Guy Kawasaki on Twitter

While I don’t always agree with Guy Kawasaki, and I find it rather funny that roughly a year after I talked about AllTop and some ways to improve it those features showed up on AllTop. Guy Kawasaki, does have some interesting ideas about how to use Twitter as a marketing tool and I enjoyed watching this video of his talk in Vancouver on Twitter.

Some alternatives to the services he mentioned in the video.

Tweet Later - Tweet Later is similar to SocialToo, except it offers more options. Even the free version of Tweet Later is more feature rich allowing you to schedule your tweets, manage mutiple Twitter accounts. You can use Tweet Later to automatically follow people that follow you and unfollow those that stop following you. Not to mention the guys that run Tweet Later are from Canada so there is a good reason to use them right there.

Bit.ly - I prefer to use bit.ly for my URL shortener. It gives you some basic stats. No worry about ads. If you add your Twitter account you can tweet right from it. If you want to schedule a tweet you would need to copy the shortened URL into Tweet Later that can schedule tweets.

PeopleBrowsr - I like Tweet Deck, but I tend to like web browser based apps over stand along applications. When I discovered PeopleBrowsr I knew I had found my favourite Twitter client. It is not for everyone, but if you like Tweet Deck then you should give PeopleBrowsr a try. All you will need as a decent browser, like Firefox, Safari or Chrome.

TwitterFeed - He talks about Twitterfeed, which is a great service to automatically tweet your latest blog posts, the professional version of Tweet Later offers a similar service. You can use Twitterfeed to automatically tweet more than just your blog posts, you can set it up to automatically tweet any RSS feed. Every Twitter account creates an RSS feed, so in theory you could automatically retweet tweets from other Twitter users very easily. If you want to get a little more sophisticated run the Twitter feeds through Yahoo Pipes remove tweets you know you don’t want like @ replies and you can in theory automatically retweet as many users as you want on Twitter. Some people might be offended at this idea, so use with caution. I can only see the possibility. It could be useful if you go on hiolidays and actually want to get away from the computer. Sort of like an vacation auto responder.

There are lots of ways to use Twitter to market your website. I know some people will be offended by how Guy Kawasaki uses it, but I can see how some of these methods are worth trying. I think the trick is to actually be available to people when they do tweet you so your Twitter account is not just a mindless robot. There needs to be a person still behind the account no matter how you use Twitter.

Let the games begin! Do you think Guy Kawasaki’s use of Twitter is over the top? Spammy? Wrong? Right? What do you think?