Leo Widrich | srtOnlineMedia.com

Archive for leo widrich

5 New Twitter Features to Enhance Your Experience

June 25, 2012 / Leon Widrich / No comments

Have you kept up with the new Twitter changes?

In an effort to dramatically increase overall user engagement, Twitter launched a number of very interesting new features.

And on top of everything, Twitter also has a brand-new logo.

After playing with the new Twitter features for a while, I have quickly grown very fond of them. Take a look yourself and see how Twitter can make your daily information intake easier.

#1: Find Out the Week’s Top Twitter Stories

After Twitter acquired popular email digest service Summify a few months back, they made a strong point that email is not dead.

Recently Twitter announced a brand-new feature. It’s a weekly email digest filled with great stories from your stream.

Or to put it in the words of Twitter’s VP Othman Lakari, you will get “the most relevant tweets and stories shared by the people you’re connected to on Twitter.”

When the first Twitter email hit my inbox I was very excited. What you’ll notice immediately is a list of the top five stories from your stream this week.

The five best links will land in your inbox.

I was pleasantly surprised with the content of the first email. The top story was about “Facebook.com.”

It seems there are still a few things with the stories algorithm that Twitter needs to resolve. But it’s also great to be able to click through from each avatar to the actual tweet.

Click through any avatar and see the original tweet about that story.

If you can’t spend time during the week on Twitter and still want to get the gist of what was going on that week, these stories are gold. I’m definitely looking forward to using these email digests.

#2: Discover the Top Tweets of the Week

What Twitter has now introduced, on top of the original Summify format, is a list of the top tweets that don’t contain links. And frankly, this was a very pleasant surprise too.

Although the value of these tweets from a business viewpoint is rather low, they are very entertaining. These tweets tend to be funny status updates or pictures that were retweeted hundreds or thousands of times.

The funniest and most retweeted tweets now in your inbox.

It seems that this feature is intended to pique your interest and encourage you to spend some time on Twitter’s site instead of providing you information. It’s a great combination to have these top tweets and the informative stories by email digest.

And if you want to turn off these emails altogether, you can always go to your Twitter settings and switch them off.

Turn off the new email digest very easily in Settings.

#3: Get Tailored Trends From Twitter

Another very powerful feature Twitter launched recently is called Tailored Trends. So in case you never got any value out of #JustinBieber or #LadyGaga trending, Twitter’s trend feature is now much more closely related to what you care about.

What are Tailored Trends all about? According to Twitter, “Trends offer a unique way to get closer to what you care about. Trends are tailored for you based on your location and whom you follow.”

Twitter asks you kindly if you want to swap to their new Tailored Trends.

The idea behind Tailored Trends is fantastic. The results are a vast improvement and have already helped me to stay on top of news from my industry. Check out the list of new Tailored Trends I received.

Customize trends for you by country or following here.

You can easily click on “change” anytime to customize them further.

#4: Get Follow Suggestions in Your Inbox

The last feature in the list for new emails from Twitter is one to send you suggestions on whom to follow. Twitter picks out a few accounts that you might enjoy following based on whom you already follow.

Check your inbox for follow suggestions from Twitter.

The suggestions from Twitter are still very general and don’t quite go into too much depth connecting them to my interests. I’m sure this is something they’re working on though.

You can use the Follow Suggest feature found on the left-hand side of Twitter. This was improved a few months ago and works very well.

The existing follow suggestions are still very useful.

Personally, I believe this suggestion box is very useful—especially if you’re trying to expand your network by following new accounts that are highly relevant to your business. Try it out and spend a few minutes following people from the suggestion box.

#5: Expand Tweets in Your Stream

The last new feature that Twitter has introduced is expanded tweets. In Twitter’s official announcement, this feature is described as follows:

When you expand tweets containing links to partner websites, you can now see content previews, view images, play videos and more.

Now this is nothing new, as this feature already existed with images, YouTube videos or Instagram pictures. But if you’re a blogger or author, this could become very interesting for you soon. Twitter plans to open this up, so any website can display previews to articles very soon.

Expanded tweets work both for your mobile phone and for the web.

See a preview of the story easily on your phone.

Twitter has only launched this feature to work with a handful of websites, including Time, the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, BuzzFeed and a few others. On the web, this is what you get:

Get picture previews right on Twitter.com for specific publishers.

This is definitely another effort to keep users coming back to Twitter.com and keep them engaged longer on the site.

Personally, I am very excited about how Twitter continues to hammer out new features, even though it’s a very established company.

The new email digest feature can be extremely handy if you suffer from information overload like I do. I’m also keeping an eye out for when I can add my own blog post previews inside expanded tweets.

Over to You Now

What do you think of Twitter’s new efforts to make the site more compelling? Which of its new features will be most useful for you? Leave your questions and comments in the box below.

Category: expanded tweet, follow suggestion, leo widrich, relevant tweet, summify, tailored trends, Tools, top tweet, twitter, twitter update, weekly email digest /

4 Ways to Use Twitter for Customer Service and Support

April 12, 2012 / Leon Widrich / No comments

Do you have customers?

Are they on Twitter?

Are you using this amazing tool to support your customers?

Keep reading to discover four ways to provide amazing customer service with Twitter.

Why Twitter for customer support?

”I genuinely believe that any business can create a competitive advantage through giving outstanding customer care.” ~ Gary Vaynerchuk (@garyvee)

This is one of the best quotes I have heard. It must give any business a lot of comfort. Even if you have a million complaints, you can still lead with better customer service.

When my business recently had to weather a severe storm, we decided to default everything to simply being there for our users and customers. It was an incredible experience.

And what better way is there to give your best customer service than through Twitter?

Twitter has changed continually over the past few months, as the service becomes more and more mainstream.

The results we’ve seen from using Twitter as our most important support channel day in and day out are incredible.

Here are the 4 most powerful insights on using Twitter for customer service that I’ve learned along the way.

#1: Use the Speed of Twitter to Your Advantage

This is a phrase that gets thrown around a lot. “On Twitter, you need to be fast in responding!” But just how important really is speed in responding on Twitter? Here’s an example.

This is the effect which speed in customer service can have.

To take advantage of this, I make it a rule to keep response times under 5 minutes for our customers. This makes an immense difference. No matter what problems come up, nothing trumps being there for people, exactly when they ask for it.

It’s a rule so simple that it is often easy to overlook. We were fortunate enough to have people publish articles on this, purely because we were so fast in responding. That’s why I can’t stress enough the advantage it gives you if you don’t let more than 5 minutes pass before you respond.

#2: Personalize the Experience on Twitter as Much as You Can

Another very important yet easily overlooked part of giving support on Twitter is personalizing the experience. This means you aren’t speaking to your customers behind a corporate logo.

Instead, make every effort to replicate a face-to-face interaction. This gives the absolute best results, in my experience. Here are three of the most important things you can easily do:

Personalize your Twitter bio.
Provide your personal Twitter handles in your company's Twitter bio.
Put your name and the names of everyone who could possibly tweet on your business account. It builds a lot of trust. Your customers, if they have very urgent questions, can also turn to your personal accounts instead.
End tweets with names.
It has long been recommended to end tweets with your initials—”lw” in my case. I always felt this didn’t make a lot of sense. Instead, end your tweets with your actual first name. It will give your customers a much better chance to connect with you, especially if you also have the names of the other people tweeting in your Twitter bio.
End Tweets with your first name, so you can connect on a more personal level.
Use your face as an avatar instead of a logo.
A third tip that can help you personalize the experience is to use a picture of your face, instead of your logo, for your profile picture. Two great examples are Dino and Dan from Triberrand Pete Cashmore from Mashable:
Test putting your own face as an avatar for your company's Twitter profile pic.
It’s one simple step that can immediately make you more approachable and human.
Some people have told me in the past that they can’t replace their logo for various reasons. No problem at all. There is still something you can do.
For the most pressing questions from your customers, switch from responding with your business Twitter account to responding with your personal account. This way you can provide a personal exchange with the branding effect of your logo remaining intact.
Again, Dino Dogan from Triberr is doing a terrific job and earns a lot of kind words for doing exactly that.
In special cases, just jump in and reply from your personal Twitter handle.

#3: Use Direct Messages on Twitter to Your Advantage

One of the keys to great support is to help the most people you can in the shortest amount of time. If you have a very widespread problem, with a ton of incoming tweets in a short amount of time, using DMs can be a lifesaver.

Here is a quick 3-step guide to help you cope:

Send one public tweet explaining the situation. Anyone who finds your Twitter profile will see that tweet first.
Then, reply to any @mentions with a DM. First, you won’t clutter your business’s Twitter stream with @replies for other customers looking for what is going on. Second, you can go into more detail explaining how you can help each customer.
Switch back to sending @replies if there is no acute problem anymore, but only regular questions and support requests.

I have to admit that I got the above wrong for a long time. I would send lots and lots of @replies in a short space of time. The problem was that all of the customers who were looking for what was actually going on had to scroll down many times to find the public tweet that I sent first.

DMs are also extremely useful when a simple @reply doesn’t give all of the information the customer needs.

In these cases, try DMs instead of the regular “please send an email to name@company.com,” which tends to prolong the time it takes to solve the problem.

You can send 2 or 3 DMs in a row if this allows you to answer your customer’s problem right away.

Use DM's wisely and make people aware you have sent one.

#4: Give Great Customer Service to People Who Aren’t Your Customers (yet)

This is quite a new concept that I learned from the great Gary Vaynerchuk and Rand Fishkin.

Did you know you can provide amazing customer support via Twitter to people who aren’t actually your customers yet?

Helping people who have problems or questions of all sorts about your niche, but not directly your product, can be an amazing way to generate new leads.

Let me walk you through this.

When I first got started with Buffer, there wasn’t any traffic directed toward our site, but we realized there were still a lot of people asking questions about the space we were in.

Lots of great questions were floating through the Twitterverse unanswered, such as “How can I schedule tweets?”, “What is a great tool to clean out my Twitter followers?” and “What is the best social media tool to manage my stream?”

I would jump in and answer questions without even hinting at our own tool—simply being helpful and pointing people in the right direction.

You can do exactly the same thing. Whatever service you are offering, there will be a great number of people asking questions related to your field. When you just help them out, many people naturally check out what you are building and become loyal customers.

Here are 3 great tools to set up search terms so you can find those future customers’ questions:

TweetDeck or HootSuite columns. You can easily set up search terms with the most relevant words contained in questions you want to answer for people. Here is one that I used:
Setup search terms to follow relevant searches for your brand.
InboxQ: Another great way to find and answer questions from anyone is InboxQ. It works as a neat Chrome browser extension. You can save searches and receive notifications whenever there are new questions you can answer:
InboxQ is a great Chrome browser extension to keep track of people asking questions.
Twitter Search: Although Twitter’s search tool isn’t perfect, it has some terrific customization options—especially “advanced search,” which will allow you to pin down exactly what you are looking for:
Don't forget good old Twitter search to find great questions you can answer.

By nature, I believe that Twitter is simply a terrific place to give great customer support, but it hasn’t been fully embraced for this role by many companies yet.

I hope some of the ideas above will help you make your customers love you a lot more.

What do you think? Can you improve support for your business with some of the above tips? What else are you doing that I might have missed here? Leave your questions and comments in the box below.

Category: advanced search, Customer support, direct messages, hootsuite, How To, InboxQ, leo widrich, personalize twitter, tweetdeck, twitter, twitter customer support, twitter marketing, twitter search, twitter tools /

5 Twitter Changes and How to Make the Most of Them

December 27, 2011 / Leon Widrich / No comments

Are you wondering how Twitter’s changes will impact your use of its network?

Recently, Twitter got a complete revamp that changed things drastically. Interestingly, it didn’t pump the social network with more and more features.

Ryan Sarver, Twitter’s head of API, explained it crisply: “In a world where Facebook and Google are competing on features, Twitter wants to focus on being simple.”

This article will review all the changes, from user interface changes to Twitter brand pages, what the new changes mean and how you can best use them.

#1: Easier and More Streamlined Navigation

The first thing you’ll notice with the new Twitter is that navigating has become a lot easier and more streamlined. With just one click on any update, you can now get all the information you need from a tweet.

It will show you the number of retweets, replies and favorites, without going anywhere else.

This means you can jump into the conversation right from there. It also gives you a great overview of how well that particular tweet has performed. While some Twitter tools offer this already, it is very helpful to have it right inside Twitter.com.

You can see all the information you need right here.

Another feature that might just have become very useful is the “Who to follow” box on the left. This is a fantastic new way to discover people close to your network whom you might not know about. You can click the “x” on any person who is not suitable, and browse endlessly through this tool to find people.

The little note below each of the suggested people tells you who from your network is already connected to that person. This makes expanding your Twitter tribe much more focused. I like this, as you aren’t stabbing in the dark when connecting with new people.

See who's following these people before deciding to follow them yourself.

I am immensely impressed with the new “Discover” area in the new Twitter. It surfaces content much more intelligently now and becomes a very powerful place to find new articles.

With one glance, you can browse through the hottest stories on the web and get updated on everything, without having to search endlessly through past tweets. This area also has a complete “Who to Follow” stream ready for you that you can explore:

It's now easy to discover the hottest stories.

How to Make the Most of the New Twitter.com in 10 Minutes a Day

These new design improvements mean that if you are super-busy handling all of your business activities, the new Twitter allows you to expand your network in a very short and focused stretch of time.

Here are a few tips on what you can do:

Browse your new and improved stream for great tweets and conversations. Click “open” on any tweet to get the full context more easily.
Spend 5 minutes browsing the “Who to Follow” stream and expand your network easily and in a focused way.
Hop over to the new “Discover” area to find all of the latest stories from your network in one glance.

Bonus Tip: The new Buffer browser extension has been updated to work inside the new Twitter. Click “Buffer” on any tweet next to “Retweet” and easily schedule your retweets to be posted at an optimum time.

#2 and #3: Twitter Brand Pages and Embeddable Tweets

Evidently, one of the biggest changes coming for businesses is Twitter brand pages alongside the new embeddable tweets function. While only 21 brands were given access to creating their page, it is said to soon roll out to everyone else.

What is most notable about brand pages is that they allow you to pin the top tweet, so it is not cluttered with replies. This means you can find one of your top-value tweets and have it ready whenever a new visitor arrives.

Secondly, you are also able to customize a banner slot right beneath your account information. You can fill it with a promotion or special deal for your followers. Here is an example from Best Buy’s brand page.

Check out Best Buy's Twitter Brand Page.

With the new embeddable tweets function, Twitter has also given a major incentive to bloggers and publishers to come back to Twitter.com. To get to the embed function, just click “Details” after you have expanded the tweet once. Then simply click the “embed” link to get all of the options to include the tweet in your next blog post:

Notice the "Embed this Tweet" link at the bottom.

The great thing is that you can customize the styling of the embedded tweet right from there. This means you can control the position and text wrapping on the page. Once you are happy with your changes, just copy and paste the code into the HTML of your next blog post.

You can customize the Embeddable Tweets.

Here’s how this looks (note: what you see below is active, NOT a screen shot):

Top 10 Facebook Apps for Fan Engagement and Building Community bit.ly/sy33DR via @smexaminer

— Cindy King (@CindyKing) December 14, 2011

Four Quick Tips to Make the Most of Embeddable Tweets

Personally, I believe this feature can be an extremely powerful blogging tool for anyone using Twitter. The fact that it places a Follow button on the embedded tweet alone is very attractive for giving any Twitter account a lot more exposure.

If you’re writing about an event, try finding relevant tweets to embed so you can give your article a more lively appearance.
Add credibility to your articles by embedding tweets from experts talking about the topic. Simply search Twitter for some keywords to find relevant tweets.
If you are reviewing a product or service, place a few tweets from across the Twitterverse at the bottom of your post to show more varied opinions.

Bonus tip: Whichever tweet you embed, let the person who tweeted it know, as you are providing them with additional exposure. They might just help you spread your content even more.

#4: The New, Much Faster TweetDeck

Another equally significant announcement from Twitter is that the new TweetDeck has been unveiled. As a heavy TweetDeck user myself, there is one most important improvement I see right away: TweetDeck is no longer an Adobe Air app, which means it is less sluggish to use.

Since TweetDeck’s acquisition by Twitter, it is evident that a lot of effort has been put into making the dashboard simpler and imitating the Twitter.com experience more closely. You’ll realize this quickly as there is no bar at the top to add your tweets, but only a box similar to Twitter.com.

The improved TweetDeck is easy to use.

However, my feeling is that these changes have taken away some of TweetDeck’s previous flexibility and functionality. Clearly, the new TweetDeck is geared toward more mainstream usage and less focused on providing the go-to dashboard for power users.

The new TweetDeck dashboard is geared for mainstream users.

#5: The New iPhone and Android Apps for Twitter

Twitter’s new mobile clients for Android and iPhone I would like to call huge successes. The experience, much like the new Twitter.com, has been greatly improved and streamlined for you.

You can access your #discover area with top stories in the exact way as on Twitter.com. Also the @mentions and news stream have received a major design update. They are much easier to browse and interact with. Especially whenever there are unread updates in one of your streams, it displays a little line beneath the icon like you see below:

The improved mobile Twitter news stream.

Here's the improved mobile Twitter @mentions stream.

What I also greatly enjoy is that on the home tab, you now have a notification counter of how many direct messages are in your inbox. At the same time, it’s very easy to access your Twitter lists right from there with just one tap. It makes focused reading of news a lot easier for you.

It's easy to see the number of unread Direct Messages waiting for you.

Tips to Make the Most of the New Twitter Mobile Clients

There are quite a few hidden tricks and features on your new Twitter mobile clients that might just make your life a lot easier. Here is a list of the top three things I found:

Whenever you’re writing a tweet and you don’t want to send it just now, hit “Cancel” and then “Save as Draft.” This is a great way to space out your tweets and avoid flooding your followers.
You can easily connect multiple Twitter accounts from the home tab and switch between them conveniently. Just click on “change accounts” and swap over to your business or other Twitter account.
For better monitoring, save some Twitter searches, as you can now easily access them right from the home tab too. This is a great way to stay up to date with your most important keywords about your business.

How do you like the new Twitter?

Overall, I believe Twitter has done a fabulous job with their updates on the new Twitter. The one point I feel might need some improvement is the new TweetDeck. But I understand that this particular revamp happened more likely because of Twitter’s overall “focus on simple” strategy than anything else.

What is worth noting is that Twitter is making a huge bet on bringing users from various clients back to Twitter.com. Looking at the changes above, I have to say that for me this has definitely been true. I find myself browsing Twitter.com far more often. The brand pages especially can be a big reason for business owners to engage more on Twitter.com itself.

Over to you now. What do you think? So much has happened to Twitter recently. How do you like it? Leave your questions and comments in the box below.

Category: Discover, embeddable tweets, How To, leo widrich, mention, new twitter, Tools, tweet, tweetdeck, tweetdeck dashboard, twitter, twitter brand page, twitter changes, twitter mobile client, twitter navigation /

srtOnlineMedia.com