Webnomena

Here are four simple ways to create tweets charged with valuable information.

Valuable tweets

1. Share news
   1. New tool, addon, web-site – like the mini launch of a new online real-time community, cliqset, or the re-launch of Pijoo as a purely content-driven service.
   2. New book, movie, album– the new Dan Brown The Lost Symbol (the bestselling author of The Da Vinci Code).
   3. Stats – up, down, on top – for blogs, for book, movie, album. Maybe how much a movie made in its first week.
   4. New Trending Topics – this is another way to break the news. Just look at TwitScoop tag cloud or Twitter Search Trending topics.
   5. Winning a prize – like announcing Hilary Mantel as the Man Booker Fiction 2009 winner
2. Connect the dots
   1. For new book, movie, album – add link to previous work done by the same creator. Example: similar to the way I just did with the Dan Brown’s example above. I made the connection to his previous work (it is not that obvious in many other cases).
   2. For a person add link to multiple places where she has presence on the web. If we take the Hilary Mantel as an example point to her Facebook page
   3. For a book, movie, album add link to coming event – something that take a little longer than Book Signing, The Dan Brown Way
   4. For news – add other items that can help understanding the context better. This is especially useful for sport event. Having the context make it a lot more interesting.
3. Connect people/Introduce
   1. For new band, author, producer, or actor, provide their twitter username (include the @). Example: The book the Lost Symbol has a twitter account @lostsymbolbook (administered by his US publisher, Doubleday)
   2. Point to hot discussion. Example: If you like book talks check #litchat
   3. Active #hashtag – not just the most active (and some times abused) from the Trending Topics. Find others from one of your twitter timelines or twubs.
   4. Engaging blog – blogs with lots of comments activity – use BackType. Example: I found this blog post Kiss “Sonic Boom” Review with 45 comments (the last one I saw was from October 6, 2009 at 10:25 pm). I searched BackType for CD review.
   5. Popular item: bestseller, popular on Glue, Amzon, B&N. Example: This is fairly trivial. Here is Amazon Bestsellers in Book page (hint: check how many days the book is in the top 100 – look for the more recent additions).
4. Compress (encode/decode) greater knowledge into short messages
   1. The best example that I could find is @cookbook – tweeting tiny recipes condensed by @Maureen. The owner of this twitter account built a @cookbook glossary that helps to convert the encoded recipes to real one.
   2. The second best example is StockTwits – here too, people found a way to communicate more than what the 140 characters allows.

Why?

• Because delivering value can really help you to get more followers on twitter
• Because if you use Affiliate Marketing links you can truly assist in the buying decision.
• Because it is a little more interesting than seeing the same 5 or 10 top bloggers being retweeted over and over again.

The secret for building valuable tweets

Closely examining my examples above, there are three key value drivers:

1. Search – finding the data. Access to great and trusted content sources is value.
2. Tying a couple or more data points together into a single piece of information (tweet).  Association is value.
3. Timing. Relevancy is value.

Additional ideas for building valuable tweets: attention, and help.

What other ways do you see for charging tweets with value?

If you liked this post please consider buying my eBook on Scribd: Timing the tweet