blogs | Social Media Marketing

Twitter Tips for Beginners

We shared 10 Twitter Tips for Beginners on our blog at the Stratford Patch and thought we could go into greater detail on a few of the key points. Twitter can be overwhelming. Many of our clients have tried it and gotten frustrated or avoided it altogether. While we agree it can be overwhelming, using hashtags to help build your initial following and followers are great ways to start.

The Hashtag (#): Hashtags were an organic development among Twitter users. It is a way to search and be searched by keywords related to your business or area of interest. For example, marketing professionals may use #marketing or #contentmarketing as hashtags when searching or sending tweets.

Hashtags help narrow the vast amounts of information available.

Social media pros like @freemcauley use Twitter for searching much the same as others use search engines like Google. If you don’t want your tweets to get lost in Twittersphere you need to be using hashtags related to your tweet content.

In the beginning of your Twitter experience, hashtags will help you identify thought leaders in your field or area of interest. It will help you build a following of quality people, not just random users.

Quality Following: Because there is so much noise [information] on Twitter it is important to start your account with a quality following. You will have to do less cleaning up on your account later if you’re taking a targeted approach to following users.

Use keywords and see who is using them as hashtags. #Socialmedia and #marketing are two of our favorites for finding thought leaders in our target market and areas of interest. Bloggers may choose #blogging or #freelancelife as a place to start.

Run your account yourself before hiring a Social Media Manager. It is important to understand your business before handing off social media to someone else. Social media is a conversation with your clients/customers and prospects. Until your start-up has a clear vision and goals, it doesn’t make sense to pay someone else – You’re going to pay a social media manager to reach out to an audience that isn’t yet well defined for your business.

As your business develops there will come a time when you want and can afford to hire a social media manager. Until that time, keep following our tips and focus on growing your business. It will be well worth it later!

Twitter Tips for Beginners

Use of the hashtag
Build a following by following quality people
Run your account yourself…at least to start…so you can be targeted in your approach

By cynthia|Guest Blogger, Opinions, Social media|0 Comments

The Golden Rules of Social Media for Business

In today’s post, we want to take a step back from the nitty gritty of social media management and take a look at the overall encompassing rules. It can be easy to get lost in the minor details and accidentally lose sight of the big picture.

So without further ado, here are the golden rules of social media for business.

Listen

So many businesses miss out on one of the biggest opportunities that social media offers – listening. Conversations will no doubt be happening about your brand, so it’s vitally important that you tap into them. Whether it’s good, bad, or a mixture of both, you’ll pick up plenty of pointers for how you can improve the customer experience in the future. Monitoring the direct mentions of your business will be easy, but never forget that you should be looking further than this. There are several tools that you can use for measuring sentiment, though using the services of a professional social media management company might be the most effective option in terms of both time and money.

Respond

Conversations on social networks happen quickly, so it’s important that you keep abreast of your mentions and messages. You need to demonstrate that your brand is highly responsive and uses social media as an advanced communication tool. Whether it’s a positive comment or a negative one, respond as quickly as possible.

Add value

Social networks are not the place for selling. If you want to get noticed for all the right reasons, you need to add value to your audience and provide them with interesting and engaging content. So, imagine that you run an online make-up store. Rather than just promoting your products, you might provide make-up tutorials that explain how to get the latest looks. As a general rule, you should add value 80% of the time, and self promote just 20% of the time. This approach makes your sales messages much more credible.

Don’t spam

If you aren’t adding value, your followers will quickly change their minds and remove you from their feeds. Think carefully about the type of messages that you’re sending out and assess whether they could be viewed as spam. You should be updating regularly, but make sure it’s not just for the sake of it. Have something interesting to say rather than just constantly trying to get in front of people without any clear thought to the content.

Allocate the right resources

One of the main mistakes that business make when they embark on a social media campaign is that they simply don’t allocate the right resources. A good campaign takes time and effort, and you must fully anticipate how much you have to put into it. From the very beginning, work out who’ll be responsible for it and ensure that they have what they need. If you don’t have the resources internally, it might be a good idea to outsource your social media.

When you ensure that you’re following these basic yet highly important rules, you’re much better placed for success.

How does your social media campaign measure up against these? Will you be changing anything after reading this post?

By Ruth|Social media|0 Comments

The Mistakes That are Killing Your Social Media Campaign

Everyone’s talking about social media, but few businesses are actually reaping the benefits of its potential. According to a survey of Irish companies by Business and Leadership, 80 percent of respondents use social media in some way. While 70 percent of them say that this activity increases their brand exposure, only 36 percent say that it increases sales. This shows that the methods being used clearly need improvement.

Why doesn’t social media do more for businesses’ bottom lines? In many cases, it’s because the company isn’t going about their efforts properly. If Facebook and other social sites aren’t improving your sales, it’s likely because you’re making one or more of these mistakes.

Posting Without a Plan

Posting willy-nilly wastes money and time, according to Forbes. Like anything else, social media requires a plan for the highest possible success. If you’re trying to improve sales, don’t scatter your efforts in 10 different directions.

What makes social media tricky is the fact that people will tune out if you bombard them with too much advertising via your social channels. Instead, try combining soft-sell posts with regular online advertising. Regular advertising is more expensive, but it can be made more affordable if you use funding like low-interest business credit cards from American Express.

You Do Nothing but Advertise

On TV, people don’t like channels cluttered by ads. This is even truer of social media. An account that is all ads all the time loses the “social” part of social media engagement, and people will soon stop following it. Forbes likens such accounts to people who go to parties and talk about nothing but themselves.

Keep things interesting and personal on your business account. This is hard for older businesspeople to get used to, but it’s essential for social media success. People don’t sign up to see a stuffy corporate front or a billboard. They want to interact with real people.

You Don’t Pay Attention to What People are Saying About You

Social media is a great format for immediate communication. This means that it can be an excellent customer service tool— or the source of a sudden public-relations disaster. Have staff check all social media accounts multiple times per day and watch for complaints. If any complaints come in, answer them immediately.

You Jump On Complaints – and Then Drop the Ball

Nothing’s as aggravating as having some social media account person quickly respond to a complaint with some platitude, then do absolutely nothing to truly fix the problem! It’s worse than getting no response at all. Make sure your social media account handlers have the authority to provide real results. Simply responding in order to shut complainants up (and then going silent once the fire seems to have gone out) will backfire horribly.

You Make the Wrong Amount of Posts

If you post too little, people will think your account is dead and stop paying attention to it. Too much posting, on the other hand, is annoying at best. On a site like Twitter, where your posts may cause other people’s remarks to scroll off the bottom of the screen, it’ll cause you to be quickly dropped from users’ lists. People want to hear from you, but they don’t want you to monopolize their timelines. A basic guideline: no more than five posts per day, and no longer than two days between posts.

About the Author:

Jason Harrington

Social media is Jason’s forte. He updates his tweets and status every hour at least and every update pertains to a new advance in social media.

By cynthia|Guest Blogger|0 Comments