If you’re not familiar with Co-tweet it’s a free service that recently became SocialEngage,  a paid service starting at $7,000  that will replace the free version of Co-tweet on Feburary 15, 2012.  The public backlash has been horrific for SocialEngage and it’s amazing to see a company specializing in social media management basically commit social media suicide.

Part of my job at CyberMontana is managing social media campaigns. I’ve used several different services in the past few years but Co-tweet has been our team solution for quite some time now.  Unfortunately, Co-tweet recently became  SocialEngage, a paid only service.  I have nothing against paying for a service and in the past I’ve used paid versions of SalesForce, Hootsuite, and several others. SocialEngage has decided to hide basic information like the cost ($7,000 starting) and other details. After seeing the behavior of SocialEngage during this transition, myself and many others, are looking for a Co-tweet replacement.

The requirements our company has

• Scheduling – We want to be able to schedule, tweets, posts, updates, etc across all of our social media networks.
• Team – Our company has several employees and each must at least have access. Also sharing and assigning features are preferred. Assigning tweets was a feature I loved at Co-tweet.
• Reporting – It was tough to find reporting and analytic from a service that were very useful. Tracking click-thoughs on the link level with a service like bit.ly is always an option.
• Accounts – The service must support multiple accounts. Ping.fm is a bonus.

I believe finding a service that works for your business depends largely on how you use social media. No one size fits all option exists.

Hootsuite has a free version that allows users to post to multiple social media networks, schedule posts, and some other useful features.  The pro version costs  $5.99 per month and comes with 1 additional team member, Google analytics-driven reports, and several other features. This works for us because myself and on other person do most of the social media engagement. If you need more than 2 people it will cost you an extra $15. Another additional option I found interesting is the Hootsuite University program, an advanced social media learning program.

SproutSocial looks amazing and has a lot of great features. The actually lowered prices recently which now start at $9 per month. Unfortunately, everything is focused on managing your brand. I find this to be less effective for smaller teams. Engagement and influence type statistics are extremely unreliable on a small scale which is where i think most small business are at.  I was also annoyed with audience demographics and other useless(for me) stats taking up huge parts of the dashboard.

MediaFunnel does everything our company needs in a simpler way. What I mean by that is that the account setup, the stats, and team features are there but just simpler and less feature filled. A free version offers a lot of the features and the standard plan starts at just $1/ per user. A very interesting price scheme they have going there.

This advanced Twitter application is focused on increasing your productivity through a variety of time saving features. Schedule tweets to re-occur automatically with the Tweet Spinner “Smart Tweets” feature. Also take note of the “Tweet Script” feature used for creating dynamic tweets that have constantly changing content based on your specifications.

Rotating Twitter profiles, web links, and designs can be useful to keep things fresh and lively around your Twitter profile while exposing your followers to a greater range of information about your business. TweetSpinner allows these Twitter objects to be set ion rotation to chance every hour, day, or whenever you like.

TweetSpinner also has features for managing your friends called “Smart Friends”. One of the best features here is called “Smart Purge” which uses a better way of cleaning your account of people that don’t follow back. Purging all nonfollowers at once can result in suspension but almost has to be done to grow rapidly, this is why the smart purge is so useful. Smart purge will only unfollow 40 people at a time that do not follow you back also leaving the 7.5% you most recently followed.

Other time saving friend management features include follow all of your followers, view friend-to-follower ratio, follow people by keyword, mimic the followings of other users, create a nofollow list, purge your DM messages, configure sophisticated follow filters, see follower and keyword comparison charts, and more.

All of these TweetSpinner tools can be automated through the scheduling options. This give you the ability to set everything up, check stats, make adjustments, and so on. Take a close look at the features and you may began to outline which ones you’ll use and how they could fit with your business. Below is a diagram to show how someone might match features of TweetSpinner with aspects of their business to effectively promote it on Twitter.

Getting Started

From a small business perspective I have found Twitter to be easy to setup, automate, and extend the reach of almost any small business. This is especially true when compared to other types of online marketing that can be expensive and with uncertain results. Twitter is neither of these. Multiple accounts can be easily managed by one person targeting individual keywords using 3rd party tools that integrate easily with Twitter. I’ve seen a consistent 4% click-through rate or higher on links posted to Twitter but more importantly the targeted connections you can make on Twitter could the most valueable part of marketing this way.

To start you’ll need to know some basic things about Twitter and the lingo used there.

“Tweet” – These are the messages, posts, updates or whatever you want to call them. Tweets can be up to 140 characters long and can contain links and some symbols.

“Retweet” – When Twitter users re post other Twitter users tweets it’s called a retweet. The tweet will appear exactly the same but have an RT in the front of it. Retweeting can cause a landslide of traffic and is one reason tweets should be targeted and relevant. If people start retweeting your tweets because they’re interesting, they’re basically advertising to all of their followes who could potentially retweet it again and again.

“Follow” – Following someone means you have decided to receive their tweets in your timeline. Accounts with default Twitter settings will recieve a notification email about you following them. This is the primary reason following other people on Twitter helps grow your own group of followers. You can unfollow someone just as easily as you followed them.

“Mention” – Any time another Twitter user types @yourusername it is referred to as a mention. Mentions are beneficial because they appear on the posters timelime exposing more people to you and your Twitter account.

“DM” – When somone follows you twitter will allow you to send them Direct Messages or DMs. DMs are also often automatically sent to new followers with a link or welcome message.

“Block” – Blocking somone will cause to following things to happen. You will not show up in the list of people followed by the user being blocked, your updates will not show up on their timeline, and the blocked user will not be allowed to follow you. Many people blocking one account is one reason user accounts are suspended.

“FollowFriday” – Twitter users appreciate when you mention them on twitter by typing “@theirname” and on friday everyone does it. Who you pick for your follow Friday list is up to you. I generally pick all the people that have mentioned me @effectivews throughout the week or retweet my posts. Follow Friday is like saying “Hey you should follow this guy”.

I’ve heard a lot of back and forth about the value of Twitter to small and large businesses alike. I have some very strong opinions on social media and what it can/has done for me. I plan to outline the more obvious points regarding Twitter in this post and add reviews and tutorials on Twitter applications which is what allows Twitter power to be unleashed.

The Basics:
Twitter runs off the principle that user1 can follow user2. After following user2, user1 sees all of user2′s updates. User2 also has the opportunity to follow user1 back. Updates, often called “tweets” are limited to 140 characters. Users can also DM(Direct Message) or block other users. Links can be included in tweets and even automatically shortned to fit the 140 character max.

The Magic:
The magic of using Twitter comes from its simplicity, and aggressive following/friend building style. Users can build up a large audience of 1000′s of followers in a short time. How targeted your followers are depends directly on who you follow. So if you have a business that sells dog collars try to follow people that are already following dog clubs or belong to pet-related groups.

The Limits:
Twitter limits the amount of users you can follow daily to 1,000. Once users reach 2,000 followers they can only follow 110% of the followers they have. For example if you have 2,000 followers exactly you’re allowed to be following 2,400 people. Users can also be banned for hitting certain triggers like following too many at once, un-following too aggressively or being blocked by too many users.

Small Business Benefits:
Why can small business benefit from a tool like Twitter? Well first of all setup takes 5 minutes and the Twitter account can be kept up with little or no effort. I say no effort because it’s easy to automated blog posts and other things to be posted automatically on Twitter. I have found Twitter, especially in the early stages, to be more about making connections than direct traffic. Use Twitter to communicate with potential customers:

Here’s a few things that are great or Small Businesses to psot on Twitter.

This gives you something to go by. I recommend developing a schedule choosing a day of the week, month to post specific types of media.