Using Twitter to Establish SMS Marketing Campaigns
Author: Darryl Gee
What is Twitter

SMS Text message marketing is growing at a tremendous rate.
More and more businesses are beginning to realize the power of
mobile marketing. Twitter.com provides a free and effective way
for a business to get into mobile marketing.

Twitter.com is a free service that allows you to quickly set up
a mobile text message marketing campaign. You can use twitter
from either a, handset a web browser or both. It is scalable and
dynamic and can be effective for any size or type of
organization.

Twitter is designed as a way for individuals to tell the world
"what their doing." The service can be improvised by
organizations to communicate with their members, employees and
clients.

On its site twitter.com, has a public timeline of every message
sent. You may choose to have your message displayed in this
timeline or not. If your messages are not in the public
timeline, you must manually approve each person who requests to
follow your timeline (receive your messages). If you access your
account online you can see every message you've sent and you may
also see every message sent to you. It's advisable to make your
timeline public so that evryone, including those who do not
follow you, can see your updates.

You can follow the timeline/messages sent by other twitter
users of your choice. Others may choose to follow your
timeline/messages. The service allows you block who receives
your updates/messages and who you receive updates/messages from.
These capabilities provide the foundation of how Twitter can be
used to establish mobile campaigns.

Hopefully by now, you are beginning to see the power and
flexibility of Twitter.com as a viable solution for your mobile
campaign. The only limitation is that you may only have one
account per handset (phone number) or email address. To overcome
this, we suggest creating a free email account at yahoo or
gmail. Note: If you access your twitter account from the web you
must provide an email address.

Mobile marketing and mobile alerts provide an instant way for
your organization to communicate. It is suitable for most any
type of organization including: companies, schools, churches and
municipalities.

Your message recipients must agree to receive your messages and
you must provide a way for them to stop receiving your messages
when they choose. Twitter provides a method for both of these
functionalities.

Terminology

Here are few a basic terms that you need to know. Followers -
these are the people who choose to receive your updates. Opt in
– this means agreeing to receive your messages, by sending a
message. Opt out – this means stopping the receipt of your
messages, by sending a message. In both cases the message sender
will receive a confirmation message. Keywords are the words that
your recipients send as a message from their handsets. For
example they would send the message "Follow darrylgee" to opt
in. In this example "darrylgee" is the keyword. Keywords allow
you to establish a unique list based on your marketing needs.
"Lingo" are the commands used to control your twitter
experience.

Tinyurl.com

Tinyurl provides a free tool you can use to shorten your long
hyperlinks. This is very useful when you are trying to craft a
text message that is 140 characters. You will notice that many
messages sent on twitter contain tiny urls. We used the service
to shorten mytextad.com from 23 characters to 20 characters -
this is the shortened url - http://tiny.cc/fFHTQ . Visit
tinyurl.com to shorten your urls's. No account registration
required.

How To Setup A Campaign

Twitter.com provides a cost effective and scalable solution for
any sized organization. It is suitable in any situation where
you have a group of potential recipients who have a need to
receive instant communication from you. We will now explain and
provide examples of how to set up a mobile marketing campaign.

Invite people to follow you on twitter. You do this by sending
them a text message to 40404 with the message "invite
212-555-1212." Twitter will then prompt them to accept or join
twitter if they are not members.

Place an invitation on your company literature. For example
instruct them to text the following to 40404: "follow your user
name"

Once you have built up a list. Begin sending updates. 1 to 3
per day is reasonable for marketing purposes, but 10 is not. A
minimum of 3 per week is fine, but 0 is not. Keep your updates
to 140 characters or less.

For examples on what types of marketing works, join twitter and
text "follow delloutlet.com" to 40404. To join twitter just text
a username you want to 40404. The Dell outlet store does a great
job of using twitter to market. Note - be sure to use expiration
dates/times for your specials.

For complete details on how to use twitter visit -
http://www.twitter.com.

Copyright 2008- Darryl Gee, mytextad.com


About The Author: Darryl Gee is the President of
http://mytextad.com. The goal of http://mytextad.com is to offer
a low cost text message advertising solution. Mr. Gee is a
frequent speaker on the subjects of mobile marketing and text
message advertising. Visit http://www.mytextad.com for details.
Contact: darrylgee@mytextad.com