Aqua Pebble

Oct

26

My first Social Media pit stop was @twitter

October 26, 2009 | Leave a Comment

twitterAs I approach my jour­ney to demys­tify social media and how it can be used in busi­ness I look at this mono­lith in the face and pon­der where do I start? I don’t have a map to fol­low and there is an over­load of infor­ma­tion out there. I decided to start with Twit­ter as I per­son­ally have some ques­tions I need clarified.

Twit­ter is a social com­mu­ni­ca­tion tool that allows 140 char­ac­ters per com­mu­ni­ca­tion (tweet). Your tweets are broad­casted to your fol­low­ers. Your Tweet stream is all the tweets you see when you go on your twit­ter home page and con­sist of replies, retweets (like email for­ward­ing but with tweets) and broad­casts from peo­ple you are following.

Before you embark on twit­ter you need to decide how best you can use this com­mu­ni­ca­tion tool for your busi­ness. I said I would find out how other busi­nesses are using twit­ter. I found this great arti­cle at Mash­able demon­strat­ing the ways dif­fer­ent indus­tries are using Twitter.

Some peo­ple use twit­ter to inter­act and oth­ers use it to purely inform or mar­ket. Most peo­ple say that purely mar­ket­ing and inter­act­ing will give you a bad name as it is a social com­mu­ni­ca­tion tool. The beauty of twit­ter is that it is instant short mes­sages. These can be used to cre­ate hype, used to adver­tise spe­cials, for cus­tomer ser­vice, press announce­ments, com­pe­ti­tions, research, pro­vide use­ful advice, to name some. I came across this Gart­ner report that out­lined four ways busi­nesses are using twit­ter.

My con­cern is time man­age­ment in all of this. How do I man­age all my social media with­out spend­ing all day on it or how do I man­age my twit­ter with out con­stantly watch­ing my tweet stream. I found a num­ber of tools like Tweet­Deck that help you fil­ter and man­age twit­ter. There are so many dif­fer­ent tools avail­able to help you man­age these. I found this list of 100 tools for twit­ter. I have also come across tools where you can inte­grate all your social pages onto one like Friend­Feed or Flock. You get tools like Ping that sends out a mes­sage to all your social mediums.

What then becomes clear is that build­ing a fol­low­ers list is like build­ing any mar­ket­ing base; it needs to be rel­e­vant to your busi­ness (or pur­pose) and it does not hap­pen over night (unless you fol­low the get rich quick ver­sion of gain­ing twit­ter fol­low­ers). Hav­ing ‘junk’ fol­low­ers is like broad­cast­ing on a radio sta­tion that does not serve your tar­get mar­ket. Your approach will depend on whether your mar­ket is nar­row or broad. There are sev­eral ways to get followers.

The first is to fol­low other peo­ple in your indus­try and join groups of inter­est. When you fol­low peo­ple a per­cent­age (seen any­thing from 20% to 50% thrown about) will fol­low you back. A twit­ter fol­low me but­ton on your web­site and pro­mo­tion of your twit­ter account in all cor­re­spon­dence. Take part in con­ver­sa­tions with your tar­get audi­ence and look out for social events (look for #’name’ to indi­cate events) related to your indus­try or tar­get audi­ence or cre­ate an event. And if you are a big brand you can even send out a press release (in con­ven­tional mediums).

I per­son­ally would rec­om­mend that you have a strat­egy about what you intend to tweet about rather than have ran­dom mes­sages. The 140 char­ac­ters lim­ited forces you to get to the point.

Once you know how you can use twit­ter in your busi­ness, have objec­tives and goals and a strat­egy you will want to mea­sure it. There are a num­ber of tools out there for mea­sur­ing twit­ter and pop­u­lar mea­sure­ments are: influ­ence, engage­ment, author­ity and reach. Now what you mea­sure will depend on your objec­tives. If you run a com­pe­ti­tion you may mea­sure responses (replies) or action taken, if you are dri­ving traf­fic to your web­site there are tools to mea­sure clicks from twit­ter, if it is purely to build con­tacts you may mea­sure growth in fol­low­ers. As for mea­sur­ing ROI you could mea­sure it in the same way as you do any other com­mu­ni­ca­tion chan­nel you use to achieve your objec­tives. I even found peo­ple extract­ing tweets to a data­base for analysis.

An impor­tant point I found a few peo­ple make was that you should reg­is­ter with as many of the social medi­ums out there, even if you are not going to use them, to avoid oth­ers steal­ing your iden­tity. A bit like buy­ing var­i­ous domain names.

Twit­ter is no magic answer to your prob­lems, how­ever it is a com­mu­ni­ca­tion medium that you need to be part of or keep an eye on and can cer­tainly be used as part of your mix to accom­plish your strate­gic goals. If you are not a leader in adopt­ing new tech­nolo­gies in your mar­ket, I would keep an eye on your com­peti­tors who are; else you may miss the boat.

Lastly if you find the jar­gon con­fus­ing here is a Twit­tonary to help you out.

I cer­tainly will be relook­ing at how I use twit­ter and test­ing some of the tools I dis­cov­ered after every­thing I have learnt. If you are still uncer­tain how you could use twit­ter as part of your busi­ness and mar­ket­ing strat­egy send me a mail and I will see if I can help you (free of charge). I hope this infor­ma­tion has helped you and if you have any­thing fur­ther to add I would love to hear your views. In my next post I will be look­ing at Facebook.

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