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By brantcooper, September 3, 2011 12:21 pm

Even since I began tweeting — as a non-early adopter in early 2009, btw — I’ve wanted to create a 10 steps blog post for something, because, well, because that’s what you’re supposed to when you blog, right?  So when my Twitter dashboard became a (brief) topic of conversation at the San Diego Tech Coffee meetup last week , an opportunity arose: a 10 steps post on Twitter? Damn, that’s social media gold right there.  And I’m after nothing, if not social media gold!

So I came up with 8 steps, which is 2 whole steps easier than 10!

But seriously, people.  I love Twitter, use it daily, and there is simply no doubt that I have benefited from using it.  Depending on your business, not only might you  benefit, too, but it might be required practice for you to be successful.

So if you have not taken the dive into Twitter, forget all the negativity you’ve heard and read on.

1. Determine why you want to use Twitter

I use Twitter for the following reasons (in no particular order):

• Build my brand
• Learn what to read from people I respect (I no longer visit my “blogroll”)
• “Socialize” (in a very broad definition of the term) with “real” people
• Participate & nourish specific communities, e.g, the San Diego tech scene
• Indirectly (mostly) sell products and services

I’m guessing some of your ambitions might fall within that list, but regardless, know what you want to get out of using Twitter.

2. Choose a client

I strongly recommend you don’t use Twitter’s web client.  In my view, you’ll be more successful if you segregate your Twitter feeds based loosely on the objectives you determined in Step 1.  I use TweetDeck and have used HootSuite in the past.

3. Follow

Follow people who will help you meet your objectives. Follow writers, journalists and bloggers you read, thought-leaders in subject matters you care about, and other influencers whom you think might tweet interesting stuff.  Don’t be concerned if they don’t follow you back.  Follow colleagues, peers, casual acquaintances and friends, but only those that are interested in or are somehow related to subject matters that concern you.

You can follow people outside those parameters, too, but be prepared for tweets that fit the Twitter cliche, e.g., “I’m flossing, but just can’t loosen that piece of beef stuck between the cuspid and first premolar.”

4. Create lists

Lists allow you to group tweeters by subject matter and “Tweetability”.  (Twitter allows you to NOT follow people, yet include them in your lists, which is patently absurd and leads to gaming of follows.  But that’s a different topic altogether.)  Create one list for your “Top Tweeters.”  I call mine “Watch” and I keep it private, in other words, others cannot see its members.  I put people in the list whom I am confident I want to read their tweets.  They are people I respect, thought leaders, influencers or simply good tweeters.  New tweeters have to earn their way onto the list.  Crappy tweeters who also happen to be “people I respect, thought leaders or influencers” are removed from the list.

I also have a list for people who tweet politics, tweeters based in Southern California, and news feeds.

Dave Churchville: In awe (with a tinge of fear) of the sheer number of columns in @brantcooper ‘s TweetDeck

5. Columnize your feed

Columns turn your massive, undifferentiated stream into digestible, information sources.  In TweetDeck, I have a column each for my lists:  ”watch”, politics, socal tweeps, and the newsfeed.  I also have a column for the standard Twitter feeds Mentions (of me), Direct Messages and “All Friends.”  Finally, I created 2 columns based on custom search queries:  tweets that mention hashtags #custdev or #leanstartup; and tweets about “San Diego startups.”  The number of tweets in each column is actually pretty easy to follow.

6. Commit

A change in behavior can’t happen by casually “checking it out.”  So maybe you don’t want to change your behavior.  But you don’t even know if that’s true until you truly give something new a shot.  Commit time to check your feed everyday for 2 weeks.  I don’t care if it’s only for 15 minutes.  Read tweets, read recommended posts, learn something new.

7. Engage at your own pace

Don’t tweet for the sake of tweeting.  Seriously, just don’t.  RT something you like.  Reply to a tweet if you have something to say.  You might not find your voice in the first 2 weeks, but who cares?  If you find what you receive valuable, you’ll come back.  Eventually you’ll figure how to give value.

8. Manage your feed

Graduate Tweeps from your All Friends and search columns to your Watch (Top Tweeters) list as needed.  Demote others.  You don’t have to unfollow, but if there is absolutely zero value to the Tweets AND no other value to keeping these people on your follow list, unfollow them.  You might want to follow people who are influential to you in some way, but they might suck at Twitter.  So keep them in the All Friends list.  You don’t have to worry about insulting them by unfollowing, but they won’t clutter your feed if you’re managing your lists well.

To be honest, I look at the “All Friends” feed the least. The most noise comes from the custom query columns.  But I find these easy to ignore, since my other lists contain the Tweeps I want to hear from.

For most people, the most difficult part is just getting started.  I’ve purposefully not addressed the etiquette of social media, providing value and all that, because that’s been written about several times before and is something you can worry about after you get going.  I hope to simply help you get going.  Start small, differentiate your feeds, commit to a small amount of time everyday for 2 weeks.

Let me know how it’s going!

Comments (6)

By brantcooper, July 19, 2010 1:23 pm

What are Market Segments Really?

I’ve written about market segmentation before both on this blog and as an important concept to understand in The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development. I think it is vital to grasp because it’s fundamental to achieving Product-Market fit and building a scalable business. I’m writing about it again because it has come to my attention that I have perhaps not explained one of its primary precepts well enough.

As I wrote before, Geoffrey Moore in Crossing the Chasm defined a market segment as:

* a set of actual or potential customers
* for a given set of products or services
* who have a common set of needs or wants, and
* who reference each other when making a buying decision.

Most of this is pretty intuitive. In a nutshell, a market segment is comprised of like buyers who share the same pain. But there’s more to it. The reference part trips some people up. The key point to understand is that the customers and potential buyers must be willing AND able to reference each other.

This doesn’t mean that two customers need to know each other or even speak to one another, but simply that one respects the opinion of the other for a particular purchasing decision and that somehow the sharing of that opinion happens. Go to any well-marketed B2B web site and you’ll see case studies of successful customer implementations, often arranged by vertical industry, because the decision maker in one company likely respects his or her counterpart’s decision making about specific products.

Note that verticals are not necessary to define segments, since for some products, buyers may not consider industry a significant factor. Same holds true for other classic market segment variables, such as geography and buyer profile (gender, age, income, etc.). Those factors may come into play, but only as defined by “willing AND able to reference each other.”

One can quickly understand the tremendous importance of social media marketing within the context of market segments. Facebook’s “Like” feature by itself instantly expands the scope of “sharing a reference” by several orders of magnitude.

Market Segments and Product-Market Fit

As you search for Product-Market Fit, you are likely to investigate multiple market segments. Ideally, you want to reach Sean Ellis’ 40% “very disappointed” metric in one segment. In other words, if you have achieved 40% across your user base, you still need to segment those users and measure within the segments.   You don’t want to find yourself in the situation of treating a group of users who are only willing to pay $5/mo — or nothing at all — with one willing to pay more.   By segmenting those users, you might discover a lower score among the group you assumed you were targeting. Or you might find your 40% “very disappointed” is in a segment that is ridiculously small or has no money. In this case, you might choose to continue to work to get over 40% in the more promising segment.

Market Segments and the Scalable Business

Simplistically speaking, your Startup becomes a scalable startup when you have learned how to acquire and convert a big (or multiple) market segments.  If you are raising money, part of your story should be detailing your target segment and how you will convert its members, as well as how winning this segment will lead to a scalable business.
As in the diagram to the left, you might find that your total addressable market (TAM) can be split into various segments.  The TAM includes all users who share a problem to some degree and who you believe will be receptive to your solution.  The level of pain might differ, however, between some identifiable groups of users.  The features required in the solution might also differ.  Further, who the buyer is, who they consider trustworthy references, and how they are acquired and converted (funnel) are likely not the same across all the groups.

Your growth strategy — how you build a scalable business model — will depend on your strategy to capture these segments.   Best practices dictate that you choose and focus on 1 segment at a time, the reasoning being that 1) you don’t have the resources to tackle specific functionality required by the different segments; and 2) you don’t have the resources to acquire and convert multiple funnels simultaneously.

Whether this is truly best practices depends on your startup.  How different are the feature requirements?  How different are the funnels?  How much bleed over into adjacent segments does your social media marketing provide?   For web-based business models anyway, as the costs of online marketing have decreased and the ability to track the return on your marketing dollars has increased, the need to focus on only 1 segment has diminished.  (When you are  first starting out, however, there’s still a lot of benefit to the learning that is accomplished by focusing on narrowly drawn segments.)

The one core principle that remains, however, is to focus on one core value proposition. If you start selling to a segment with a different need or change the product for a group of users because they’re solving a different pain, in actuality you are “pivoting.”   In this case, you are better off not serving multiple masters and must “fail one” in order to pursue another.

Market Segments and Early Adopters

Early Adopters are not a segment unto themselves.  Early adopters are those prospective customers who readily recognize the problem you are trying to solve and are often looking for solutions for themselves.  Early Adopters are important since they are likely closer to the pain then you are and will help modify and validate your core customer-problem-solution assumptions.   They will also likely champion your product if you are successful at solving their problem and will form the base of core passionate users you seek that determine Product-Market Fit.  In the early going, you will likely find that your early adopters represent different segments and you will eventually disappoint some of them.

I hope this clarifies some of my past writing on market segments.  What has been your experience?