Guy Kawasaki: Using Twitter as a Marketing Tool

The first speaker at the Social Media Mom's Celebration was Guy Kawasaki, a dynamic and controversial speaker, whom I enjoyed hearing immensely. While I did not necessarily agree with everything, it was fascinating hearing him share ways to use Twitter that I'd never thought about before.

I think of Twitter as mainly a way to make instant connections, mostly with other bloggers, and a way to have real time conversations with them online. Yes I know most people aren't interested in what I'm serving ER for lunch, but you'd be surprised how many responses that tweet got from my Twitter friends. You know quick little snippets of life is how you get to know someone. That's what I love about it, the personal connections; getting to know people. Plus I find out about great giveaways and interesting blog posts or online articles all the time.

Guy was speaking from a strictly marketing point of view, he's all about getting as many hits and links. Since I know several of my readers are entrepreneurs I thought they'd be interested in the points that struck me the most. First he stressed that the real key to Twitter is SEARCH, which to be honest I had never used before.

It's a great way for a company to monitor their reputation; to know what people are saying good or bad about their product. He points out that companies like Comcast are searching for tweets about them and they have a corporate tweeter, who responds with help. It can also be used to find out what's being said about competitors.

Another way companies can use Twitter is to sell their product, after all a company has an direct access to an audience, i.e. followers, who have self selected that particular company. No longer do businesses have to rely on PR firms to write and place ads that might reach their target customer. Now they can send out sale information at the click of a button, immediately.

He shared a great example of how a mobile food cart in the LA area will tweet out where they are going to stop next and when. They find their customers waiting for them when they arrive. What a great way for small businesses to use technology!

Advanced Search is a great way to for businesses to localize their searches because they can look for tweets near their physical location. The example he gave was for a Camero repair shop. If they search for tweets mentioning Cameros within 100 miles of their location they can then tweet people who mention needing parts. TwitHawk is a service he suggests for advanced searches. Okay so most of those suggestions, I know many of us probably have no need for. This next one I thought was great for bloggers. He talked about using Twitter Feed to drive your blog feed into an automatic tweet each time you post. You can also add other people's feed into your Twitter Feed and every time they post, you'll also automatically tweet out a link to their post. This is an important tool because in Guy's opinion the way to get and keep Twitter followers is by constantly being interesting. I have to admit I do follow him and do find a lot of the links he tweets out worth checking out.

He also discussed using Objective Marketer, as a way track your tweets. You can find out which ones people click through the links and even schedule tweets. Bet a lot of you had no idea you could do that, I certainly didn't!

He suggests scheduling a tweet to repost in 8-9 hour intervals for maximum results to reach the most people. I don't know about that, most of the people I communicate via Twitter would be shocked if the same tweet came out over and over from me. Plus I think that takes away the spontaneity of conversing through Twitter. But like I said, if nothing else his talk gave me a lot to think about. It's a whole other world he was talking about and it was pretty interesting to visit it, if only for a little bit. My lack of knowledge in his sphere is no doubt why my blog makes no money, which is fine by me as it's not the motivating reason for me publishing it, and his sites are successful.

About: Guy Kawasaki is a founding partner and entrepreneur-in-residence at Garage Technology Ventures. He is also the co-founder of Alltop.com, an “online magazine rack” of popular topics on the web. Previously, he was an Apple Fellow at Apple Computer, Inc. Guy is the author of nine books including Reality Check, The Art of the Start, Rules for Revolutionaries, How to Drive Your Competition Crazy, Selling the Dream, and The Macintosh Way. He has a BA from Stanford University and an MBA from UCLA as well as an honorary doctorate from Babson College.