Using Twitter for Marketing and PR: Do the Pros Practice What They Preach?

It seems that everyone claims to be a Twitter expert these days. Of course, most are not. But several of the real Twitter pros I know—including those who have written books about using Twitter as an effective marketing and public relations instrument—have figured out how to best leverage the 140-character microblogging tool to promote themselves, their books, their firms, and their clients. And some of them actually follow their own advice!

How Smart Marketing Book Authors Use Twitter

For example, Mark Schaefer of Schaefer Marketing Solutions is the author of the book The Tao of Twitter: Changing Your Life and Business 140 Characters at a Time. He and his firm provide affordable outsourced marketing support to address both short-term sales opportunities and long-term strategic renewal.

Mark uses Twitter to help deliver on that promise for a number of his blue-chip clients, including Nestle, AARP, Anheuser-Busch, Coldwell Banker, Scripps Networks, Keystone Foods, and the U.K. government. He also very effectively promotes himself and his book on Twitter as part of his own marketing, branding, and relationship-development strategy.

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The Blogosphere in 2010

I just found the State of the Blogosphere in 2010 report over at BlogHerald. It’s chock full of lots of data about blogs and the bloggers who blog them, taken from the BlogPulse survey that includes over 150,000,000 blogs.

In the infographic below, you’ll discover the following:

  • Top 10 blogs by traffic
  • The spread of pro, part-time, hobbyist and self-employed bloggers
  • Breakdown of their age and demographic data
  • How often they post
  • What languages are most prominent (hint: English is now ranked #2 as the most prominent language of blogs. See if you can guess what #1 is.)
  • Revenue earned by bloggers
  • Geographic distribution of blogs within the U.S.

Typically, this is a function that was handled by Technorati. It would seem that their report is still a few weeks away. You can check out the archived posts for the State of the Blogsophere in 2009, 2008, 2007 and earlier. But it leads to the question: whatever happened to the prominence of Technorati? It’s a question that’s been asked before.

In the meantime, enjoy the eye candy. Other great infographics are available from BlogHerald here. If you have any observations or insights, I’d be glad to hear about them below.

Scott Monty

Image credit: InfoGraphicsLab.com