Twitter Marketing: How Smart Marketers Are Succeeding

Do you use Twitter for your business?

Want to discover how to use the latest Twitter updates?

To learn more about Twitter marketing, I interview Joel Comm.
More About This Show
The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

In this episode I interview Joel Comm, a serial entrepreneur and the author of 12 books. His latest project is an apparel brand you can find at DoGoodStuff.com. Joel's latest book is Twitter Power 3.0: How to Dominate Your Market One Tweet at a Time.

In this episode Joel will explore new updates to Twitter, along with video, his favorite apps and more.

You'll discover how to use Twitter more effectively.

Share your feedback, read the show notes and get the links mentioned in this episode below.
Listen Now
You can also subscribe via iTunes, RSS, or Stitcher. How to subscribe/review on iPhone.

Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Twitter Marketing
How Joel got involved with Twitter

Joel, who has been building businesses online since 1995, likes to explore different technology and new ways to communicate. Twitter and microblogging interested Joel, since he had already been blogging for several years.

In May 2007 Joel posted his first tweet. "In true, first-tweet form, it was utterly forgettable," Joel recalls. "I think it was something like 'Trying to figure out what this Twitter thing is.'"

That was about it, until six months later, when Joel gave Twitter another try. He looked more closely, and decided Twitter was a cool platform for engagement. Sometime in 2008, after Joel accumulated about 5,000 followers, a friend told him John Wiley & Sons was looking for somebody to write a book on how to use Twitter for business. They connected and hit it off. The first edition of Twitter Power came out in February 2009.

At the time, many were still trying to figure out Twitter, which posed the question, "What are you doing?"

"We began to realize the heart of social media is about sharing life, relationships, the journey that we are on together," Joel says. "It's the points of commonality that we have in many of these mundane activities ... that bring us closer together. Therein lies the power of Twitter to connect people."

An organic tweeter, Joel uses Twitter.com and the Twitter app on his phone. For those who like to consolidate and schedule tweets, he recommends tools like SocialOomph and Hootsuite.

Listen to the show to hear both of our initial thoughts on Twitter.

How the retweeting process has changed

In the past if people wanted to retweet something, they would have to take all of the original tweet's text, copy it and put "RT" in front of it. They could only comment if there was any space left in the 140 characters.

Joel believes Twitter finally realized that when people want to retweet, they have something they want to say about it. So now, if you want to retweet, you can quote that tweet and still have 116 additional characters left to add to it.

This change makes these retweets feel like more of a conversation, because it puts all related tweets together.

The way it works is simple. If you are in the app, you can retweet and share as is or quote the tweet. If you are on the site and you click Retweet, it opens up a window and you can comment or just retweet.

Listen to the show to learn what Joel thinks of the Twitter character limit.

Twitter video

Joel starts by talking about Vine. You can record a Vine video and it automatically goes to Twitter. In addition to doing a straight video, Vine allows you to do creative things. For example, you can hold down the recording button, let up with your thumb, then point in another direction and take some other video, until you've got your full segment.

Joel finds native Twitter video more interesting,