I would suggest breaking your tweets down by times of the day.

• First tweet should be in the early morning – The new day in the US begins in the Eastern Time zone. There are a lot of people in New England and I want them to read my tweet when they start their day.
• Second tweet should be before lunch – People get a break for lunch and check their Twitter. I want them to see what I have to say during lunch.
• Third tweet should be shortly before people get off work – Many of the people in your audience will check their Twitter/e-mail before getting off work. For this reason it is good to have your tweet waiting for them before they get off work.
• The fourth tweet should be around dinner time – People are home and checking their Twitter. They can now read what you have to say in the comfort of their own home.

If you want to tweet more you can but make sure you have content WORTH tweeting. Nobody will give a glance to your tweets if they know you are going to waste their time.

Question & Answer Time!

• Q: What type of content do you tweet?
• A: I’ll tell you on Friday.
• Q: How do you find the time to tweet so often during the day and what if you are too busy to tweet during those times?
• A: I will tell you on Monday.

I’m really looking forward to sharing the next two blogs with you.

Thanks for reading,

~Joshua Lyons