Digest...

Twitter Lead Gen Cards have several important elements:
• Content Hook: 140 characters like any other tweet that appears at the top of the card. This has to be interesting and valuable. Don’t use just a blog title. Take your best tip, your best fact and put that here—make people want to read and look at the rest.
• Supporting Copy: 50 characters to brand yourself and communicate the experience. If you have to email them something tell them that here so they know how they’ll get what they want–tell them what’s going to happen.
• Social Visual Impact: 150 pixels by 600 pixels for banner ads. This picture can be text, but be sure to keep it clean. This is a good place for the name of your blog post or whitepaper. Create multiple images for each image you promote so you can see which one works and which doesn’t.
• Integrated CTA Button: users click this button and you automatically get the conversion. Best practices from web and landing pages apply to this button as well.  A box will pop up and say the company will contact you shortly. So how do you work around? Integrate with marketing automation so they get the asset automatically emailed to them with no lag.
• Auto Lead Capture: when someone clicks that button you get the name, handle, and email associated with that Twitter account.
• Engagement: the number of retweets & favorites still show at the bottom of the card.

How to Set-up a Twitter Lead Gen Card

Twitter knows marketers like easy, so they made it super simple to create a lead gen card. Log in to the Twitter advertisement interface, and from the drop down choose the option that says create new lead gen card, and you’re good to go.

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Learn in just a few easy steps how to create button and text click-to-tweet calls-to-action for your content!

Digest...

1) Navigate to Click to Tweet

First, you'll need to head over to clicktotweet.com, an awesome tool we use constantly at HubSpot.

2) Craft Tweet

Next, begin typing the copy of your tweet. Something to remember: When you paste a link into a tweet on Twitter or most third-party Twitter tools, Twitter automatically counts your link as 23 characters -- even if there are more than 23 characters in your tweet. Click to Tweet does not have such functionality. So, you'll need to shorten your link ahead of time.

3) Hyperlink Text

Once your copy is all set, click the "Generate Link" button to create a custom link. Then, copy the generated link from the "Here's your URL" field and hyperlink the text you want shared.

How to Craft a Button Click-to-Tweet CTA

1) Create Custom Button

First, you'll need a social media image and/or button to link to. If you don't have time to design or create one, have no fear! We have an array of pre-built social media icons in our collection of 135 free icons you can download and use in your ebooks, blog posts, and other content.

2) Craft Tweet

As per the instructions above, go to clicktotweet.com and craft your tweet.

3) Hyperlink Button

Click the "Generate Link" button to create a custom link and copy the generated link from the "Here's your URL" field. Instead of hyperlinking text, though, insert your social media icon into your blog post, ebook, or website, and simply hyperlink it with the link generated from Click to Tweet.

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Apparently, even the "global town square" needs a good, private place for people to communicate.

Key excerpt...

The company plans to significantly update its direct-messaging product in the near future, according to multiple sources, bringing the long-buried feature to the forefront for the first time in years.

Part of the new reemphasis on direct messaging is already here. For weeks, Twitter has been internally testing a setting that allows users to send and receive direct messages from others without needing to mutually follow one another. And, earlier this week, the company began to roll it out to the public in a limited capacity.

But Twitter’s new vision for direct messages will go further. It has kicked around the idea of launching a standalone direct-messaging application separate from the Twitter app, according to three people familiar with the matter. It is unclear, however, what form the final revamp of direct messages will take.

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With some solid strategies, a strong Twitter following can certainly be achieved.

Summarized...

To help grow your initial base of followers quickly and easily, here are some additional methods you can try:

Utilize your LinkedIn and email connections.

Use a timesaving tool to schedule your tweets.

Join a Twitter chat.

Multitask.

Respond to people who are interested in similar content.

Tweet inspirational quotes.

Follow users who follow your followers.

Follow the accounts recommended by Twitter.

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Like it or not, you need to build a significant following on Twitter in order to take full advantage of the platform. These 17 tactics, including two brand-new Followerwonk features, will boost your efforts.

Introduction...

You might ask, why do I want more followers anyway? Twitter does little for SEO (at least not directly). Well, I don't want to get into a whole sales pitch for social media generally, but a few points stand out:

• Twitter is a lightweight, frictionless, and serendipitous way to engage customers. It doesn't require an email blast or the customer actively visiting your site. Once they follow you, they'll encounter you on their timeline during the normal course of their social experience. The little pings and pops you'll have with them accrue tremendous value.
• Your follower count is a good measure of your influence, and other people see it as such. The more followers you have, the more you'll attract, and the more you can use your influence to drive customers, conversations, and engagement.
• The more you are followed, the more likely you will appear in the "Who to follow" Twitter promotion on the left hand side of Twitter.com.

SEO, Content and Social Media are so related these days that site owners need to grab every advantage they can to wring the most out of their efforts.

Digest...

Facebook Open Graph

Since this is the foundation for all three of the plays I’m suggesting, let’s start here. The good news is that for WordPress users, plugins have been built that make all the coding aspects of these tactics very, very simple. I recommend that every WordPress Site owner install the WordPress SEO Plugin by Yoast. For non WordPress folks you can read the Facebook Open Graph implementation instructions here.

Twitter Cards

The implementation is pretty straightforward and the documentation pretty useful. Once you’ve set the meta data up on your site or page you do have to get validated and approved for the card types you wish to use. Simply go to the validator and click on the validate and approve tab and put in the URL for blog post. The tool will check for the OG code and allow you to submit. Twitter says it takes 2-4 weeks for approval, but when I submitted it took about 5 minutes.

Google Authorship

Google allows content producers to link their site and Google+ profile to content they produce. This includes content you write on your site and content you contribute to other sites. Simply add all the sites you contribute to in your Google+ profile to get this additional feature started. (it may take months to actually start showing up in search, so do it today!)

Twitter\'s advancements in the ad platform combined with a still growing number of active users means that there\'s opportunity for any size advertiser for direct response or social media growth.

Digest...

The self-service platform is clean, easy to use, and fast (amazing how important that aspect is). More importantly, the targeting features have been expanded and now provide a robust set of options for advertisers. Twitter Ads is unique in the social media ad space, as there are multiple actions, or engagements, to target and track. There are clicks (on links and hashtags), retweets, replies, and follows.

When you set a bid, you are bidding on all of these engagements - thus, the cost-per-engagement (CPE) metric. Important note: the effective CPE (eCPE) metric reported on your Twitter Ads campaigns is not your actual cost-per-engagement. Twitter looks at clicks, replies, and follows that occur after someone retweets the Promoted Tweet. While you didn't pay for those engagements directly, they still occurred as a result of your ad. Just be aware and understand what that stat means!

The latest news from Twitter Ads is the inclusion of Cards. In particular is the Lead Generation Card where you can capture lead information directly in Twitter! For now this is only available to managed Twitter clients, but will soon roll out to self-serve advertisers, too.

The site announced plans to move into the ad retargeting space today by using browser-based cookies and email identification with third-party sites.

Excepted...

Twitter wants to eat your cookies and turn them into Promoted Tweets. The site announced plans to move into the ad retargeting space today by using browser-based cookies and email identification with third-party sites.

Users' browsing behavior and email addresses will be used to match them up with ads from brands or business that are most likely to fall into areas of interest.

Advertisers can now share scrambled email addresses or browser-based cookies with Twitter to retarget and direct Promoted Tweets to users who previously visited [the advertiser's] site or joined a newsletter. "This is how most other companies handle this practice, and we don't give advertisers any additional user information," Kevin Weil, senior director of product revenue at Twitter, notes in a blog post about the changes.

Ready to juice your business' Twitter presence for more ROI? Here are 10 tips to get going.

Summarized...

1) Monitor and thank your current sales opportunities who are reacting to your content on Twitter. 

2) Tweet "welcome aboard" messages to new customers who have signed up for your product or service. 

3) Add a Twitter username field to your forms.

5) Monitor customers who tweet "help" or "support."

6) Monitor your most successful long-tail keywords in social media.

7) Check out your leads' most recent tweets prior to jumping on a sales call. 

8) Follow people who have viewed your product or pricing pages.

9) Collect positive customer tweets about your products/services, and use them as testimonials.

10) Monitor leads who mention your competitors' names.

The dive into user data that all Twitter users have been clamoring for has finally arrived. Found hidden within the Twitter Ads dropdown, the official analytics tools show data on specific Tweets and follower info – no ad spend required.

Digest...

To access official Twitter analytics follow these steps:

1. Head to Ads.Twitter.com and log-in.
2. Click on the analytics button in the top navigation. You can choose from “Timeline Activity” and “Followers”

The data that is available is broken down by Tweet and by Followers:

Excerpt...

The Lead Generation Card enables users to easily and securely share their email address with a business without leaving Twitter or having to fill out a form.

When someone expands your Tweet, they see a description of the offer and a call to action. Their name, @username, and email address are already pre-filled within the Card. The user simply clicks a button to send this information directly (and securely) to you.

You can easily embed a call to action inside a tweet. When this call to action is clicked, Twitter can fire information (such as Twitter handle and Email address) directly into an Eloqua Form, where you can take that information and process it just like any other Form submission.