Are you being a twit?

Are you making the most of your Twitter account?

You may be working hard to come up with clever or relevant tweets for your target market or unique offers to send to your followers, but if you haven't put the time into acquiring and cultivating the right followers then you are just wasting your time.

If you are a B2B company and think that following medium-to-large sized businesses twitter accounts is getting you any value, then you should rethink that idea. These accounts are maintained by the communications/marketing/pr department of a company, so unless you are selling advertising or other products related to these specialties then you aren't hitting the decision maker for your product. The people you need to try and get following you are the decision makers in those companies. But how do you find those people?

• Collect business cards from networking and business meetings then check to see if these contacts are on Twitter
• Go through the Followers of the company's corporate Twitter account, the people managing the account will often like to follow members of the company
• Use other social media profile information (ie. Facebook, LinkedIn) to see if contacts have listed a Twitter account

Just following these people won't guarantee they follow you back, but it is a good way to let them know you are on Twitter and introduce yourself to them. When one of these people gets an email notifying them "John Smith is now following you!" the reaction will often be to find out who this new follower is.

Now all you have to do is keep them interested in what you have to say.

Advertainment

Pretty sure i'm not the first to term the phrase "Advertainment" but if I am then let's hope I earn some serious royalties from it just like when Donald Trump tried to copyright the phrase "You're fired".

Anyways, the point of this post is to talk about how brands and companies can use Advertainment to engage users and get their message in front of copious amounts of eyes. As I was going through my blog reader today and reading Andy Sernovitz's latest post I couldn't help but laugh out loud. What a brilliant way to sell your impressively, terrible, beater of a car. The creator could have just put together a plain old Craigslist ad or posted it on Cartrader.com or any other car selling website but instead they created what can only be seen as one of the most brilliant marketing pieces i've seen in a long time. Although they clearly have an advertising background a similar ad could have been created using Microsoft office, not InDesign, Quark or other professional layout programs. He used humour and creative messaging to make his product go viral and that is a great lesson for small businesses everywhere.

You don't NEED to spend huge dollars to have an advertising agency create you an ad with Jerry Seinfeld or aliens. If you don't have marketing/advertising dollars to spend you have to use creativity and have a sense of humour to get the word out about your product/brand. In this digital age it is becoming easier for brands to make a big splash with a smaller amount of money. The masses are using advertisements as a source of entertainment and if you make one interesting enough they will do all the work for you.