Twitter is here and it is growing fast.  Some are still skeptical and others are forging ahead.  The thing about Twitter is that it is a low calorie service.  It takes very little to create an account and post a few messages every day.  If you run an ecommerce store, why not do something with it even if you don’t think it will make any difference.  What do you have to lose?  Not very much.

Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.

Or, said another way…

A mediocre plan that is implemented is far better than a great plan that is not.

Assuming that you have taken my challenge, what exactly should you do with your Twitter account? Of course you want to create your account.  Try to choose a name that is a good fit but don’t get too hung up on it.  The name of the game is to get followers.  To do that, you must provide information of value.  If all you plan to do is spew out yoru specials of the day, don’t bother.  I recently got followed by a Twitter account called “Jewelry and Watches”.  I took one look at their tweets and blocked them.  It is pure spam I tell you.

Enter a Bio

Statistics show that profiles that have a bio are more likely to get followed.  It’s only 160 characters.  It cannot be that hard.  Make your bio a real commentary about your e-commerce site.  Do not just cram it with buzzwords.

Follow Top Users and Your Followers

The more people you follow, the more followers you will get.  The ratio should be about even.  If you have 50 followers you should be following about 50 people.  The rules are different if you have a strong brand name or an advertising campaign.  Many TV news personalities now are promoting their Twitter accounts.  They don’t have to follow this rule.

Put a Link to Your Store

This is the simplest one of all.  Just do it.  Did I really need to tell you that?

Know Your Customers and Give Them Value

Your customers will be interested in valuable information you bring to them.  Beyond telling them what you have on sale today, give them some information on your industry.  This could just be links to articles.  If you write your own blog then you can tweet links to those articles.

Twitter isn’t the place to list all the widgets you are selling.  You will quickly get ignored for that.

Retweet Others In Your Industry or Your Customers’ Interests

Retweeting is sending a twitter message that came from someone else.  It is the main way that information spreads on Twitter.

Your customers will appreciate getting information from you.  Think about someone who sells cars.  What would his friends think if every time they talked to him he asked if they wanted to buy a car?  I mean every time.  Once in a while he might tell them about some special deal that they had.

Tweet About 20 to 30 Times a Day

You can go overboard with twitter.  Don’t over do it.  At the same time, you must have some activity.

What To Tweet

Keep things conversational. An old uncle of mine always said, “People buy from people they like.”  Someone does not have to know you personally to like you.  If you can give some aspect of personality in your tweets, people will feel more connected.  Try actually responding to people once in a while.  When you are tweeting, you are the individual, not the corporation.  No one ever had a conversation with a corporation.

You might consider doing discounts and specials.  Some ecommerce businesses have been successful with that.  Other brands send out photos or testimonials of real people using their products.

If you sell dive gear, tweet about great places to dive.  You will get more respect that way than talking about 10% off snorkels this month.

A coupon deal of the day has been a big winner for several internet businesses.

Remember, don’t over do it.  Don’t flood your customers with too much sales stuff.

I will be doing a presentation at barcamp orlando tomorrow.  For those who do not know about Webhooks, here is a brief overview.

Before I start, you should know that webhooks does not involve any particular technology.  It does not matter if you use PHP, C++, Ruby, DotNET, C-sharp, or any such language or system.  If you program for the web this is something you should know about.

Second, as a technology, it is easy to implement.  This is especially true if your software triggers on events and sends emails today.  In terms of technical difficulty, webhooks are very similar.

And now back to our regular programming.

If you are with me, I said webhooks are similar to sending email that triggers on events.  This is the difference. Instead of sending an email, you will send an HTTP POST.  “Hold on there” you say.  It cannot be that easy.

Webhooks are so simple it you’ll think it’s stupid

That’s the latest from Jeff Lindsay (Twitter: @progrium). http://blog.webhooks.org/

Webhooks are not rocket science.  It is their application in such a broad way that makes them valuable.  The way it works is that an application has an event happen.  This could be something like a task gets updated.  It then sends a message to a URL behind which sits a small piece of code.  That piece of code has to respond to the message in any way it wants.  The application that triggered the event does not care what the code does.  That is why the language it’s written in does not matter.  Use Ruby, PHP, DotNet, PERL, C-Sharp or whatever programming language you want.

The value of this really comes to light when you consider connecting up several different applications to make a super system comprised if several parts.

I hope you take the time to learn more about webhooks.  Years from now, these should be taken as matter of fact.

The ability to share information directly with others on the Internet is now expected. And users want to be able to share that information with friends and collegues easily. Every site of note either has ways to establish a connection to others or they are planning to do so. It is now an expected feature. What I intend to lay out here are the basic socialization features that site or service should have just to be in the game.

Identity

The first necessary feature is a basic identity. This might be the person’s real name or it might just be a non-identifying id or nickname of some sort. I would expect that this is password protected. There is a problem with each site requiring a user to create an account on that site. This eventually becomes a burden for the users. Even the most heavy power user will eventually have so many accounts all over that they will resist using a site that requires them to have yet another user name and password. Consider offering OpenID as an alternative so that users can use their login from an OpenID identity provider.

Profile

The site should offer a profile. This should let the user put in whatever information they would like. There are many things to offer in this area. It really depends on what the site is all about. Whatever information the profile allows there are some guidelines to follow.

Do not require a birthday. This has security implications.

All information should be optional.

If the profile has a place for specific information, be sure to offer a section for the user to share whatever information they want to share. For example, I have seen profiles that let users share their favorite movies, music, books etc. However, it did not have a place for me to share a link to my blog. Let users customize the profile.

The last item to mention is that a profile should let users control who has access to each profile component.

Connecting to Others

The site should allow users to connect to others for whatever reason makes sense for the site. This might be a connection to friends, collegues, or others with similar interests. The one thing that I am strongly against is asking users to enter their passwords for other sites. I still get alarmed when I see sites asking me for my Yahoo or Google username and passwords so they can import my contacts. This should NEVER be done. If the third party site supports OAuth, then use that.

Let users categorize or tag their connections. Make it easy for them to find all their connections that have certain characteristics.

Sharing Outside The Site

We can no longer live in an isolated world. A site should expect to share and interact with other sites. No one will want to input all their connections in every site they belong to. In a perfect world, I would like to make my list of favorite music once. And then share that information with other sites if I choose to do that. I should not have to input the same information separately into Facebook, Yahoo, Orkut, Last FM and so on.

Sharing means offering a web service so that third party sites can get to the user’s information. This means that a user may want to participate in a certain community provided by a site but may not want to actually go to that site on a regular basis. This one probably scares some site owners. The traditional approach has been to draw users to a site and try to keep them captive. The ability to do that is fading. Internet mind leaders have realized that this has to change. Oauth is the most glaring example of this realization and effort to switch to a new paradigm. The rest of the world has to catch up or perish. For example, users are realizing that it is not unreasonable to prefer to use Facebook as their primary interface and still use some other site for music. Or better yet, they are willing to participate in multiple social networking sites but only want to use one of them as their primary means of managing their social data. We all know that the customer is always right.

Interacting With Other Devices

The world is no longer made up of PCs sitting on desks. Phones, if they can still be called that, represent a huge means by which users interact. Relatively few of them use their phone to browse the web. I don’t see that changing. But, the use of text messaging and phone hosted applications is become more and more popular. Users of iPhone are familiar with this concept. The challenge is to come up with ways to seamlessly integrate these various technologies to make users’ lives easier.

In the end, any site owner should be concerned about one thing. Am I bringing value to my users. Make their lives easier. Let them connect and communicate with others. Don’t box them in. Let them be flexible. If they do these things, then the site will be a success.