If you market music in any shape or form, a recent study by NPD Group shows that you should definitely consider Twitter for your next marketing campaign.

Marketing Music on Twitter (Image: Flickr)

The numbers are actually quit staggering. According to the NPD Group survey, 34% of Twitter users have bought digital music recently compared to only 16% of non-Twitter users. 41% of Twitter users have listened to online radio, while the non-Twitter number is only 22%.

Additionally, 39% of Twitter users have watched online music videos recently compared to 25% of non-Twitter users. One third of Twitter users have bought a CD recently, while less than one quarter of non-Twitter users have bought a CD recently.

Said Russ Crupnick, an NPD Group analyst: “Twitter has the potential to help foster the discovery of new music, and improve targeted marketing of music to groups of highly-involved and technologically savvy consumers, but it has to be done right. There must be a careful balance struck between entertainment and direct conversation on one hand, and marketing on the other. Used properly Twitter has the power to entertain — and to motivate music fans to purchase more new albums, downloads, merchandise, and concert tickets.”

Are you new to Twitter? If so, you are probably interesting in learning how to get followers. Marketing yourself successfully on Twitter will allow you to gain many followers quickly. If you are using Twitter for business purposes, each follower is a potential lead.

How do you get followers on Twitter? Here are some tips:

1. Follow Others
Find people on Twitter who you find interesting and follow them. Many times, those people will return the favor and follow you. If you are marketing a business, try to find customers on Twitter.

2. Be Active
No one wants to follow someone who never tweets. Aim to have at least a couple of tweets per day — especially early on when you are trying to build your followers base.

3. Promote Elsewhere Online
Don’t rely just on Twitter for your marketing. If you have a Facebook or MySpace page, promote your Twitter page there. You can also promote your Twitter in the signature of your email and anywhere else you spend a lot of time online.

4. Promote Offline
Many people have added their Twitter contact information on their business card. For businesses, you can put the information on everything from flyers to receipts to coupons.

5. Quality Over Quantity
While getting followers is important, be sure to remember that quality counts. When you are following others, just don’t follow anyone. That may make your Twitter seem like it is spam related.

Twitter Followers (Image: Flickr)

For those who use twitter as a way of communicating with others, you might be interested in the web-based software program called Twubs. Twubs is based on the #hashtag system that is part Twitter. According to their website….

A great feature of Twubs is that its usefulness is not limited to Twubs that have been “created”. A Twub is created anytime someone uses a #hashtag in the global Twit-o-sphere. Just type the #hashtag in the box above or add it right into the URL and you will be taken to the Twub and all its content already aggregated from tweets. Don’t know what #hashtag to use? Use our search methods below to find Twubs that interest you!

Just to make sure that everyone understand what a #hashtag is, it is the process of a Twitter user creating a word combination that is proceeded by the “#” symbol. Many Twitter users use this technique to track the popularity of their topic. Examples of #hashtags are below:

• #SocialTalk
• #TwitInterviews
• #Women2Follow
• #FridayFollow

So when you are tweeting (the process of sending messages via Twitter) all you have to do is to include a tag in your tweet and other people searching for the same tag will be able to find it when they use Twubs or other Twitter 3rd-party applications.

You may not think of Twitter as your portal to the world of online shopping, but as Twitter continues to consider ways of making money, the idea of selling products through Twitter has gained steam. According to Todd Chaffee, a Twitter board member, the website may offer links to products, creating a source of revenue for Twitter through corporate partnerships.
 
Twitter has been recognized as a way for users to get product recommendations from their followers, so Twitter may decide to make it even easier and allow users to buy the product in one easy step. Many companies have already made their way to Twitter and advertised directly to consumers, benefiting from free advertisement and the ability to gauge customer responses. 
 
In order to differentiate itself from search engines, Twitter would combine customer recommendations and advice with standard e-commerce practices. Also, Twitter would allow customers to learn everything they need to know about a product and then purchase it without having to navigate to several different websites.

Using my Twitter mug (Image: Flickr)

Recently Nestle decided to try using tweets in their Juicy Juice ads. What’s interesting about these new ads is that readers can interact directly with the ad. They can tweet an answer to the featured question or respond to a previous comment. All from the ad (if you’re logged in to Twitter). And the tweets can be featured anywhere the ad shows.

It’s a whole new level of interactivity.

Of course, my immediate concern was live tweets. It would be quite easy for someone to graffiti the ad by making inappropriate or belligerent comments. “For juice?” you say. Yes, it’s amazing what people will say when they are behind a screen — even with a Twitter user name attached. Fortunately, the ads are able to be moderated. I think that’s a good thing, but it may limit the immediacy of a real Twitter conversation.

The ads are supposed to be follow-able on Twitter via hashtags. I was surprised, though, that the articles I read didn’t take the opportunity to mention the hashtag so people could go find out what others are saying. Or maybe see if there’s any participation. (But maybe that hadn’t been determined yet - it wasn’t clear if the ads were up at BabyCenter and CafeMom yet.)

So what I’m really curious about are your reactions. What do you think about this? Sure, a few companies have used tweets in their ads, but not at this level. Do you think it will open up a new type of interactive ad? Will people even bother answering questions posed in the ad? Is it worth the time of monitoring comments? We may have to just wait and see how it plays out, but I’d love to hear what people’s initial thoughts are.

image: Lin Pernille ♥ Photography on Flickr

According to a recent report by Forrester Research, United States email marketing will reach $2 billion by 2014. That number comes about after factoring in 11% compound growth each year between now and 2014.

Forrester

If you are in the marketing world, you likely already know the power of email marketing. The report by Forrester Research points to falling costs, more online usage by consumers and high ROI as reasons why email marketing will grow by this staggering rate.

While the good for email marketers is mostly very good, one problem that may become an issue is the growing use of social networking messaging. For example, many online consumers now use Twitter, Facebook and MySpace more than their traditional email account. As a result, traditional email marketing will likely be forced to alter its current strategy in order to thrive down the line.

Marketing on Twitter has shown to be lucrative. Twitter allows you to reach current customers and potential customers quickly, easily and in an environment that can instantly give your marketing campaign viral attributes.

However, there are a number of Twitter marketing mistakes that can ultimately mute your marketing efforts. Here are five such mistakes:

1. Following Anyone
Twitter has attracting spammers by the thousands. Following spammers and dummy accounts will make you look like a spammer. With Twitter, you are the company you keep.

2. Relying on RSS
Just because your tweets are coming fast a furious from your RSS feeds doesn’t mean that you’re doing your job. Nobody wants to read just an RSS feed without any “real” tweets mixed in.

3. Not Interacting
If your Twitter marketing campaign is running smoothly, you will undoubtedly have your customers interacting with you. Ignoring those customers could do a lot of harm to your efforts.

4. Boring Copy
Yes, the Twitter word limit will stop you from writing anything too profound. That said, your text needs to be thought out and eye-catching.

5. Poor Implementation
If you have a website that corresponds with your marketing efforts, you should institute an easy navigation between Twitter and the site and between your site and Twitter.

Twitter Marketing Mistakes (Image: Flickr)

Sometimes it’s hard to remember that many of things you do on the internet can be seen by anyone. And whether you want it to or not, it may live on in infamy. So you want to be extra careful when you represent your company in social media. What you do can affect how people perceive you.

A blogger I know recently found her content on another site. It appears that it was scraped off of her RSS feed. She tried contacting the site via e-mail, asking that they remove her content. When she received no response, she went to Twitter to ask if anyone else had gotten their content scraped by this company.

What happened next could have been prevented by just taking some time to compose a professional and measured company response.

The company responded saying that she was bashing them and that they weren’t scraping her content. Of course, then the blogger wondered how they have her exact posts from her web site? Part of the problem was that the blogger’s content was not properly attributed or linked back to her site. How can a company claim to drive traffic to a writer if there are no links to the original work?

The conversation went downhill from there. The company complained that people were bashing them and calling the bloggers (at this point, more than one blogger was complaining) unreasonable. Instead of getting defensive, the company should have immediately complied with the request and then attempted to give more information about their business model.

And if you’re trying to drive traffic from your site to someone else’s, it helps if you actually link a short quote back to the original author. Unless someone releases their copyright, like Leo Babauta at Zen Habits, you should be very careful about how much content you reprint. Fair use is one thing, but reprinting an entire post without permission is something entirely different.

This back and forth on Twitter resulted in the blogger writing an entire post about the situation, drawing even further attention to what she considered a social media failure. Situations like this are easily preventable by just taking a moment and thinking about your best response. Don’t be that type of social media example.

image: Newscom

Not even Microsoft can ignore the success of Twitter and Facebook. On Monday, Microsoft announced that they will be adding Twitter and Facebook to its Xbox Live experience.

With millions of users who spend an ungodly amount of time their social networking sites, Twitter and Facebook are growing in their importance on the online world. Now that Microsoft plans to allow Twitter and Facebook users to stay on their Xbox 360 during the process, this could be a great way to add more usability to the gaming console.

In addition to Twitter and Facebook, Microsoft also plans to integrate last.fm, a service that streams music, with Xbox live.

Said Shane Kim of Microsoft: “This expands the reach of Xbox live. We have had an effort of making Xbox live a next-generation social and entertainment network.”

It’ll be interesting to see if this move will be a hit with the Xbox Live community.

XBox 360 -- Soon with Twitter and Facebook (Image: Flickr)

Last Friday night, I joined Twitterers in creating tweets about the ABC special “Unbroke”. Plenty of us found something to be desired with the show. While amusing and generally educational, there were some items that could have been addressed better. (For a pretty extensive re-cap, visit Free From Broke.) My major beefs were these two things:

1. Mortgage payments: I prefer to use net income to using gross, as recommended, and I think you should keep your payment to 28% of your monthly income or below, rather than being happy with 33%.
2. Individual stocks: The investing portion of the special was all about the individual stocks. I really thought that there should have been some mention of index related investments.

MainStreet.com did a round-up of some of the best Twitter comments of the evening, and I was mentioned a reasonable amount (it’s really been a good couple of days for me in terms of shameless self-promotion). But there were some other great bits as well. Here are some of my favorite Twitter remarks from Friday evening:

• @singlema: Buy a house within your means, get adequate insurance & have a rainy day fund = financially secure.
• @MattJabs: I want them to say something outside the box, like “sacrifice something like your cable TV then put difference in savings”
• @mainstr: Stocks Oscar the Grouch holds: Enron, WorldCom, Lehman Bros, WaMu
• @Matt_SF: Are we really this dumb? Do we need movie stars as eye candy to learn about personal finance & investing?
• @moneyrelation: PLEASE DON’T BUY INDIVIDUAL STOCKS! I bet they are recommending that so you go out and buy Disney!
• @stephonee: Oxygen mask metaphor for college vs. retirement savings is very smart. Secure your own mask first!
• @JeremyVoh: Un-broke may be obvious for those of us who talk about finance every day, but the public needs to hear the message
• @MMarquit: The real question is this: Will we as a society actually CHANGE our financial habits? I’m not sure this will accomplish that…

Did you watch Unbroke? What did you think?

image credit: Ben Schumin via Wikimedia Commons