Category Archives: Twitter

Social Media is the Brush, Not the Painting

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On one hand, twitter (or Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, etc) offers a positive change in business landscape, a brave new world of business possibilities, and you’re crazy to ignore it. On the other, it’s just a distraction, a shiny new thing, that gets in the way of the real business.

Can both hands be right? Yes.

The one hand: I spend hours every day now watching, playing, posting, and reading twitter.  That’s gotten me mentions in Business Week and The New York Times. I find myself speaking up for social media on public forums, spouting phrases like “changing business landscape” and “you’re crazy to ignore it” and “great new low-cost road to market” or “marketing tool.” Twitter is essential to my blogging. Its a window to what’s going on and who’s doing and saying what.  It’s great for my business.

The other hand: You can use it to send useless text clutter to nobody. You can use it to pretend you’re working when you’re just watching the world go by in cute sayings, headlines, and interesting pictures. It can be a total waste of business time.

The synthesis: Twitter is the brush, not the painting. It’s a tool for a new kind of self publishing with a different kind of reach. Talk of business benefits of Twitter are like talk of business benefits of the telephone, or of conversation, or of advertising. It’s all in how you use it. Who or what are you trying to be in Twitter, and what does that have to do with your identity, your message, your business, your self.

Tools enhance power. What matters is not the tool, but what you do with it.

(Image: enhanced from a photo by Victures/Shutterstock)

2 Pictures, 200 Words, Lots of Ideas.

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Pictures, words, ideas. If one picture equals 1,000 words, how many ideas does it generate? Is there a transitive property there? I had time over the weekend to pick up two unrelated pictures. Each covers something entirely different. Both are full of ideas.

The first, a chart by Seth Godin:

From Seth Godins Blog

From Seth Godin

This is one of those things that must have been hard to come up with, but makes sense when you look at it. A map of communication. On the horizontal axis of the chart, from book on one end to a conversation at the other. With a book, the writer writes it at one point in time and the reader reads it at an entirely different time. With the telephone and coaching, both parties of the communication, sender and receiver, are involved at the same time. On the chart’s vertical axis, how much bandwidth is involved, from mail and graffiti at the low extreme, to movies and coaching at the high extreme.

The Second, from Pingdom:

from pingdom.com

From pingdom.com

This one is one of several on that post — Report: Social Media Demographics 2012 — that are fascinating to me. As always with this kind of research, accuracy depends on how they sampled, but even if it could be off by a bit, it still gives a big picture of the main social networking sites (which is what I assume the acronym SNS stands for) usage by age. I have no conclusions to draw, but maybe you do. Apparently the more well-known platforms have older users, except Twitter spreads out over more ages. That same post has some interesting data on usage by gender, as well. Good stuff.

Our Recommendation About Your Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn

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Earlier this year I was in a classroom full of entrepreneurial MBA students, as a guest speaker, answering their questions about me and Palo Alto Software and bplans.com, my blogging, and so forth.

When they asked me how I managed my online self in social media, my response went something like this:

I don’t do social media clutter. I think of social media as publishing and I try to offer nothing that isn’t useful to a reader. When I’m on Twitter I tweet only what interests me and might interest somebody else. I highlight blog posts I wrote and posts I read that seem worthwhile. I ask questions. I sometimes share something useful about business planning, or small business. I use TweetDeck to manage my Twitter self, and I set TweetDeck up to share that with my Facebook and LinkedIn pages.

Several of the students seemed troubled. One of them asked: “So you never post anything personal? What about who you really are?”

And I realized, with that question, that maybe I was lucky. I got into social media late in life. The topics I care about are business related, and my friends are business related. I was already a published author and business owner. I wasn’t ever tempted to post the kind of personal stuff that gets younger generations in trouble. I was always aware of it as publishing, not just gossip. Most of the students, on the other hand, started on Facebook as high-school or university students. Facebook was fun first, business, if at all, only as an afterthought, later.

So here’s my advice: your social media presence is public. It’s publishing. Never clutter it up with personal trivia, much less drinking parties, embarrassing pictures, inappropriate comments, or anything your adult self might not be proud of. Use phone, sms, and instant messages for playing around with friends. Build a social media presence you’ll be proud of when your next prospective employer, boss, or client looks into it.

Oh, and by the way: you don’t have to call it personal branding. You can just call it taking care of your reputation.

7 Easy Steps To Make A Simple Twitter Profile Page

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This particular one – 7 Easy Steps To Make A Simple Twitter Profile Page is three years old but still easy to follow and useful. And it keeps its promise, giving us, literally, seven easy steps. So I’m recommending it here.  

As an aside, I like this writing:

They used their logo and then coordinated their Twitter page colors.  Bing, bang, boom, DONE!

And I also like the author’s bio at the end. She says:

Jo-Lynne Shane has written 3062 posts.

Impressive. And that was three years ago. Like she says in a different context, bing, bang, boom, done. 

They used their logo and then coordinated their Twitter page colors.  Bing, bang, boom, DONE!

The Really Simple Math of Social Media

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Here’s a walk down memory lane. Those basic math properties we had to memorize in the seventh grade. chalkboard

Transitive Property of Social Media

This one is taken from the transitive property of equality, which, in case you don’t remember your seventh-grade math, is that if a = b and b=c then a = c. For social media that’s

If social media increases transparency, then it’s as good or as bad for your business as is having the customers see you better.

I kind of like this. In the old days, we saw the business as what its advertising agency and marketing budgets were able to construct for as its facade, also called brand. Nowadays, to the extent the business is operating in Facebook or Twitter, we get a better view. Is it still all corporate and snazzy and artificial?

People are discovering that they like the story and the people in the business, aside from its paid advertising. I’d like to think this helps real people, and small business, compete against manufactured images and big marketing budgets and large business. Fingers crossed.

Applied Elasticity in Social Media

According to Wikipedia, elasticity is the ratio of the percent change in one variable to the percent change in another variable.

According to me, elasticity in social media means that the percent change in the number of active social media participants will be matched by the percent change in the number of social media experts and social media coaches. So the active social media population will always be 50 percent social media experts and 30 percent social media coaches.

Oh-oh. Does that sound cynical?

(Image credit: Marc Dietrich/Shutterstock)

Infographic: How to Optimize Your Tweets To Increase Engagement

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Our thanks to SocialMouths, where we found it; and to Fuse Works Studio, who they say designed it, for this Infographic. I like the surprises it offers, beginning with when to tweet. This one says Saturday and Sunday. Really? Maybe the explanation is that it’s about company tweets.

Don’t Ever Click These Links! Block and Report Spam

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Simple Twitter tip: here’s one example of a standard kind of tweet you should always immediately block and report spam. Here are the telltale characteristics: 

  1. Just your handle (mine is @timberry, which you see in this example) and a link. Nothing else. 
  2. A new twitter account with no face; just one of those egg pictures. 
Warning: don’t ever click that link! It’s either just spam or worse (worse than spam is malware, tiny programs that attack your computer). 
 
What to do? 
 
I recommend you do a public service and block and report these people to discourage others. You could just ignore it of course, but this takes just a a few seconds: 

  1. Click on the account name, as shown here … in this case it’s “Barrom Hall.”
  2. That opens up a quick profile, shown here below. Note in this case we see exactly what I expected. It’s a spam account, just created, with no real content, just spam tweets like this one, to other people. If I discovered this was coming from a more legitimate account, with history, and real tweets, then I might just ignore it. But this is classic Twitter evil doing: the account is just spamming people.  So you hold your mouse over the small silhouette  to open a drop-down menu, and choose “Report” as shown here. That will simultaneously block and report spam for that account. You’ve done good.

 

To be sure, this isn’t the only kind of bad tweets and spam to block. It is however, both the most common and the easiest to identify and avoid. 

Is Twitter Selling the Goose or the Golden Eggs?

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Just yesterday I was telling a friend that one of the reasons I like Twitter is choosing who I follow, and unfollowing the ones whose tweets I don’t like. And then I saw this…

… in my tweet stream this morning.

At first I was confused. I don’t follow Victoria’s Secret. I clicked on the account handle, and checked, to make sure. So why would I see that tweet? But then I saw the yellow “promoted” icon, highlighted in the illustration. Of course. Twitter is charging to put ads into my tweet stream.

I think Twitter is playing loose with its core value here. The follow or unfollow choice is a great anti-spam device. Selling ads destroys that.

“Monetization” is the web buzzword for figuring out how to make money from traffic. I don’t know what Twitter should do about it. I don’t blame them for trying. But I wonder how this can work. If they sell too many ads, they kill the value. If they don’t, it doesn’t make them money. That’s a tough business decision. Are they selling the golden eggs, or killing the goose?

Sorry, Marketers, You’re Doing Twitter Wrong

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Does this apply to you?

Most marketers are tweeting too much on the wrong days, not using hashtags enough and almost never do the one thing that will dramatically boost their retweets — ask for them — according to a new study looking at how marketers use Twitter from Buddy Media.

Maybe not. It’s about 320 Twitter handles from the world’s biggest brands. That might or might not apply to the rest of us. Still, this is interesting data:

 Twitter engagement rates for brands are 17% higher on Saturday and Sunday compared to weekdays. However, most brands aren’t taking advantage of this phenomenon and, on average, only 19% of the brands’ tweets were published on the weekend. If a brand spaced its tweets out evenly throughout the week, then 28.6% should occur on the weekends.

This is from Sorry, Marketers, You’re Doing Twitter Wrong [REPORT] published today on Mashable.

5 Social Media Marketing Myths Debunked

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Excellent! Read Evanne Schmarder’s 5 Social Media Marketing Myths: Busted on the Huffington Post yesterday:

Myth 1: Social media marketing is free.

Yes and no. It’s true that you can sign up and create a profile on popular platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Tumblr, and Pinterest for free. However, a monetary value must be placed on the time spent to develop the platform and the creation and implementation of an online social media strategy.

The truth is that time is money, and engagement takes time. Your persona needs to be developed and nurtured and constantly tuned and pruned. 

Myth 2: I’ll get a neighborhood teenager to handle my social networking, they know the ‘net.

Your social media communications plan must be as carefully crafted as any of your other marketing efforts. Not only should you not cede responsibility of your social media messaging to some young hipster that goes to school with your kid, you should tightly monitor all social media messages that come from your business or your brand.

Kids are great for coding and setup and such. But your online business persona is you and your business combined. You need somebody with judgment and experience if you aren’t going to do it yourself. 

Myth 3: If I get involved in social media marketing the ‘haters’ will hijack my marketing message.

Guess what, whether you are using social media or not, people are talking about their experience with your business. Creating a social media presence allows you to monitor what’s being said and offers you the opportunity to publically respond to less than favorable comments, winning the customer (and others that may have been swayed by the negative post) back.

The problem is not being there engaged in the conversation doesn’t mean they aren’t talking about you. It does mean that you don’t know it. Evanne cites the 2011 Harris Interactive/Right Now Customer Experience Impact Report to say that what matters is how you handle complaints more than the fact that people are complaining. 

Of the dissatisfied customers that post a complaint and receive a response, the study showed that 46 percent were pleased and 22 percent went on to post a positive comment about the business.

Myth 4: I built a Facebook page therefore I’m a social media marketer.

My response is a sarcastic “yeah, right.” And a blog post titled Social Media is Littered with Business Carcasses. Evanne says: 

Social media marketing — on Facebook and elsewhere — is not a ‘set it and forget it’ tool. It takes commitment, tenacity, time, and strategy to identify the best platforms for your business, consistently engage your target market, and develop business-driving relationships.

Myth 5: Using ‘friend-farms’ to buy ‘likes’ and ‘followers’ will build my business.

Fat chance. Evanne says:

It’s the same as sending a promotional email to an unqualified list. It’s dead on arrival, no matter how many addresses you send it to. You’d be much better served building your following by sharing relevant content, interesting news, and an occasional marketing message.

Social media is a powerful tool, fun, and worth the effort. But it’s also a great generator of myth.ÂÂ