Your ‘Follow Us’ button is a Social ‘Leak’ from your site

It seems harmless enough.  A cute little blue bird.  An inviting come on: 'Follow Us on Twitter'.  Who could resist?

And, everyone's doing it, right?  Even the cool sites.  So what's the harm in putting a little 'Follow Us on Twitter' button on your site?

That innocuous little button is worse than you think. It's akin to a termite colony.  Watch.  If you click on the bird above, you will leave the site!  You will end up on Twitter.  Which is cool, unless you are the site that was just left.

If you're a publisher, it's tough enough to attract visitors.  It might have been a link in an email or a tweet that motivated your visitor to come to your site.  Whatever it was, they made it there. And if you are advertising-supported, you want them to stick around.

Of course you also want them to follow you on Twitter - if they don't already - because that means they might come back when you tweet a link.

So it seems that the button is a no-brainer. Do you have a choice? Yes. Ditch the button.  Plug the hole in your site.

• The 'Follow Us' button leads people off your site - it's a 'Social Leak'
• It only serves one twitter feed - and if you have more than one, only the one you choose will get followers
• It doesn't monetize - and once it's used for following it's wasted space

LiveIntent has developed the only real alternative to the 'Follow Us' button.  The LiveIntent Window keeps people on your site, serves up dynamically generated Twitter accounts based on your visitor, and can be sponsored.

Ditch your button, get the window

The window in this example is approximately 300 x 550 pixels, contains two branding elements, three publisher accounts, and replaces space that had previously not been either monetizable or traffic-producing.

Compare that to the lowly 'follow us' button.

If you are interested in exposing more of your site's accounts to your visitors, stopping the 'social leak' problem, and generating revenue where there was only an exit before, please contact LiveIntent!

Want to ‘embed’ your tweets? You can…

With both LiveIntent as well as Twitter.

The new LiveIntent window, going live this week across 25 sites, has tweets embedded.  A great feature that helps users figure out who to follow.

Twitter's getting in the act too, releasing a tool today that will allow sites to embed tweets into/onto their pages.

Business Insider has a great story here about it, along with a typically pointed criticism from @cdixon.  Here's a screen shot:

LiveIntent's embeds tweets in its new window.  You can't choose them now, but you can expect curation features to come up later in Q2 or early Q3.

Twitter’s Monetization Message Resonates with LiveIntent

At the Twitter Chirp conference in San Francisco today, the crowd was regaled and reduced to silence by a procession of Twitter celebrities executives presenting their new initiatives addressing engagement ("@anywhere") and monetization ("promoted tweets").  For a 'developer conference' it sure seemed like a marketing conference triggered by Twitter's Board of Directors' urgency that the service fill some holes get serious about revenue.

Dick Costolo, Twitter's COO, spent considerable time today discussing 'resonance' and its importance to the promoted tweets offering.  Resonance, as cribbed by Techcrunch is considered the following:

• Resonance: measures ‘multiple axes of engagement’. Didn’t want to force companies to engage in one axis (e.g. a click or follower). There are different ways companies engage with customers. So didn’t want to be cost per follower. Resonance measures all the ways people engage with tweets. Replies, retweets, favs, hashtags, clicks on hashtasg, clicks of avatar, shortened links, impressions after retweet.
• Companies will have an expected resonance score based on past stats. A company can select multiple tweets to promote. If we see one or two start to resonate more than others, the one that doesn’t will fall out of rotation. Tweets that don’t resonate will disappear as promoted tweets. We will stop showing promotions that people don’t like. Those tweets are organic too, so they’ll still appear when people are following that account.

Wow.  How do you create resonance?  LiveIntent!

The LiveIntent window is a resonance creation machine.  As the accounts in a LiveIntent window (check this one out on Ziff-Davis' Appscout) are selected/deselected, followed (or unfollowed), or @mentioned, or retweeted, they develop a "follower quality score".  The "follower quality score" is similar to what Twitter is calling 'Resonance'.  "Follower quality scores" and 'resonance' are essentially reputation indices.  Reputation is predictive of success.

LiveIntent is in the business of creating the sort of signal that services like Twitter's 'Promoted Tweets' require of your account to be effective.  The users' choice in selecting, following, and engaging accounts through the LiveIntent window creates the sort of powerful reputation that would make a promoted tweet really sing.

While no resonance score is required to become a LiveIntent Sponsored Introduction, it's still important that your message resonates with your intended audience for it to be successful.  A successful Sponsored Introduction, where a brand bids for placement in the LiveIntent window to gain followers, helps a brand build resonance - and reputation - that can aid it when it wants to enter the Promoted Tweets game.

So if you are a brand, and want to gain the kind of credibility that is going to lead to success with Promoted Tweets, contact LiveIntent and we can discuss how we can create an engaged audience, resonance and reputation for you and your accounts.