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Tweeting for Advertisers
Twitter is the new media darling these days and while there are tons of articles about how it may be the new Google, it's never been very clear to me how it could be useful to advertisers. Then last week I heard Guy Kawasaki speak at Pubcon South and he made a compelling case for how advertisers can use Twitter to drive highly relevant and targeted traffic.
The idea is that a company sets up a permanent search for keywords related to their business. For example, since I have a website to help people prepare for the naturalization test given by the INS, my keywords could be "naturalization", "immigration interview" and "become a citizen". Whenever one of those terms appears in a tweet, I am notified and I can decide to respond to the person with a message along the lines of "Congrats on almost becoming a citizen. I took the test recently and created a site to help people study: http://www.immigrationquiz.com".
There's even an application that automates this form of lead-gen for 5 cents per tweet: TwitterHawk.com. As the screenshot illustrates, it compiles all tweets that match a set of search criteria and lets you review those before replying with one of 6 predefined tweets. The application can also automatically send responses. To prevent Twitter accounts from getting suspended for spam, they auto deliver at most one tweet every 6 hours.
The search functionality on TwitterHawk enables advertisers to narrow their search by location, by sentiment (positive or negative) and by whether the tweet contains a question or a link. That seems like a pretty powerful way to help you target your offer to exactly the right Twitter users.