#TwitterSmarter Podcast: Clever Ways to Use ClickToTweet with Mike Stelzner [Episode 38]

Listen in iTunes, Soundcloud or GooglePlay

Michael Stelzner is the CEO & Founder of Social Media Examiner, the world’s largest social media marketing resource. I read his blog every day because it’s filled with the best, most up-to-date articles and information that pertain to the world of social media. Mike is the host of the Social Media Marketing podcast. He brings on expert guests discussing strategies and tactics that will help you take your social media marketing to a new level. Mike also hosts a weekly live video show called Social Media Marketing Talk with expert commentary on the latest news of the week.

In this episode, Mike shares insights into cool ways you can market your events utilizing ClickToTweet, which is one of my favorite tools. He breaks it down and even shares a cool hack that allows you to include an image. This is something I’ve never seen done before. Mike walks us through the process and I have to say, it’s quite simple. I can’t wait for you to learn about this cool tip and so much more.

Take a listen then follow these screen shots as I walk you through the process of adding an image to your ClickToTweet.
Listen in iTunes, Soundcloud or GooglePlay

Screen Shots Showing ClickToTweet and Mike’s Workaround Adding an Image:

1. This is Mike’s “Thank You” page when you sign up for his event. He set up this link using ClickToTweet.

2. You are directed to a page with a pre-populated tweet. Click the tweet button and you’re done. This is a great incentive to get people who register for the event to share their excitement.

3. Here’s your tweet. How cool was that? You’ve made it super easy for people to share their excitement with a tweet. Thank you ClickToTweet!

4. So how did Mike get the image embedded into this tweet? The workaround is simple. First, post a tweet that has the image in it. Open the tweet up (we’ll use this tweet as the example). Click the pull-down menu and you’ll see “Embed Tweet.” Click that.

5. Copy the HTML code.

6. Paste the HTML code into a Word or Google doc or even in your email program. In this example, I’m in Gmail. I go to compose a message and paste it into the body. I do this just so I can sift through the code to find the “pic.twitter.com/ABunchOfLetters.

7. I’m now in ClickToTweet and pre-populating my tweet. I’m placing the pic.twitter.com link at the end. That’s it! You’ll click on “Generate Basic Link” to get a URL that you’ll share on your Thank You page (screen shot #1) or wherever you want to promote this. Pretty nifty!

How to Reach Mike Stelzner:

You can reach Mike Stelzner on Twitter @Mike_Stelzner and socialmediaexaminer.com.

Your Call-to-Action:

Your call-to-action for this episode is to take your marketing a step further by utilizing this method of ClickToTweet on your website. The best place is on a Thank You page. This can be for an event, like the way Mike uses it. Or when someone signs up for your webinars (I used it for that) and even purchasing your books or services. There’s no end to the ways you can use this method. It all start with ClickToTweet. Try this and let me know what you think by sending me a tweet @MadalynSklar.

Share The Love For This Podcast:

Want an easy “one-click” way to Share The Love for this podcast? Go here: www.madalynsklar.com/love to tweet out your love.

Win a Love Handle!

Thanks For Your Attention!

I appreciate you listening to this podcast, and would be extremely grateful if you would take a moment to rate & review it on iTunes. By doing this, more people will be able to benefit from the tips and tools shared in this #TwitterSmarter podcast series. Please also subscribe to this podcast while you’re there. It will ensure you don’t miss an episode!

I read every review that comes in, so please know that you have my sincere thanks! Not sure how to rate & review a podcast? Click here to learn how.

Sponsor:

#TwitterSmarter Twitter Chat:
Join our weekly Twitter chat where you go to learn and share Twitter tips. It’s every Thursday at 1pm ET/10am PT. We’ll also have Q&A’s with guests from the #TwitterSmarter podcast. Mark your calendar. You don’t want to miss this!

Most Recent Reviews on iTunes

Transcript:

Mike:
Hi, this is Mike Stelzner, founder of Social Media Examiner and you’re listening to the Twitter Smarter podcast with Madalyn Sklar.

Madalyn:
Hey, hold that tweet! This is episode number 38 with Mike Stelzner from Social Media Examiner.

Announcer:
Welcome to the Twitter Smarter podcast where you get the best Twitter tips from the pros. Twitter expert Madalyn Sklar wants to help you take it up a notch on Twitter. In each episode of this podcast, you’ll walk away with actionable tips that you can start using right now? So are you ready to get Twitter Smarter?

Madalyn:
This episode is brought to you by the #TwitterSmarter Twitter Chat. Did you know this podcast had a chat? If not, you are in for a treat. Every Thursday at one o’clock Eastern , I host the #TwitterSmarter Chat. It’s a great community of people looking to connect, learn, and share Twitter tips. I hope to see you there. Now let’s get on to today’s episode.

I have such a great guest for you today. His name is Michael Stelzner. He is the CEO and founder of Social Media Examiner, which is the world’s largest social media marketing resource. I read his blog every day because it is filled with the best, most up-to-date articles that pertain to the world of social media. Mike is also the host of the Social Media Marketing podcast. It is truly the best podcast out there that will keep you informed and up to date with every single aspect of social media.

On today’s episode, Mike shares some insights into cool ways you can market your events using ClickToTweet. This is one of my favorite tools. Now he breaks it down, sharing details on how to set it up so that your tweet includes an image. Now this is something I’ve never seen done before. Mike walks us through the process, and I have to say it’s quite simple. I can’t wait to share this with you so you can learn this cool tip and so much more. Let’s go ahead and jump right in. Here is my interview with Mike Stelzner.

Hey, Mike. Thank you so much for joining the #TwitterSmarter podcast. I am so happy to have you here as my special guest. You’re doing some really cool things for your event utilizing Twitter. Can you tell us a little bit about this?

Mike:
Yeah. By the way, this is something anyone can do for any kind of product. In our case, we’re doing it for Social Media Marketing World but as I share this example, this can be done after any purchase of anything is made at all. What we do is after someone purchases a ticket to Social Media Marketing World, which is our conference, they’re brought to a page that gives them steps. It says, “Step one: book your hotel room, step two: share your excitement.” When someone clicks on that step two, what happens is it pre-populates a tweet, and this works on desktop or mobile, and it just basically says, “I’m attending Social Media Marketing World.” It has our hashtag and then it has a picture and a Bitly URL. The end result of this is that usually after someone makes a purchase, Madalyn, they’re very excited about their purchase and this is a way for people to let the world know that they’re coming. Because we attach the hashtag to it, it allows others to be able to see that these tweets are all coming together.

We take this hashtag and we embed a widget on the sidebar of our sales page so that all those tweets show up when people come to the sales page. It serves a whole bunch of purposes, like people that are thinking about buying a ticket to Social Media Marketing World see all these people that just bought a ticket because we’re aggregating those tweets around that hashtag and it creates kind of a cool excitement for the person who just bought it, and it also does some free promotion for us.

Madalyn:
I love it. I think this is such a smart way to promote an event, and you’re so right. People are excited, and having that next step of, “Hey, I’m going to go promote this and all I have to do is just click a link and then it just pulls up the tweet,” you’ve done all the work.

Mike:
Exactly. We’ve done all the work and we’ve found that most people don’t even edit the tweet, which is hilarious. We’ve also embedded an image in the tweet, which I think is also something that’s kind of unique.

Madalyn:
It’s very unique. You’re the first one I’ve seen to do this. I’ve seen these types of pre-populated tweets, and I’m sure you’re using ClickToTweet, right, to do this?

Mike:
We are. We’re composing a tweet and then we’re going to clicktotweet.com, and we’re just creating a one-click tweet but ClickToTweet does not support images at all. We have a special workaround I can talk about if you want to know how to do it.

Madalyn:
I would love for you to share this workaround because it’s so unique.

Mike:
Okay, so first and foremost in order to put an image into a tweet, you have to first go onto Twitter and upload an image. What you need to do is you need to start by just going, for example, on your desktop and going to twitter.com and composing a tweet of any kind and uploading an image to that tweet. Once that’s done, Twitter goes ahead and actually creates a special URL for that image and it always starts with pic.twitter.com. What you got to do is you have to grab the embed code for that tweet. Now you can explain better than I can how to get the embed code. How do they get the embed code on a tweet?

Madalyn:
Well the embed code is just the URL from that tweet. You have to click on the timestamp of the tweet. In this instance here, I just took the URL of the pic for the image and it’s a tweet that says, “I’m attending” and a photo that says, “Social Media Marketing World, I’m attending,” but it’s actually getting the image off of here.

Mike:
Let me explain again. You start with just any tweet. It doesn’t matter. You can just say, “Test tweet” and upload an image. You grab the embed code for that entire tweet, you grab the raw embed code. You look into the code and you’ll find the URL for the pic, and the URL for the pic is always pic.twitter.com with a bunch of characters. You just grab that URL and when you embed that URL in any tweet, Twitter just knows to pull up that image. Does that make sense?

Madalyn:
Interesting, yeah.

Mike:
So what you’re doing is you’re kind of jerry-rigging the system a little bit here. You’re just taking a tweet that previously had been published, and if you take that pic.twitter thing and you just paste it into Twitter it’ll probably pull up the original tweet, if I’m not mistaken, that it came out of. Yeah it does.

Madalyn:
It does.

Mike:
The point is all you need to do is tweet once with the image that you want, pull up the source code, and then grab that pic.twitter.com URL out of that source code. That is part of what you use as part of the tweet that you compose in ClickToTweet. Does that make sense?

Madalyn:
Yeah.

Mike:
Instead of uploading an image into your ClickToTweet, you’ve just got a special URL in there and Twitter knows what to do with that URL and it auto-displays the image from the other tweet that previously happened somewhere else.

Madalyn:
That’s super smart because when somebody now puts this tweet out, it’s going to be not just the text; it’s going to have the image, too, which we all know-

Mike:
It’s huge.

Madalyn:
We all know that images are so important in your tweet, so it allows your tweet to stand out from the others because it has that image in there. That’s super smart.

Mike:
Yep, and it works like a charm. It makes us stand out, especially when you aggregate it with the Twitter widget because those Twitter widgets auto-display the image. It just shows up as if, “Wow, this person’s attending and they made a cool graphic.”

Madalyn:
Right. I love it, it’s so brilliant. You do such a great job with this, Mike, and are utilizing the hashtag which is great because that’s such a great way to bring people together for a conference. I was utilizing it like crazy for this past conference with the Social media Marketing World ’16. It’s just such a great way to connect with other people, so by doing this now, people that are registering now have that opportunity go. Most times, people go and look at the tweet that they just did and they’re going to click on the hashtag, and go look to see who else posted this tweet.

Mike:
Yeah, and this goes beyond events. Any product that you sell at the point of completion of the purchase on the thank you page, you can compose something very similar that says, “I’m super excited because I’m the proud new owner of blank,” whatever it is, and then get a picture of it. Follow this exact same philosophy and now all of a sudden, this person’s going to say, “I just bought blank,” whatever it is, and there’s going to be a picture of it. That is free advertising for you, whether or not you’re using a hashtag. Basically people are going to click on that. We have had a lot of people click on these tweets and it definitely has driven sales for us in a pretty significant way.

Madalyn:
Right. I have had people tweet to me from this because you also take it in another direction by having people tweet their favorite presenters. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Mike:
Yeah. Following the same philosophy that we want to make it simple for people to act, if you have a product that has a longer cycle to it, like people Social Media Marketing World tickets months before the event and there’s a lead-up to it. We have on our attendee information page, we say, “Tweet your favorite presenters” and we list out a whole bunch of the presenters. You click a button and boom, it will send them a tweet saying something along the lines of, “I’m looking forward to your session at Social Media Marketing World.”

Madalyn:
I love that, and you’re using it right now for Social Media Success Summit as well. Since I’m one of the presenters for that, I’ve been getting bombarded with those tweets right now, which is great.

Mike:
What’s cool is the presenters don’t even realize, you know? It’s all pre-programmed, but the person that clicks it. A lot of times, the presenters respond back. It’s just a great way to solicit interaction, and we also include the hashtag in those as well.

Madalyn:
Right, which is just again, super smart. I love how you’re taking marketing on Twitter to a whole new level. This is just great information. Now, you also have a special hashtag you use during the conference. Can you talk a little bit about that because I was not aware of this?

Mike:
Yeah. At Social Media Marketing World, we have a crazy number of tweets. 70,000 or some crazy number like that that happens during the conference because you’re talking about thousands of social media marketers and they go kind of hashtag crazy. When you have a lot of activity on a hashtag, it can get kind of hard to find special needs and in our case, we might have technical challenges with our people. For example, maybe there’s an emergency in one of the rooms or maybe there’s a person who’s lost something. We just came up with SNMW16 and then the word “help” all in one hashtag. We’ve got a couple of other different similar hashtags and we let everybody know in our conference guide that if you run into a snag, you just simply use this hashtag and our staff is monitoring that.
We’ve had people say that they’ve lost and found cellphones using this hashtag. It’s just been a cool way for us to give support to the special people that need it without having to cycle through tens of thousands of tweets.

Madalyn:
Right. I think that’s really a great way for an event, conference, whatever to monitor a hashtag. Put it out there and monitor it. As we all know with Twitter, it’s so great for real-time quick help, passing along news, things like that, so this is super smart during a conference. These are all really great ideas, Mike. I love this. I think our listeners here can take this information and use it for, like you said, not just for an event but also for anything that you sell. I hope that everybody here listening will take this information and implement this with the next thing you have coming up that you’re selling. Let Mike and I know how this is working out. Thanks, Mike, for sharing this. This is super awesome.

Mike:
My absolute pleasure.

Madalyn:
You know what’s funny? Here I’m saying “awesome” a lot. When you interviewed me for your podcast, remember how at the end you were like, “I just said ‘awesome’ a lot.” I realize I’ve been doing the same thing back. I keep saying “awesome” to all your stuff you’re saying, but it is great information you’re sharing.

Mike:
#awesome.

Madalyn:
There you go, there you go. Well thank you so much. What is the best way for people to get in touch with you?

Mike:
Well if they want to tweet me, it’s Mike_Stelzner. S-t-e-l-z-n-e-r. That’s probably the easiest way for someone to contact me directly. If people want to learn more about Social Media Examiner and Social Media Marketing World, just simply visit socialmediaexaminer.com.

Madalyn:
Excellent. Thanks, Mike. Appreciate this.

Mike:
My pleasure.

Madalyn:
What a great interview with Mike Stelzner. He shared an awesome way to market events on Twitter using ClickToTweet. It’s a pretty simple process, and as Mike pointed out, people are super thrilled after signing up and you want to keep that excitement going by utilizing this. Setting up the image requires just a little bit of work up front. I have screenshots in the show notes that will better explain it. You’re first going to do a tweet that has the image in it. Then you’re going to pull up that tweet and get the embed code by clicking on the tweet in the pull-down menu. You’ll click on “embed tweet,” and then you’re going to see a bunch of code. You want the part in there that has pic.twitter.com and then there’ll be a slash and some numbers and letters. I have found that a quick way to go through this is to copy and paste that code and open it up either in a Word or Google doc, or if you’re like me and you have Gmail open all day, go to “compose a message” and just pop it in there, and then you’ll see that code and just copy out that one piece: pic.twitter.com slash, and the letters and numbers.

When you go to ClickToTweet and you’re going in there and setting up the tweet, you want to be sure to post this piece of code, the pic.twitter.com, at the end of the tweet. Again, I’ll have screenshots in the show notes so it will all make sense. To get to the show notes, go to my website madalynsklar.com/twittersmarter38 because this is episode 38.

Now, your call to action for this episode is to take your marketing a step further by utilizing this method of ClickToTweet on your website. The best place is on a thank-you page, but it can be for an event like the way Mike uses it, or when somebody signs up for a webinar. I’ve used it for that, or even if they’re purchasing your books or services. There’s really no end to the ways you can utilize this method, but it all starts with ClickToTweet. Try it out. Let me know what you think. Send me a tweet @MadalynSklar. I want to hear from you.

Now before we go, I want to thank everyone who’s taken the time to rate and review this podcast in iTunes. It really means the world to me, and it also helps the podcast show up better in an iTunes search so that more people can find it and listen. Hey, you don’t want to keep me all to yourself do you? Let’s go spread the love, right? I would love for you to go post a review. I want to do a giveaway. I think this will be really fun. Randomly I will choose a winner each week to receive a free Twitter Smarter love handle. This is a cool grip for your phone or iPad. It makes it so easy to do one-handed texting and selfies, you name it. It’s also pocket-friendly too, like you can just put it right in your pocket and you won’t even notice it. I really love mine. I have fallen in love with this thing. I think it’s super cool. I had some made up that has “#TwitterSmarter” on it. It’s super awesome. If you want to go see what it looks like, go over to my website madalynsklar.com/lovehandle. Madalynsklar.com/lovehandle.

Here’s how you could win this. Here’s what you got to do. Follow these steps, and I’m going to randomly choose a winner each week: go to my podcast in iTunes, leave a honest rating in review. Do that first. Number two, before you click the submit button, take a screenshot of your review and tweet it to me @MadalynSklar. Third, I’m just going to randomly choose a winner each week. I will tweet out the winner. I will announce it in future podcast episodes. Start reviewing. Again, go see the love handle by going to my website madalynsklar.com/lovehandle.

That is it for this episode. Until next time, I’ll see you out on Twitter. Take care, everybody.

Announcer:
Thank you for listening to the Twitter Smarter podcast, where you get the best Twitter tips from the pros. Stay in touch with Madalyn on Twitter @MadalynSklar or through her website madalynsklar.com.