AMY PORTERFIELD: Hey there, Amy Porterfield here and you are listening to another edition of the Online Marketing Made Easy podcast. I hope you are having a really great week. As for me, I just returned from spending a few days in Franklin, TN with my good friends Michael Hyatt and Stu McLaren.
Now, I'm sure you all know Mr. Hyatt. He is a pretty awesome guy, and he was the reason we were actually in Franklin so I'll tell you about that in just a minute. But for those of you who might not yet know Stu, Stu is one of the co-founders of Wishlist Member which is the tool I use to set up all of my membership sites for my online programs.
Stu and I have become really good friends over the last few years. Stu and his wife, Amy–she's also an Amy–are founders of the non-profit called World Teacher Aid. Right now they have a big focus in Africa but they've also been in other locations as well. Now, it is an OUTSTANDING cause, so just last year my business, for the first time, was in a position where I was able to make a sizeable donation, so my donation actually helped them build an entire classroom, with chairs and desks and walls and all that good stuff. So I felt very fortunate to be a part of this great, great, cause.
The reason I was just in Franklin just this last week was because when I was speaking at Michael Hyatt's Platform University event in November of 2013, Michael was gracious enough to support Stu's cause and what he did is he offered a one-day mastermind to those in the audience that donated $5000 or more to World Teacher Aid. I volunteered to be a part of that Mastermind, so it was Michael, Stu and I. We put together this Mastermind and then people actually got to come to Franklin where Michael Hyatt actually lives and we masterminded with them for a full day.
Well, it turns out we were going to offer this to four people, but 8 people signed up, so we actually did 2 days of masterminding where about 8 o'clock in the morning to about 5 or 6 in the evening, 4 people each day got our full attention, so it was a pretty
incredible experience. A lot of the people that showed up were so open and honest and really just took in every ounce of information that we gave them, which was so cool to be with an audience that was receiving and wanted to just take in everything they could to make their business better. So it was a great experience to say the least. Now, as a little extra treat during the mastermind, Michael and his wonderful wife Gale–I just love that woman–they opened up their home and invited all of us and the mastermind participants to dine at their house. It was such a neat experience!
I posted a few pictures from it on my Instagram account, so check me out on Instagram if you want to see some of those photos. Now, that was a huge highlight, and also two of Michael's daughters, Megan and Mary, they joined us during the mastermind and at the dinner and truly they are the coolest girls ever.
If you're ever at an event and you see Michael and one of his daughters, make sure to say hello, they're really special people, I always say that Michael and Gail raised some pretty awesome girls! They have 5 daughters! No sons! 5 daughters! Pretty crazy, right?
That was a really fun experience, and while we were at the mastermind, Stu and Michael were working on some content about the stages of building your platform. There were five stages and what they did was they explained the five stages of building your platform and then the people in the mastermind would have to identify where they are in those stages and a lot of them basically were in stage 3 but they had completely missed stage 2.
Stage 1 is finding your audience, stage 2 is about list building, stage 3 is about creating products, programs and services, and stage 4 is taking yourself out of the business and really building it up so you're not the only one doing everything. A lot of the time people would see themselves in stage 3 completely missing stage 2 or 1. It was really cool to identify where they were and then really dive into how to master that stage so you can move on to the next.
A little treat for you is I've invited Stu to come on the show in March to actually explain all of those stages and to help YOU to identify where you are and maybe show you where you might have skipped over and you might need to come back a little bit and build one of the stages up a little bit more before you move on to the next. It was extremely eye-opening and very valuable, because we talked about the tools you would use in that stage, the different goals you would have, the focus of that stage–I think you're going to love it. So anyway, we'll have Stu come on in March so we can dive into each of those stages for you.
Okay, so I'm a little bit of a talker today. Sometimes I have so much to say I just can't stop myself, so sorry about that! But let's switch gears a bit because I want to dive into today's topic, and that's how to promote with Twitter. I am not a Twitter expert at all, and that's why I invited my friend and my mentor, Michael Stelzner, on the show to talk to us about some very specific strategies he uses to promote his live and online events on Twitter.
He would say he is also not a Twitter expert but I would disagree because he's literally doing things on Twitter that are getting some serious results and he's been perfecting his Twitter strategies for many, many years. So in my book, he's a pro.
For those of you that do not know Michael Stelzner, he's the founder of the best social media site around, Social Media Examiner, which he launched in October of 2009. To say the least it has exploded from the first day it came on the scene! Last year more than 7.5 million people visited his site. Crazy right?
He's the author of two books, Launch and Writing White Papers, and he's the host of the Social Media Marketing Podcast. He also founded the parenting blog, mykidsadventure.com–if you have kids you definitely want to go check out that site.
Because I'm in that chatty mood, I've got to tell you one more thing and then we're going to jump into the interview I have with Mike. But a quick background on how Mike and I met–it was in 2009 and I was still working with Tony Robbins. Well, I had become friends with Mari Smith and she suggested I reach out to Mike about hiring him to write a White Paper for Tony.
At the time, Social Media Examiner was not yet launched and Mike was still offering his white paper writing services. So we hired Mike, and that was the first project I got to work on with Mike and we became really good friends, plus Tony was really impressed with the white paper so that definitely sealed the deal.
From there, I had mentioned to Mike that I was thinking of starting my own business, so when the time was right and I left Robbins, Mike became my very first paying client. I helped him with some social media projects, research, writing–just about anything he would let me do, I would do it. I was extremely eager because I was so new in starting my own business.
I got lucky and Mike eventually asked me to partner with him to create the Social Media Examiner Facebook Page. We went from 0 to 30,000 Facebook fans in that very first year and this was in early 2010 which that's a really big fan jump at that time, so we were both very excited to say the least!
As a little side note, in those early years Mike asked me to travel to BlogWorld, which is now New Media Expo, but back in the day it was BlogWorld, to travel to BlogWorld in Vegas to basically be his talent wrangler. What that meant was that Mike would set up a bunch of interviews before he went to blog world.
It was some really big social media experts–Chris Brogan, Jay Baer, of course Mari Smith, there was just a lot of big names that were going to this event. So we would set up these interviews in advance, and then when we would get to the event we'd have Mike's camera guy, Jeff, there, and of course Mike, and I would go off and wrangle all these experts and bring them back to where Mike was set up so that he could do these quick interviews with them so we could have more content for his brand new website, Social Media Examiner.
This was a really cool time for me because I got to meet all of these big names in social media before I really ever got my business established. I feel like all of that was a lifetime ago, but I still look to Mike as one of my very first mentors because he was the first one to give me a shot when I left Robbins. So I am forever grateful.
So let's go ahead and get to the good stuff and dive into all things Twitter with Michael Stelzner. Enjoy!
Amy: Mike, thank you so much for being here today, I really appreciate it.
Mike: Amy, it's my absolute pleasure to be on your awesome show. I'm a regular listener.
Amy: Well, thank you! That means a lot coming from you, and I was excited just to have you on the show in general because, as I mentioned in the intro, you've been a huge mentor of mine for many, many years. But I also was excited because I haven't yet really talked about Twitter and you have always, in my opinion, always have understood how to use Twitter in such strategic ways that I thought “Who better to have on the show than you to really dive in a little bit deeper?”
So I want to kind of step back a little bit and talk about the importance of Twitter just in a big picture way as it relates to your marketing plan. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Mike: Yeah, well thank you, first of all. It's a pleasure to be on your show and I'm definitely no Twitter expert but I'm one of those kind of guys that likes to dabble and experiment and try things out and do things that frankly have maybe not been thought of before. In that regard, that's pretty cool.
The way that I use Twitter is predominately as, from a marketing perspective, as a promotional tool. So I don't really see Twitter as the ideal tool to quote-unquote “Make money” with or to close a deal with. Instead the way that we use Twitter over here at Social Media Examiner is really as an awareness building tool. So whenever you're selling something or promoting something like your podcast, the idea is that the way people use Twitter, they tend not to, like, see something in 140 characters and just make a transaction.
Instead they tend to use Twitter as a way to express themselves or say how much they appreciate whatever it is you've done or how excited they are about whatever it is that they're about to do, that they've already purchased from you.
And we also use Twitter as a way to kind of show love to the people that are involved with whatever we're doing. So, for example, if we've got an event coming up and Amy Porterfield is speaking and we're going to make sure that we empower not just ourselves to let the world know that Amy's part of it but also people that buy tickets to whatever we have to do. So stepping back, Twitter is a tool that a lot of people don't think of this way but it's spectacular for getting the word out, for promotion. It's kind of one part of a bigger marketing plan.
For example, when we do stuff, we involve pretty much all of the social networks but Twitter seems to be the one that's the easiest, the least amount of friction for people to get involved with, and obviously so many Twitter users are mobile, Amy, that it's just very easy for them to just use Twitter. In the grand scheme of things it's built as a layer on top of all the other marketing, as a supplementary layer that just helps everybody get excited and become evangelists for whatever we're doing.
Amy: And that's what I've seen so often, is that people just talk about Social Media Examiner A LOT on Twitter! It's a topic of discussion that comes up in my feed all the time, and so you're obviously doing a lot of things right, so in my opinion I think that
you have used Twitter in so many different, creative ways, so talk to me a little bit about some ways our listeners can use Twitter in their marketing.
Mike: Absolutely. One of the first things that I think a lot of people don't think about is what I refer to as “transactional based tweets,” which means that after someone has a made a transaction of some kind–for example, they have registered for your newsletter or they have purchased your program or your course or your event. It's at that juncture that a lot of times we just send them a thank you email but we don't provide them the opportunity to express themselves via Twitter.
This is one of those things that's a bit of a psychology thing, but the idea here is that at the moment that the transaction is complete, generally speaking they're sent to some sort of a page. Almost always they're sent to a page. The email comes later. So, on that thank you page why not have “click here to tweet your excitement”?
For example, we do this for Social Media Marketing World. Whenever anybody buys a ticket to our conference, one of the first things that they see beyond booking their hotel room and stuff is a big headline that says something like “tweet your excitement about coming to the event” and then we have a little text that says “click here to let people know you're coming!”
They click that button and up pops a tweet that says “I'm attending Social Media Marketing World” with a link back to the sales page and a hashtag. What happens is a lot of people edit it and they say “I'm STOKED I'm attending!”
Amy: I like that, yeah.
Mike: Whatever, you know? But the idea is you make it effortless. You make it so easy that just with a click of the button, they will share that with their audience and what does that do? That creates evangelists for whatever it is you're doing, right, because they're so sold–they've already made the purchase, right? Who better than our customers to let everyone know? Not everyone's going to click that button, but all you need is a few of those people to be clicking that button and you can generate an enormous amount of exposure.
Amy: And you do this so, just to reiterate–let's say they've purchased, so they've purchased a ticket to the event, and then on the Thank You page this tweet button might be there?
Mike: Exactly.
Amy: Gotcha.
Mike: And it's not even a button, it's literally text, and all it is, is an instruction. It's not like everybody has to do it, but the idea here is that it's very easy for someone to do with a click of the button and it's not even a graphic.
A matter of fact, ours says “click here to tweet that you are attending” and then it says “be sure to use the event hashtag.” And that's just in case somebody wants to know how to tweet in general. but we've found an enormous amount of people actually click that button.
Amy: Nice!
Mike: And what that does is it just–you know, these people are evangelizing all their friends that track this, they end up talking to their friends on Twitter about why they just made the purchase, you know? And that's exactly what you want. Most people end up making purchases as a result of this transactional-based tweet. 7
That's a great tip. I hadn't even thought about doing that yet for the thank you page of my programs. that's a great one. Keep going!
Mike: Okay. So, another one is a verbal tweet. So–and these are, I just made these names up.
Amy: Hah! I like it!
Mike: It's cool if someone starts writing about them, or whatever, but the idea of a verbal tweet is for podcast listeners, and I know that I do this and Michael Hyatt does this and I think you do this as well. The idea here is that people that listen to podcasts often times are on the move. They're walking, running at the gym, in the car, on the tractor–you know the whole spiel.
Amy: Yeah.
Mike: Because podcasting is such a passive medium, if you're a podcaster, what a great way to help other people express their interest in or their appreciation for your show but them using a verbal tweet?
For example, if you visit socialmediaexaminer.com/love, it says “I recommend the Social Media Marketing podcast with…” and it's got my username. And then it's got a link to, I think, our ITunes page. It's just an effortless way, and at the end of each one of my shows, I say “If you love the show, do me a favor and help spread the word by visiting…” something they can remember. SocialMediaExaminer.com/love. Now, Amy, what's been your experience with this? You've been using it, right?
Amy: I love it! And I completely stole it from you and use /love as well. It works so great, because it kind of goes back to your other tip where it's effortless. It's very easy and people at the end of the show they're excited, they hopefully found a lot of value, so it's just perfect timing. It's worked very well for me.
Mike: I'll give you a tip, if you do something like this, or either one of these two things, take it one step further, if you have time, and hit the reply button and say thank you!
Amy: Good point.
Mike: I cannot tell you, every single person that says “I recommend the Social Media Marketing Podcast” I reply to and I say thank you and I even include their name, if I can tell. You know, some brands don't have names.
Amy: Nice!
Mike: And you know what happens? A dialogue. They tend to come back and say “Oh my gosh I can't believe it's you!” Or “I really loved your show on X” and it starts an actual interaction and it's the beginning of building real relationships, and people love that kind of stuff.
Amy: I was going to say, that's really where it's at, right there.
Mike: Absolutely.
Amy: Fantastic. All right, give us some more.
Mike: Okay, I've got three more. Shout-out tweets is my next one. Again, I just made these names up.
Shout-out tweets are when you want to give love to somebody. And I'll tell you how we use this, and I literally just came up with this a couple weeks ago. We have, you know, let's say you have something that's got lots of people involved, like we have our
conference and we've got 100 different speakers. We have this, on another page, similar to the thank you page, you can put something like this even in an email, by the way, and what it says is “tweet your favorite presenters. Click on the names of your favorite presenters, tweet them that you're looking forward to meeting them at Social Media Marketing World.”
So you click on, for example, Chris Brogan, and you click on his name and it says “Hey, Chris Brogan! Really looking forward to meeting you in person at Social Media Marketing World” and the hashtag of the event.
Amy: That is BRILLIANT! I love that, yes!
Mike: And we've got every single name of every presenter. So people look down the list, they find the presenters that they want, and they start clicking on them. And the speakers respond and say “I'm so excited to meet you!” Isn't that cool?
Amy: I LOVE that!! And I will be presenting at this event, so whosever listening, I want you to be clicking on my picture! I want to hear from you! That's a great idea, I love that!
Mike: Yeah, and you know, we didn't use pictures, because we have so many, we just use their name.
Amy: Oh, gotcha.
Mike: But what's cool about this is you can take this and you can put this into an email. So, for example, if you've got a bunch of people and you've got something coming up like a course, you can go ahead and put this kind of stuff into an email and when they get the email they can do it right from their email inbox. Isn't that awesome?
Amy: That's great. I am a huge fan. I feel like email marketing is alive and well and does so many great things for my business. So if I can incorporate social into my email I'm such a fan, yeah.
Mike: Another cool thing that we do is, if anyone's listening right now and they've got any kind of resell letters or affiliates or, you know, people that are somehow involved but not part of the company with whatever it is that you're doing, this next one–I'm
just going to refer to it as affiliate tweets. Amy, you've been an affiliate for a lot of my stuff in the past so you kind of, I think, know what I'm talking about.
The idea here is to pre-craft maybe 10-15 different tweets and simply put them on a blog page and, for example, you might say “Join Chris Brogan, Jay Baer and Amy Porterfield at the Super Event of the year” or whatever. You can just write up a whole bunch of these little headlines and people can essentially, especially your affiliates, they can literally swipe these. It's like a swipe file. They can use them when they want, they can schedule them, and then they can insert their affiliate URL.
The idea is–this is another example of frictionless marketing. The idea here is that you're giving a long list of pre-crafted tweets that they can just do whatever the heck they want with. You know, one of the things I've learned over the years working with a lot of affiliates–we have over a thousand of them–is that they have a lot of choices of what they want to promote, and the ideal scenario for you is for you to make it so easy and effortless for them that they'll say “Okay, I'll do this because you've done all the hard work for me.” Right?
Amy: Yep. That's why I really like being an affiliate for you because I don't have to do anything, really. It's all there. And all the information. So I agree, the easier you can make it for an affiliate, the better.
Mike: For those of you that are listening right now that don't use affiliates, this stuff applies to any kind of audience. If you've got an email newslist and you're trying to promote something, like, for example, when I came out with mykidsadventures.com, I emailed everybody on our newsletter list, 230,000 people, and I said “Here's our new My Kids'
Adventures website and even if you don't have kids, would you click this button or take a couple of these tweets and help us get the word out?”
The idea is, some people may not be interested in parenting, but they might be willing because of some equity I've built with them to go ahead and promote it for me. So the idea here is all this stuff applies to just about any context if you think a little bit out of the box. It's really about doing all the heavy lifting, and making it just effortless for people to just choose to promote for you.
Amy: Yes, definitely.
Mike: Okay, the last thing that I've been doing lately is social share buttons. Now, I'm sure a lot of people listening right now probably got a website and they've got Digg Digg or one of these plugins where there is, you know, it makes it easy for you to just click a button and tweet things. But let's just say that you've got a sales page for whatever your product or service or event is, and you've got many different pages, and you want–when someone clicks the tweet button, you want the exact same tweet to be on every single page.
Meaning, for example, for my conference I've got the homepage but then I've got the hotel page–I don't want, if someone's on the hotel page, to click the retweet button and drive people to the hotel page, I want to drive them back to the main page. So you can do what i refer to as custom tweets, and the idea here is if you google “Twitter share buttons” or you just go to about.Twitter.com/resources/buttons and I'm sure we'll have all this in the shownotes, you can–that's not even the right button, actually. I'll get the right button to Amy after this is all over with, but bottom line is you can very easily go to a Twitter page and literally just handcraft the tweet.
For example, for my conference I have a tweet that says “check out Social Media Marketing World, mega conference from Social Media Examiner” and then it's got the URL and it's got the hashtag. So once you actually create that custom tweet, Twitter gives you an embed code, and all you have to do is paste that into a widget in WordPress all the pages that you want it to be on and it's there forever.
Amy: Oh, very cool!
Mike: And it's the same tweet count on all the pages, right? So if you have a blog, some blog posts are more popular than other blog posts, right? Well this aggregates all the tweets across all the pages into one count, so the end result is you've got everyone driving to the main page for whatever it is you have, if you have a multipage sales page.
Amy: I love that. So social sharing is at its best there–or social proof, I should say, because it's all being aggregated just with the one button.
Mike: Exactly.
Amy: Fantastic.
Mike: And you could do the same thing with Facebook and the same thing with LinkedIn and the same thing with Google+. They all have share buttons that allow you to create a custom message and have it all linked back to the same page.
Amy: Oh, very cool. I'm going to have to check that out.
Okay, so those were your five big tips. and I just kind of want to go over them real quick. We've got the transaction tweet, verbal tweets, shoutout tweets, affiliate tweets and then social share buttons. So I'll make sure that I put a lot of detail in the shownotes so you can really understand all of these different options you have and how to do them.
Now one of the big things that obviously is happening on Twitter is hashtags. And talk to me a little bit about hashtags in terms of when to use them, why to use them, all that good stuff.
Mike: Yeah. Hashtags is really, really important when it comes to your marketing because what you can do–and this is the magic sauce. For example, let's say you have a contest. We give away free tickets for our events and stuff and we have contests, so we come up with a hashtag just for that contest.
Not only can we do analysis of how many people have tweeted or what the most popular tweets are, and you can use cool tools like TweetBinder.com to go ahead and run analysis on a hashtag, for example, to see what kind of reach you're having and all that fun stuff, but I Think the secret sauce comes in when you embed this, a little Twitter widget on your sidebar. Have you seen these before, Amy? You know what I'm talking about, or…?
Amy: I don't think I know.
Mike: If you visit Social Media Examiner, you'll see there's this little widget on the side bar that says “people tweeting about Social Media Marketing World.” And all we did was Twitter has a cool little embed widget and it's a live update, so every time someone tweets anything with the hashtag #SMMW14 it shows up in our little feed.
Amy: Love that! Now I know what you're talking about. Very cool.
Mike: It's across the entire site, so now I hope people are connecting all the dots on this kind of stuff right? Because if you're using transactional based tweets and they have the hashtag in it and you're using shoutout tweets and they have the hashtags
and affiliate tweets and social share tweets, and they all have the hashtag, what happens when a new person comes to your sales page? They see all of these people, like literally a minute ago during this interview I just saw a new tweet coming in from Michael Jared who said “I'm attending Social Media Marketing World.”
Amy: That's cool.
Mike: So you know, when people come to this page they see all of these tweets in the last few minutes from people that have essentially been given this frictionless opportunity to share.
Amy: What a great thing to put on a sales page! You said it's on your sales page, right?
Mike: Oh yeah, it's on every page of our entire website. And this is where it gets really intriguing, right? Because if you think about whatever it is that you have to sell, I'm sure a lot of people listening right now have some sort of website, probably a blog or a podcast or something. And they have maybe another page set up separate from all that for whatever it is they're selling.
Well, the idea here is you can take this widget box and you can put it anywhere. So instead of just putting it on your sales page you can put it on every page of your entire website like we do at social media examiner. So now when someone comes to social media examiner and they're reading an article, for example, on Facebook marketing and they start scrolling down the page and they see a ton of people tweeting in the last few minutes about our conference, that stops them in their tracks! They're like “What the heck is that?” And we just put a little link above the box that says “click here to find out more about X” you know what I mean?
All this stuff kind of creates this crazy fury, if you will, of interest in whatever it is that you have to sell.
Amy: You got to love that. I love that you–it's not just about the hashtag, but what you do about the hashtag and how you can get the word out with those hashtags. I think that's a great tip, I love that.
Mike: Yeah its' really just about thinking about the totality or 360 degree or whatever you want to call it of how you use these things, right? Because if you make it easy for people to tweet using the hashtag and you've already programmed it in there and
you make it easy to aggregate and follow all of the hashtags, then the end result is just spectacular promotion for you.
Amy: Yeah, that's fantastic! I've got some stuff to do here with my next promotion for sure.
Now, one of the things that's going to come up, if someone's listened to this in its entirety, the big question is what are some tools to make all of this happen? I know you've got some good tools, right?
Mike: Yep. And they're all free.
Amy: We love that.
Mike: The first one is clicktotweet.com. Have you ever used that tool?
Amy: My favorite ever. I use it for my podcast.
Mike: Cool, so clicktotweet.com has recently gone through an update in the last 60 days if someone hasn't used it in a while. The cool thing about clicktotweet.com is you sign in with your Twitter account and you can go ahead and handcraft those kind of tweets that we were talking about. You just type it in and you can put it in your hashtag and you hit generate a new link.
But what's really cool about Click To Tweet is it's like bit.ly. They can track click stats. What that means you can see what times of the day and what days of the week people are clicking the most on these things, so you can create a whole bunch of Click to Tweets.
For example, remember I told you we have one for all of our presenters, so we can go back and look at the analytics to see who has been clicked on the most, and you can see “Huh, who are people most excited about meeting?” There's a lot of really cool stuff. Click To Tweet is like your secret weapon.
The end result is once you generate a new link you just get a new URL and it's just with that URL you can do whatever you want, you can create an image that says “Click here to tweet your excitement” or you can create text and you can just hot link to that URL.
Amy: I think that's such a great idea, and one of the things that we've been starting to is when I interview somebody and their interview goes live on my podcast, Rebecca, my content manager, will send out an email to, let's say, to Mike here and give you some options if you want to give your interview a shout out, and we use Click To Tweet in there. So you just have to click the link and you're good to go with your own tweet about your show, or about your interview. Does that make sense?
Mike: Totally. And it used to be so much harder to do this, so click to tweet is just really awesome. This is like the secret to almost everything I've talked about so far.
Another tool is the actual Twitter widget, and I've got the correct URL here. It's Twitter.com/settings/widgets. You have to be logged into your Twitter account to use it, and once you're logged in it's really easy for you to go ahead and you can go ahead…you can put in, for example–you don't have to use just a hashtag. You can put in anything.
You can put in, for example, for mykidsadventures.com, we have one of these on the sidebar of the website, because it's a brand new blog for parents, and we just have every single tweet that includes the mention of “mykidsadventures.com” so that when people come to the site they see that other people are talking about it.
Amy: Perfect.
Mike: And it’s just kind of a promotional thing, so you can create as many of these widgets as you want and then you can go in and edit them. A couple quick tips, you want to opt-out of tailoring, which is one of the options, and you also want to only show top tweets, because what ends up happening is if you don't click only show top tweets, then every single retweet ends up coming into your stream and it just doesn't look very good.
Amy: Oh, gotcha.
Mike: The end result is a little piece of code and you just take that little piece of code and you just paste it into, like I said, a widget in WordPress or if you have a person who's an HTML person, into the code of your stuff. And it's set it, forget it and you're done.
Amy: Perfect! Anything automated like that, I'm a big fan.
Mike: One more thing that I also like is tweetchat.com.
Amy: I've never used that, so tell me more.
Mike: Tweetchat.com is, we've been using this for years for our online conferences. All it does is you go to tweetchat.com, you type in a hashtag, and all it does is show you all the tweets around the hashtag, live. For example, if you're having a webinar and you have a hashtag for the webinar, you can use tweetchat.com to see everyone in real time who's tweeting about that hashtag and tweetchat.com allows you to actually interact and engage with people, to pause the live feed, and it just makes it super easy for you to kind of like have your Twitter experience completely focused around that hashtag.
Amy: Now, would you tell participants to go check out Tweet Chat, or do you just use it as–?
Mike: We do.
Amy: Yeah, okay, good.
Mike: Yeah you tell everybody involved, and we've been doing this for years. It brings kind of a–it's almost like a forum, you know, on top of Twitter, right?
Amy: Right, that's live.
Mike: It's live, it's public, and it goes into everyone's Twitter stream, but it's completely focused around just hashtags.
Amy: Okay, taht's cool. I'm going to use that on my next webinar. That's a great idea.
I love this! One of the reasons why I asked Mike to be on the show is because he always makes things really actionable and breaks them down into small pieces that we can actually implement quickly. So I appreciate you doing that Mike because I think it makes it easier for everybody.
Now you have mentioned a little bit about social media marketing world. I'm excited about it, I tell everybody I know that they need to go to this event. IT's coming up. I'm speaking there so I guess I'm a little biased, but I have to say last year I went to this event and it was the best event I've ever gone to related to Social Media. It was fantastic! So I would love it if you would tell people a little bit about the event.
Mike: Thank you. It takes place in San Diego. Nice, warm, San Diego.
Amy: Mmhmm, we like that!
Mike: March 26-28th, and what's really cool about this event is even though there's going to be 2000 marketers and that sounds like a huge number of people, we–and there were 1100 last year–we try really hard to make it feel intimate. Didn't you feel that way when you were there?
Amy: 100%. I felt like every little thing was planned out to the T. It was great!
Mike: A few things that differentiate this event–#1, we really design networking to be a key part of this thing. This year we have our opening night party on an aircraft carrier and we use Twitter in our party. I don't know if you were at that opening night party where everybody had these little bingo cards–were you there for that?
Amy: Yes, yes!
Mike: So we had these little networking bingo where everybody goes around and asks Facebook stock, or you have to find someone that has more than 10,000 followers, find someone from Maine, or whatever. You know what I mean? And then you write their Twitter ID on the card and then at the end you tear off a little thing and you win prizes, but the idea is that people start networking with people like crazy and meeting people the night before the event even happens. And then we've got networking built into every component of the event. We've got just tons going on.
But to break it down a little bit further, we have 4 tracks–Social Tactics, which is where I believe you're speaking about Facebook, Social Strategy which is where you learn about the high-level business–the tactics is like every tool, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, all that stuff.
Then we've got Community Management, we've got lots of sessions and panels about how to grow and manage your communities, and then Content Marketing, which is one of my favorites, and then under that we've got podcasting, blogging and web video. So we've got 9 simultaneous sessions underneath these 4 tracks and it's just an awesome experience and pretty much everybody who's anybody in the world of social media is going to be speaking at the event.
Amy: That's how I feel, and I felt like the caliber of speakers and the amount of work they put not having a really great presentation was much more impressive than any other event that I've gone to. So I can sing praises for this event all night long because truly it was so good and I'm glad you talked about the networking side of it because that made it extra fun and it was–made it really easy. So if you don't know anybody at this event, you don't have to walk up to someone and introduce yourself and feel awkward or whatever. Mike creates these little mini, fun events or mini exercises like the bingo where it's just really seamless in the whole thing. I just have to say you've done such a great job.
Mike: Thank you. What's cool is that, already, we've got people from more than 31 countries and there's lots of small business owners like you and me and lots of brands, too. We've got Wal-mart and Whole Foods and IBM and Hershey's and, so, it's a huge mix of everything, but the slogan is Networking Discovery and Fun. Networking is what it's all about, but our sessions are spectacular. We do not–we hand-recruit every single speaker so we don't like, you're never going to a session and say “that was lame.”
Amy: Right.
Mike: And you know, it's a lot of fun, too. So anyways, I'm sure you'll provide links and all that fun stuff.
Amy: I will, and anybody listening, you can go to AmyPorterfield.com/smmw14 and you can get a link directly to it. AmyPorterfield.com/SSMW14, and I'll also include information about it and a link to the event in my shownotes.
Again Mike, thank you so much for being on the show, I've always wanted you to come on and when we thought about talking about Twitter I knew it was a perfect fit event hough there were a million things we could talk about, this really is going to be valuable for so many people listening. So thanks for coming on!
Mike: Thanks for having me, and if anybody wants to find me on Twitter, it's just @mike_stelzner and I'd love to hear how you guys are implementing this. It's really easy stuff and once you start using it, it's fun! It's exciting! So Amy, it was a pleasure to be on your show.
Amy: Thanks again, take care.
So there you have it. I hope you found this mini Twitter training with Mike just as valuable as I have. I have some work to do to get implementing and hopefully you'll do the same.
Don't forget to check out the show notes because all of the links that we talked about in the show can be found at AmyPorterfield.com/25. Also, if you like this podcast, I would really appreciate if you would take just a few minutes and leave a review for me on iTunes. That will help me reach even more people with my episodes.
Just go to AmyPorterfield.com/review and it will take you to the page that you can click to launch iTunes and leave a review. It would truly mean the world to me and thank you so much in advance. Until the next time, make it a great week.
