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Marketing

Best practices for automatic posting of Google Alerts to Twitter

by Adam Green on July 6, 2009

in AlertRank, Announcements, Autotweet, Google Alerts, Marketing, Public accounts, Reputation management, SEO, Twitter

Auto-tweeting of Google Alerts has become one of the most popular features in AlertRank, and now that AlertRank accounts are free these auto-tweets are popping up everywhere. We’ve added lots of controls that let you fine tune your auto-tweeting, and I wanted to point these out.

Let’s take the public Google Alerts account I created for the food author Michael Pollan as an example. These alerts are sent to a Twitter account, and have generated a good list of followers. The auto-twitter page for this account on AlertRank shows you the different ways you can control which alerts are tweeted.

auto-tweet

  1. Add a hashtag to the end of each tweet to help people find it with a Twitter search tool. You can add as much text as you want here, and AlertRank will automatically trim the alert to make sure the total tweet is within 140 characters.
  2. Use the AlertRank quality score to control the importance of the alerts you tweet. The AlertRank score is based on Google PageRank and a collection of other influence factors. The higher the AlertRank, the more influential the source of the alert is.
  3. Select the search terms to include in your tweets. You can collect alerts from up to 1,000 search terms in a single AlertRank account, but you can limit the tweets to just the terms you want.
  4. Restrict tweets to those alerts with the right page features. For example, if you want to only tweet alerts that allows comments or trackbacks, you can set these options on. That gives you a set of tweets that are suited for a blog outreach campaign.
  5. Depending on the amount of alerts you get in your account, you can restrict the number of tweets to a maximum per hour and per day.

The best part is that all of this tweeting is automatic. Since the accounts on AlertRank are free, you can create multiple accounts, each with their own search terms and levels of auto-tweeting control.

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The value of automatic tweeting from Google Alerts

by Adam Green on June 5, 2009

in AlertRank, Google Alerts, Marketing, Twitter

It’s been 2 months since I started testing the idea of automatically sending selected Google Alerts to a Twitter account, and the results are pretty remarkable. The Twitter account for @marketing_alert has attracted over 1,500 followers.

autotweet3

When I created the account, I deliberately made it as clear as possible that this was an automatic process, and not a real human running the account. I used the default avatar, used an account name that explained the purpose, followed nobody from this account, and stated in the bio that the tweets were automatic. I’m sure that if I had adopted a persona by using the name and picture of a real person, the number of followers would have been much greater.

So what is the value of this experiment? It shows that by simply auto-tweeting about a specific subject you can attract followers interested in learning more. 1,570 followers may not seem like much compared to the millions promised by the various pyramid schemes being promoted, but these followers are all self-selected. They want to learn more about this topic. It is the ultimate opt-in lead list. The pyramid schemes are all based on the existence of auto-follow bots on many accounts. If you follow millions of people, a high percentage will auto-follow back, but what is the value of this completely non-qualified list? Bulk growth of Twitter accounts is so early 2009. The real key to Twitter marketing with be opt-in lists like this one.

If you use this technique, you can grow a list of engaged followers, and then add whatever messages you want to the account. It isn’t spam, because everyone on the list asked to be there. Let’s say you are a band that wants to build a list of followers interested in your type of music. Just auto-tweet the appropriate alerts, and then add offers for your CDs at regular intervals. The same idea can be applied to all types of ecommerce.

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Creating an automatic Twitter buzz account for a restaurant

June 5, 2009

One way of creating buzz within a Twitter account is to add an air of “newsiness”. Instead of just tweeting about your own business, you can tweet about news in your community as a way of showing involvement and attracting followers who are interested in that community. I created a Twitter account yesterday based [...]

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Setting up an automated drip marketing campaign with Google Alerts

May 15, 2009

Drip marketing is a great application for Google Alerts. They should rename it Google Alerts marketing. Wikipedia sums up the idea well:

As an example, a real estate lead may be interested in home listings for a specific area. He could be sent an introductory message, then be placed on an automated e-mail drip campaign where [...]

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