Don’t get me wrong, I think Twitter is a great tool, if used in the appropiate context. We have several customers who use Twitter and/or have added Twitter feeds to their primary websites (see examples below) and see benefits from this.

However, for each of these there are truckloads of businesses who set up Twitter accounts because of the hype and then either

• don’t use them
• use them for a honeymoon period of a couple of weeks then lose interest, or
• post occasional updates that are completely irrelevant (going to the shop for a sandwich, hooray it’s Friday)

The Chaser team seized on this with glee when they started looking at politicians’ Twitter accounts on ABC TV’s Yes We Canberra leading up to the 2010 Australian federal election, as illlustrated in the short clip below.

When Twitter is useful for business

The organisations that get the most from Twitter are usually successful for at least one of the following reasons (illustrated with examples from some of our clients). If you fall into one of the categories below Twitter may well be useful for you. If not, I’d suggest you think hard about your strategy before committing.

You have a young audience

Are those youngsters ever offline?
For example: Gen Y and below Recruitment agency GXY Search tweet new jobs: twitter.com/gxysearch

You have a wealthy audience

Usually with both the latest gadgets and lots of leisure time on their hands.
For example: St Kilda Boat Sales provide regular updates on all things boating at to a large group of followers: twitter.com/thinkBoats

You have a tech-savvy audience

Of course those geeks are tweeting. They’ve been doing it since waaaay before you even heard of it.
For example: http://twitter.com/iTunesMusic (OK, you spotted it – iTunes isn’t really one of our clients. Right now).

You run an event that people attend

If the audience is right Twitter can be good to allow networking and a second level of discussion at conferences and events.
For example: Headspace kept people up to date before and during their recent International Youth Mental Health Conference: twitter.com/headspace_aus/, and participants discussed all things conference-related during and after the event at http://twitter.com/search?q=%23iymhc

You run an event that people might not attend but want real-time updates from

It’s undoubtably true that Twitter is probably the fastest way to get updates on something happening in real time.
For example: Sail Melbourne post realtime race updates during competition time.

And another thing to consider…

Time.

It seems almost standard these days that every new website launched has the ubiquitous Follow us on Twitter (and Join us on Facebook) buttons linking to associated accounts. These each have to be set up, styled and polished – the easy part. Then they have to be promoted and managed and posted to and have followers and friends sought and approved.

If you have a marketing person or team that’s all ok. If, like many small businesses, you don’t this can add up to huge amounts of time each week. You need to think about if this extra work is going to benefit your business.

For example if you regularly read 20 different blogs or sites you could subscribe to RSS feeds from each of these sites and then use a feedreader to easily check a digest of all new articles each day without having to visit all of the sites one by one.

Should I have an RSS feed from my website?

If you have a website and publish regular updates, like news or blog posts, you should offer your visitors the chance to subscribe to your website’s RSS feed.

How do I do this?

If we build you a website using WordPress you’ll automatically have an RSS feed from your site. The address of your feed will be http://www.yourdomainname.com/feed/. If you have different types or categories of content that you regularly update you can also offer people category-specific feeds.

For example the Go4 website’s main RSS feed is here: http://www.go4.com.au/feed/ – this shows alls new posts we add to our site. The RSS feed for our blog is available at http://www.go4.com.au/category/blog/feed/ and just includes items posted to our blog.

Easy.

How do people access RSS Feeds?

There are a couple of ways people subscribe to RSS Feeds.

RSS feed readers

Dedicated feed reader software like Feedreader (Windows) or NetNewsWire (Mac) or online tools like Google Reader or Bloglines pull all people’s subscribed feeds together and show summaries.

RSS feeds as Live Bookmarks in a web browser

Firefox, Safari or Internet Explorer (7 or newer) web browsers let people subscribe to RSS feeds in their web browser as a special type of Bookmark or Favourite (sometimes called Live Bookmarks or Web Feeds).

…here’s our new website (bet you didn’t see that one coming).

Hope you like it. Of course the site runs on the spunky WordPress backend.

We’ve worked hard to try and build a clean and simple site and get to the point. So in that spirit, I’ll leave you to have a look around.

Amongst other things they run several youth camps each year, work with Bellingen Urban Landcare, run workshops and encourage young people to become leaders and to have a voice in the community.

We’re proud to work with EYE on their website and have lots of fun.

Here’s a rough summary of what we’ve achieved together so far…

• In 2008 we sat down with a couple of EYE members and their co-ordinator Lisa and nutted out a plan for the website.
• EYE members Charlie and Jasmine worked on concept design with help from Mark from 30point4.
• Steve and Michael from Go4 then worked with Charlie to turn this design into a fully functioning WordPress-powered website.
• Since launch Charlie has maintained the website, calling on us if he needs help
• In 2010 Charlie came up with a new design which he and Steve are working on integrating into the site. At the same time the focus of the site is changing to put more focus on blogging and to add some social networking goodness to hook up with the EYE Facebook Group.

Here are two easy ways to use Facebook to help promote your business website that won’t require much extra work for you.

1. Let people to be good sharers

Building in the ability for your visitors to quickly share something they see and like on your site with their network of friends on Facebook (or other social networks) is a simple and effective way to getting your content spreading through those networks.

It works like this

1. We set up the ability for people to share your content on your site – this adds some little icons to the bottom of your pages and posts
2. A visitor to your site sees a page or post they like on your site, clicks a ‘Share on Facebook’ icon and is taken to their Facebook page where your link and a summary is prepopulated for them . They hit the button and you’re shared across their network. Easy.

   

2. Publish in two places at the same time

It’s pretty easy to to set up a Facebook page for your business. But how do you integrate this with your existing website without making a huge workload for yourself?

We can set up your website so that whenever you publish a post – like a blog post or news item – it’s also automatically published to your Facebook account at the same time (using a tool like Wordboooker). If you allow commenting on posts on your website you can also have any comments made on Facebook appear on your site too. Here’s how

1. Compose your post on your website normally
2. Check a box at the bottom of your screen to tell the post to be published to Facebook as well as your site
3. Hit the button and you’re done

Want to know more? Contact us or request a quote.

From the end of August 2010 we’re no longer going to be doing any further development on websites built with the older Snap CMS system. If your website was built in 2007 or earlier this probably affects you.

We want to reassure you that if your website does use Snap CMS it won’t stop working or change in any way after August 2010. We do also need to let you know that we won’t be able to do any further work on it for you or provide support.

In many cases older sites can be rebuilt using the newer system, which will give you the benefit of the latest technology, an easy to use system and lots of options for integrating newer features of the modern internet.

We are offering our valued customers generous discounts on rebuilding and advice on other options should this not be feasible.

More reading…

More about this change

Frequently asked questions

Experiences of customers who’ve already upgraded

Request a quote for an upgrade

Thanks to the wonderful Rebekah and Guy, the long-suffering Annette and my patient girls and the cool calm and collected master deskmaker Ben Watkins (he’s available, but not for long).

We’re pleased to announce that you can now access your Go4 Mailouts stats on your iPhone or other mobile device.

As users of the system are aware the reports available after you send an e-newsletter or email marketing campaign are pretty comprehensive, showing for example how many people have opened messages and when, how many have clicked on links in messages and which ones (see Go4 Mailouts screenshots).

Until now you’ve needed to be at your computer to access these but stats-obsessives can now check in with them on the road.

iPhone users – if you like you can even make an icon on you home screen by going to your login page in Safari and choosing ‘Add to home screen’. Very slick!