It’s the social media day of the conference, and after I spoke about Facebook Marketing Tactics Chris Winfield and Co. moved the social media train over to Twitterville to discuss marketing tactics. Chris moderated and presented alongside Tamar Weinberg and Michael Gray. Below are the highlights of the session — enjoy!

How do you define ‘marketing’ on Twitter?

• It’s all about relationship marketing (long-term steady return on your efforts)
• It’s anti-marketing marketing; have a conversation and build trust
• Build a community you can interact with and monitor effectiveness
• You need to give your brand a face/personality
• “Your brand is now the sum of the conversations about it” – Marcel LeBrun
• It’s about conversations and relationships, not marketing in the traditional sense

The worst form of spam on Twitter:

• Trending topic spam, especially on a local level
• “Want to join my mafia” – it never ends, and it comes from random people so it’s hard to block
• Spam that steals login credentials
• Porn accounts following you can damage credibility – be diligent in blocking
• False tagging and irrelevant links hidden in short URLs
• DM spam
• Auto DMing someone after they follow you (it usually entails a horrible pitch of some service)

How are you leveraging Twitter to help get you more links/traffic?

• “Anchor text via downstream Twitter output thru integrating them onto other social media websites” (not sure what this means)
• Use Twitter as an RSS feed so you can interact with your followers and use keyword searches to find related writers to connect with
• Build/engage an audience, then when you have content to promote, they listen and link

Are hashtags important? How do you use them?

• They’re good when searching for something
• Great for events (SMX, etc)
• Create specific hashtags for specific events
• Hashtag spam is becoming more prevalent
• The usage of hashtags indicates you’re a fluent tweeter
• It helps structure tweet content and makes it easier to find; great for establishing authority

Is Twitter’s ‘real time search’ really a threat to Google?

• Yes; lots of Twitter users rarely search Google for products, tech help, or recommendations; instead they tweet and get an immediate answer
• Yes, they’ve got the hard part down (the users), now they need to nail the indexing and integration
• Google can’t yet provide info on live/current events. Twitter often becomes the first-try search engine

How would you convince a company that Twitter’s not a waste of time?

• Show value in the relationships that are built (increase in traffic, etc)
• Twitter can connect you to influencers in any discipline
• It brings results, baby!

Can Twitter generate sales?

• Dell made $3 million over two years by using its Twitter stream (using specific URLs that are sourced to Twitter, specific landing pages, etc)
• Small businesses like Mimobot and Namecheap are leveraging Twitter successfully as well

How can Twitter be used successfully for customer service?

• JetBlue’s Morgan Johnston does a good job
• ComcastCares is a popular customer service account

What the goals of having a commercial account on Twitter?

• Connect with customers, advocates, industry leaders, new customers and detractors
• Make sales and generate leads
• Promote content
• Solve customer problems

How can you grow your commercial account?

• Tweet links to non-self serving, interesting content
• Retweet the most self-serving links of power users in your vertical
• Help solve people’s problems
• Engage with users, especially people who @ you
• Don’t be a robot; tweet the occasional boring, off-the-cuff, slice of life information

How can you successfully retweet content?

• Make tweets direct and click enticing
• Keep tweets as short as possible; try to leave 15 to 25 characters (room for retweets)
• Jump-start the retweet process with your friends
• Ask for the retweet and thank the people who do
• Be aware of multiple time zones – retweet yourself multiple times throughout the day
• If it’s been more than 30 minutes without a retweet, your momentum is probably dead and over
• Retweet your best archives and older content