The Research Playbook

Posts Tagged ‘Twitter’

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Most of us would like to expand our sphere of influence or at least be noticed. If you have a Twitter account one of the ways you increase your sphere of influence is to have a growing number of followers. However, a more immediate way to have your voice heard by a new and sometimes large group of people who have tuned into Twitter is the RT. That is, your voice is heard by new people when someone sends your tweet to their followers or retweets (RT) your tweet.

When this happens the new group of Twitter readers are exposed to you and your message. The hope is they will become interested enough in you to follow you – thereby increasing your sphere of influence. If this is one of your objectives allow me to suggest a tried an true approach that is also easy to do.

Enter the “Quote.”

The use of a quote as a micro-blog post is very effective. It seems nearly everyone loves a good quote and when they read one they like to share it or in this case RT it. If you find quotes that relate to you and/or your Twitter “theme” than you may grab the attention of new and interesting people.

The quotes you select will suggest something about you and your interests, beliefs, or philosophical point of view. So carefully select the ideas with which you want to be associated.

Here is a quote I like and that I think defines how I see the world:

“It’s amazing how much you can accomplish if you don’t care who gets the credit.”  Abraham Lincoln.

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I think it’s fair to call Pinterest a phenomena given the short time it has taken them to go from start up to tipping point to critical mass. This networking platform has achieved remarkable success and as comScore reports, Pinterest has attracted nearly 12 million unique visitors in the month of January. There are already numerous articles and blog posts about this new network which began in May of 2010,  less than 2 years ago – now that’s a phenomena!

What sets Pinterest apart is its visual nature and with approximately 10 million members (and growing) it is not surprising companies want visibility for their brands on this site. Interesting content has gone viral more then once on Pinterest – what company would not want that to happen to them?

No other networking site has focused purely on the visual, which is a perfect fit for a company’s logo-brand building campaign. Pinterest has already gained the interest of and some very aggressive practices from well know brands. Companies are trying hard to use Pinterest as a venue to expose users to brand messages using the uniquely visual approach.

However, Pinterest is facing some issues. The interface is not as robust as some would like it especially regarding links to other sites like Twitter. Perhaps more importantly Pinterest must resolve the legal issue concerning pinning someone’s work without permission. It seems they need to be more like Facebook in this respect, though I’m guessing they would prefer to be less like Facebook in most respects. If Pinterest cannot resolve these issues quickly the growth they are experiencing now may not last.

While only time will tell if this “phenomena” has staying power, it certain is off to a very good start!

Currently membership is by invitation only, if you have not been able get invited contact me and I will happily set you up.

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This Twitter case study is another in a series of case studies demonstrating how businesses can grow a strong Twitter account and use it to gain advantage in the marketplace.

A small marketing and website design company in Virginia asked for help with their Twitter account. They simply wanted to build a well-targeted audience and use it to push people to their blog and help to create relationships with a broader audience. These are very typical objectives and very doable ones too!

The company had had a Twitter account for over a year and they had accumulated 449 followers and they were following 818 people.  We took over and quickly built the account to 1600 followers. However, at that point things slowed down and it wasn’t clear why. We investigated the follow-back situation and found that of the original 818 people being followed 427 were not following our client back and this had slowed finding new followers to a crawl.

Unfortunately, they had never inspected these non-followers and once we did a “purge”, our quest to build relevant followers was back on track. Within the 8-week contract period, we expanded the number of followers to 3,277. Since this client is familiar with social media, they decide to do the work internally going forward.

However, the company has suffered from its own success and, unfortunate, the account has not progressed , in fact, the number of followers has shrunk to just over 3,000. The reason is focus, if you don’t focus on the tasks of building your twitter followers you simply won’t see progress. Whether you go with the do-it-yourself or hire a social media manager the effort and resources applied will largely dictate the results you derive.

Please share your experiences using Twitter. How have you been able to build relationships?

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Here are five ideas for leveraging LinkedIn

This is not rocket science, but if you put these ideas into practice, you will see results.

# 1- LinkedIn is a network and a database. The network is structured primarily around profiles and group memberships and the information is stored in a database. Once you realize this, you can approach LI with an eye toward understanding how to leverage the vast resources it offers.

For example, if you have a solution (product or service) that can help CPG companies where else can you search for professionals in this industry, connect with them, discuss CPG related issues in discussion groups such as the CPG Supergroup! and find potential new hires? Don’t stop there. Ask questions through group discussions, use the Poll feature, and message your contacts fifty (50) at a time.
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Bloggers who “Tweet New Posts” can build larger and stronger readerships

Twitter is, in my opinion, a micro-blogging site and I am certainly not the first person to see it this way or to treat it as such.  However, many bloggers don’t appreciate the micro-blogging function and think of Twitter as something outside of the blogsphere.
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Recently we published a post on Tier-Two sites. Tier-Two Social Networking and Utility Sites

This post is a follow up to it and will be followed by more as the weeks roll on.

One of the newer sites to come onto the social media scene is Visible.me [don’t add dot_com]. This is a networking site that let’s you track activities across platforms. Visible.me. like other sites allows you to import profile data from other sources into your Visible.me profile.

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If you are reading this blog chances are good you have created a presence on one or more of the major social network sites (e.g., Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, or Facebook). However, there are numerous (and a growing number) of what I’ll call Tier–Two sites that may be just as important to meeting your objectives as these well known Tier-One sites are.

See this post for more information Powering-up-your-social-media-presence
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Situation
Recently a unique business specializing in helping companies develop communities and networks asked if we could help them improve the value and performance of a Twitter account they started more than 2 years ago. While they wanted help, the business owner was skeptical about Twitter. True they had a sizable number of followers [approx 4,000], but they attributed that to the success of their blog, which was syndicated and had over 30,000 readers.

We discussed options and suggested starting slow to give the owner time to become comfortable with our approach. It was clear that the Twitter account had benefited from the blog. However, the more typical path is for a blog to benefit from a Twitter account, that is, followers are introduced to the blog, rather than the other way around. With that in mind, we began our campaign to grow the number of targeted Twitter followers. We went about the work of providing useful and interesting tweets, some of which pointed followers to the blog where a much richer library of information was available.
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Situation

Mid February [18-Feb] 2011, the Galveston Island Humane Society wanted to expand its reach through social media. This is a non-profit organization and we agreed to help by setting up a blog and a Twitter account [we agreed to the work Pro Bono for about a year] With the help of one of Galveston Island Humane Society’s volunteers we began developing a Twitter account. Within three months we had over 7,000 (and counting, currently 9,200 ) followers, just in time for an important challenge.
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What do you think of the new Twitter interface? Do you love it or hate it?

Chances are few of us have that strong an emotional reaction. More like “It’s okay, no big deal, or I like it, let’s move on.”

For those of us that have been using Twitter for a long time (defined in Twitter years – not that long really) the new look was perhaps at first a little annoying, but only because it meant learning where all the functions were again.

It seems to me Twitter is trying hard to provide functionality to help both individuals and businesses. The newly organized interface feels more contemporary and user friendly. 

The future is uncertain, but building a strong following on Twitter is likely to be as important as any other social media marketing task.

He/she who has the largest audience has the power of the press! 

What do you think?