On Tweeting Well...

...and on LinkedIn-ing well, on Facebook-ing well, on Google+-ing well, etc., etc., etc. ...etc.

Social media is a medium for communication, right? To communicate, when you're not talking, what are you doing? That's right: You're writing.

Writers will recognize that the headline of this blog entry is a play on William Zinsser's contribution to writing well, the oft-republished "On Writing Well." If you write well, you'll tweet well; according to the chatter from this past Wednesday's #TChat, in fact, you'll be well-versed in perhaps the one indispensable skill necessary to succeed in social media, in any profession.

Social media is fertile ground for a "what-does-it-all-mean?" discussion, and in "Exploring the Heart of Mainstream Social Media Careers," #TChat covered a good deal of that ground. But what stood out, for me, was this idea that social media is a form of written communication, and to do social media well, you need to be a good writer. Matt Charney (@mattcharney), social media manager for Monster.com, put it best:

That's the thing about writing: having a voice. In social media, tweets with voices stand out. LinkedIn groups with voices stand out, and Facebook status updates with voices stand out. They rise above the din. They sing. They come not from faceless social media managers, not from superficial tweeters, not from zoning-out Facebook users, and not from cogs-in-the-wheel LinkedIn members; they come, instead, from thinking, dreaming human beings. People, not tools, have voices, and only people whose voices resonate through their writing stand a chance of succeeding in social media.

News Releases Cut Up The Dance Floor

The slow, inexorable decline of news continues. It's not that, really, but the decline of traditional news reporting as a single-play, profitable endeavor has been undeniable for a long time. That's what people think when they think news: conventional publishing, the advertising model to support it, and the ham-fisted attempts to migrate that model to the Web. Contributing to that decline has been the online environment created by search and social media, and some have surveyed the landscape and called for the death of the news release. But news and the news releases that give rise to it are very much alive, and on search engines and social media, news is cutting up the dance floor as we look for and share information.

What else can we make of the apparent trends reported in a Washington Post article last week looking at social media's impact on the sharing of news online? Google is the 800-pound gorilla on the Internet, sending around 30 percent of traffic to all news sites. And that gorilla has an up-and-coming competitor, Facebook. A large primate feeding every day, all day, on Muscle Milk™ and who knows what else, all in an effort to bulk up and match Google's fighting weight, Facebook sends as much as 8 percent of online traffic to some news sites.

These are all significant numbers, and let's focus on social media for a moment: Any casual or not-so-casual Facebook user can attest that news links are popular attractions. Look in the home feed at any time of the day, and a good half of all status updates come in the form of a comment about a link to some news story. These typically draw conversations, and you want people talking about your news.

Does this appetite for news mean people are hungry for news releases? Certainly not, if those news releases are stuffy, boring affairs intended solely for the press. But news releases aren't that anymore, and notice that lots of people now call it a news release, not a press release.

Business Wire says making news releases ready for social media and search engines goes a long way in helping to spread your news. The problem is that, even now, few folks are doing so. Applying SEO to a news release is a subject well covered, and yet, "Only 18 Percent of News Release Headlines Are Optimized For SEO," according to a study reported by Business Insider seven months ago, when mainstream efforts to capitalize on the combination of news releases and social media had just gotten underway -- e.g. PitchEngine's launch of an app to place newsrooms on Facebook.

News itself is all around, and just like rock 'n' roll, it will never die. That's a cliché worth repeating, and news, as a currency, remains the same. Make your news releases interesting, findable and shareable. We humans have a tendency to search for interesting information, and once we find it, we have a propensity to share.

Re-tweets: Bigger Is Better—Three Ways to Get Re-Tweeted by Tweeters Who Matter Most

Yes, it's true, and for anyone who makes due with small re-tweets, I hate to be the bearer of bad news: If you haven't got a big re-tweet, any re-tweet will do, but bigger is better, and Twitter users everywhere ought to be vying for that big re-tweet. Why? A big re-tweet brings with it big visibility, and big visibility brings with it success on Twitter—but only when developed and cultivated in a methodical way. In other words, you need to know how to use that big re-tweet, or it'll do little for you. The consolation is this: That big re-tweet is anything but complicated to get. Just provide the valuable information (whether it be your own or someone else's) and sprinkle it with wisdom. Oh, and make sure you're in the right place at the right time.

Last week, yours truly lived a mini case study in what the big re-tweet is like. About a month ago, I joined the Twitter list of SmartBrief on Social Media, an aggregator of information pertaining to search and social media. SmartBrief distributes its e-mail newsletter daily to thousands. Earlier that day, I had seen an article at MediaPost Blogs that asked whether or not B2B companies ought to embrace social media in 2010. I thought this would be useful for my followers to see, so I tweeted a link to the article and tied the notion to the trade show industry.

Here's the original tweet:

brentskinner "Will B2B Companies Embrace Social Media in 2010?" http://bit.ly/cQ7uxp Well, trade show producers should. #mtosummit

Notice that my tweet happened to include the MTO Summit's Twitter hashtag. It did so because I wanted my fellow attendees at MTO Summit to read the linked article. My hope was that as many of them would agree: Yes, the trade show industry indeed ought to embrace social media in 2010. It's a reasonable statement highly relevant to their industry—the stuff of excellent tweets, actually.

Well, imagine my surprise (and elation) when SmartBrief on Social Media noticed my tweet and not only re-tweeted me, but also featured me as the day's "Big Re-Tweet" in its afternoon e-mail distribution. Here's the publication's re-tweet of me, as it appeared on Twitter itself:

sbosm @brentskinner is the man of the hour -- and the #ireadsbosm big retweet of the day!

And here's the blurb that appeared in the e-mail newsletter:

RT @brentskinner "Will B2B Companies Embrace Social Media in 2010?" http://bit.ly/cQ7uxp Well, trade show producers should.

…which is the language of the publication's actual re-tweet, interestingly.

Thousands probably saw the re-tweet and the word of it in the e-mail newsletter, and in a methodical way I went about making the big re-tweet work for me—following the advice I shared with you a few paragraphs ago.

First, by encouraging a handful of my closest, most trusted and best-connected followers to re-tweet the re-tweet, I effectively chased what I like to call the long tail of social media chatter. Would I have liked to do more? Sure, but I worked with the bandwidth I had that day. Additionally, I forwarded the e-mail to as many of my hottest prospects as I could think of, and in many cases, doing so reignited exciting conversations regarding deals. By at once playing the role of information curator and wisdom-sharer with one tweet that day, I capitalized on the big re-tweet in order to take a critical step in establishing myself as a thought leader in my field and as a curator of especially useful information in the Twitterverse itself.

Much of this might seem boastful, but in no way am I special. I simply worked the online ecosystem, and so can you. In fact, following are three simple tactics anyone with good ideas and tenacity can employ to get that big re-tweet that'll go a long way in getting them big results on Twitter:

1) Use hashtags liberally: Capitalize on hashtags to get your ideas in front of the Twitter users following the subject matter related to your expertise. Share your wisdom with these ad hoc communities, which display great fluidity. Some, such as #publicrelations, have great staying power; others, such as those forming around a trade show or networking event (e.g,, #mtosummit), can form quickly and organically, swell, and then, eventually, dwindle. Either kind is of great value—you never know when a key influencer will give you the big re-tweet.

2) Join lists: Created by influential thought leaders or by publications, lists automatically place your tweets on the radar of the list's creator and everyone on it. Once you tweet something perceived by that community as being of note, you may draw the big re-tweet. Several weeks ago, for instance, I joined SmartBrief on Social Media's list by following the publication's instructions to do so—i.e., by including the hashtag of #ireadsbosm in a tweet. This alerted the publication to my desire to be added to its list's roster, and being on that radar placed all my tweets on this influential publication's radar—hence, that big re-tweet.

3) Re-tweet notable tweeters: It may seem unseemly, but it isn't if you do it tactfully and mean it. Just refrain from re-tweeting others will-nilly and be sure to include your own nugget of wisdom, thus adding to the quality of the conversation. The powerful re-tweeted person's followers may very well notice your tweet, re-tweet it, and even follow you. And if that person's followers comprise your target market, you've gotten that much closer to new business.

Twitter, Meet the Upside-Down Pyramid…Sort Of

You ought to be inverting your tweets. This will make sense shortly. Read on.

The hallmark of informative writing is the inverted pyramid. Think about walking into a bona fide Egyptian pyramid. I've never been inside one myself; maybe you have. But I do know that no real, live pyramid is inverted. The fattest part, the footprint, is at the bottom, flush with the ground. And you probably have to climb a musty, ancient stairwell to get to the top. That's what I'm guessing, anyway. As I said, I've never been inside one myself.

But where's the top of the figurative pyramid when you're reading a news release, the mainstay of informative writing? That's right. The top is at the bottom. When we read, we read from top to bottom, and the most -- and most important -- information appears at the top of this upside-down pyramid, also called the inverted pyramid. Skillful writers can stuff that info into the first sentence, even. This way, if you're the reader, you're sure to learn everything essential in the first paragraph, and if you're the writer, you've imparted the gist of your message in the space where your audience is most likely to pay attention. And if the lead paragraph compels you to do so, as the reader you have the option to climb down into the rest of the news release, just like you have the option to climb to the top of a real pyramid if you are so inclined.

Sure, the analogy is rough. In a real pyramid, for instance, curiosity might compel you to climb to the top regardless of what's at the bottom. I don't know what's inside the fattest part of a real pyramid -- perhaps nothing of note. But the fact remains that you must first enter the fattest part of the pyramid before you can get to the tip, and the same goes when you begin to read a news release.

Take stock of the inverted pyramid's utility, for doing so will help you to write more effectively online. A well-put-together online news release, for example, contains many of its most important keywords in the very first few lines -- again, the fattest part of the inverted pyramid. These very first few lines, in turn, display directly underneath the news release's headline (another critical component) on a SERP (search engine results page).

Put another way, people aren't the only ones who best pay attention to and digest information presented in the inverted pyramid format.

But how do these concepts possibly apply to Twitter? Well, I recently read an article that shares several ideas on how to write tweets, and when it comes to Twitter SEO, one of these ideas cuts to the core of issue: your tweets' visibility online. To squeeze the most possible organic SEO out of your tweets, you must write them as tiny inverted pyramids of information. Include the keywords up front, within the first 30 characters or so, because when search engines index your tweets, these are the characters that will appear on the SERP.

Where, by the way, does this leave shortened URLs, the very basis of many tweets and arguably just as important as a tweet's original content? Place them at the end of a tweet. That's what I do, and this means my tweets take on the form of not just one pyramid, but two: an upside-down pyramid at the beginning joined at its tip to that of a right-side up pyramid at the end.

Yes, that's all pretty complex for a mere 140 characters.

But with just 140 characters at your disposal, do you really need to think about capturing the reader's attention before those 140 characters are up? Shouldn't even the most boring tweet still command some attention simply because it's only 140 characters? Conversely, shouldn't it take at least 140 characters to get someone's attention in the first place?

Yes and no. It almost seems pathetic and silly, the ultimate indictment of our ever-shortening attention spans. And it would be, except that the "reader" in this instance is a search engine, where a large population of your potential followers will learn of your tweets' very existence, let alone take interest in your micro blogging. In key ways, this makes the search engine your gateway audience, and now that Google has announced plans to make real-time search a reality, the time has come to invert your tweets and make them search engine–friendly.