It’s a great example of how not to do things using Twitter. That should be self-evident. Habitat have said that the use of these hashtags was not authorised, but did not say who had used them (Source: BBC News). They have since apologised for the mess up, but it seems the damage has already been done.

But it looks like people are jumping on the bandwagon and following suit.

Habitat Fail, others follow suit

See this very recent example of promoting products and services by using the conversations around the release of the Transformers 2 movie. There are many more like these on Twitter right now.

As with everything online, people will find a way to abuse the system for their own gain. Facebook went through the same, when they started letting third parties develop applications. People’s profiles were awash with invitations to “bite people as vampires”. Not today thanks, I’ve just had lunch!

So, we face a barrage of spam on Twitter against popular subjects. This erodes the credibility of Twitter and the people that tweet genuinely.

Let’s hope that Twitter do something to stop this, ASAP.

Searching on twitter is more passive and recreational than using a search engine. People will be interested in conversations rather than actively seeking a piece of information. Thinking carefully about how you write your tweets and using the correct words and tone will help to promote your business.

Optimising your tweets

All the major twitter platforms, including the web interface, have a search facility. This enables users to search for a particular phrase that interests them and see who is tweeting about that topic. They can then follow this person’s tweets.

To start growing your online audience, consider doing the following:

Keyword rich tweets – you have 140 characters, use them wisely. Think about your audience and the keywords they might use to find your product or service. Use your existing research to help you. Search campaigns, other social media, web logs are all good places to start.

Search for your own terms - find out what people using those keywords are saying. Think of it as a little competitor analysis. Do you fit in? If not then try some similar searches.

Make it natural - you should not stuff your tweets full of keywords, it should still read well.

Use hashtags to incorporate keywords – you can use these in your tweets to include keywords which do not fit in naturally. Simple place a # in front of your keyword and remove all the spaces; now you have a hashtag. Your tweet will show up against those searches.

• For example: #seo #search #searchengines
• Be aware that you will need to include plurals and that Twitter cannot differentiate between two words in a hashtag. So #mobilephones will be picked up on searches for “mobilephones” and “mobile” but not “mobile phones”.

Use URL shorteners -  this will free up space and allow for more keywords. If your URLs are already keyword rich, you may want to use the full URL. If not, use a service like bit.yl and then add parameters to the URL rich in keywords. This is a great way to get keywords in without ruining the flow of your tweet.

• For example: http://bit.ly/1a0ULG?topic=seo will work and help increase the keywords. The parameter is the bit from the “?”. Format them “?topic=keyword”

Shorten, shorten, shorten – your text. Strip out unnecessary words, use ampersand (&) instead of “and” etc., use numbers (22) instead of numbers (twenty two). Think like you’re writing a text message.

Find a suitable time - broadcast when your audience is most likely to be search/watching. Try different times and watch the response rate. This might be when people are on their lunch break or on a Friday afternoon. Don’t be tweeting your breaking news story at 2am!

Provide value - as with all marketing, give your audience a reason to follow you. Offer free advice, the latest industry news or your opinion. Do it on a regular basis to gain a following.

Choose a personality – when writing your tweets try to keep your tone consistent. No one wants to follow an irrational tweeter, but do show your personality. This is a great place to show your audience the open, fun side of you. Leave the corporate facelessness for your dull print brochures.

Make a pretty profile - ensure you have completed your profile with a link to your website. Perhaps change the colour scheme from the norm, create an avatar and put up a background. See our twitter page for an example.

Things to be aware of:

We encourage you to take all of this advice when you next tweet, but remember the following:

Don’t over tweet -  unless you have tons of interesting updates that provide value, your followers will become irritated and stop listening. We’d suggest no more than an average of one tweet an hour. Don’t retweet the same stuff!

Don’t be afraid to block - it’s not a race to get as many followers as possible, remember quality, not quantity. You want relevant follows who share an interest. Unfortunately there are spammers who will follow people just to get followed back. Block these people if you feel it is necessary.

Follow them – if someone has followed you and they are relevant to you, follow them. It’s polite and it shows that you are interested in what they have to say, building a better relationship.  It’s not all you, you, you!

The main point to take from this is to be yourself and provide value. Don’t over do it; few people enjoy aggressive marketing, especially in a social space like Twitter.

• Tweet Beep – alerts you via email when your brand or keyword is mentioned with hourly updates.
• Tweet Later – software for automating your tweets
• Tweetmeme - Tweet aggregate service, finds the most popular tweets. Great WordPress plugin as used on this site