Tag: twitter

Throwing the marketing baby out with the bath water…

| March 14, 2012

While search engines seem to be taking social signals into account, there’s no need to throw the marketing baby out with the bath water.

If you haven’t got to grips with social media marketing yet, you’d be forgiven for thinking you’ve missed the boat. You’d also be forgiven for thinking search engine optimisation is dead, as online marketers working at the sharp end head en masse, lemming-like, to new pastures like Pinterest.

Marketers have always had a tendency to drop proven tactics in favour of the next big thing. As an ex-marketer myself, I’m allowed to say that! But common sense is really important, however exciting things get.

All you need to do is join Twitter or Facebook to see thousands of brands fighting to gather as many followers and ‘likes’ as humanly possible. But how many of them have a handle on the real-life business benefits of marketing via social media? How many ‘likes’ and followers convert to enquiries and sales, ultimately improving their bottom line?

A recent report showed that 45% of Brits don’t want to ‘interact with brands’ via social networks. Which is no surprise when they were designed with pleasurable, personal social interaction and networking in mind, not sales and marketing. And while millions of us enjoy social networks, even more of us don’t bother.  When you concentrate exclusively on SMM, you miss out on a big pot of potential customers.

Then there’s search engines, who need all the information they can lay their hands on to help them classify, rank and rate websites fairly and accurately in a crowded commercial landscape. There’s no way they’re going to drop boring old search engine optimisation, inbound link building, unique content and so on from their algorithms’ repertoire.

If your online marketing agency starts making noises about shifting your entire budget into social media marketing at the expense of SEO, DM, SEM and other comparatively old hat media, just say no. Innovative new media like Pinterest might be shiny and exciting but they’re extras, not replacements. The jury is still out as regards solid, reliable, readily reproduceable empirical evidence of social media’s marketing effectiveness. As such it really shouldn’t be treated as a replacement for established, better understood practices.

I know I sound like a broken record. But the best marketers always TEST a new medium to the nth degree to establish its performance and potential beyond doubt before rolling it out. And social media marketing is no different.

As I’ve said a tedious number of times before, variety is the spice of successful marketing life…

(Thanks to http://www.sxc.hu/profile/mokra for the excellently funny free image!)

Is more than 230 Twitter followers ‘meaningful’?

| November 25, 2011

Apparently we can only maintain meaningful social interactions with 150-230 friends.

Does the same go for Social Media Marketing on Twitter?

We’re all human so there’s no logical reason to suspect we can handle more than 150-230 concurrent meaningful business relationships any better than we can personal relationships. And by all accounts we need to communicate meaningfully to make a commercial success of Twitter.

Thanks to things like Tweetdeck and Hootsuite, it’s good news for big brands and companies doing large scale, nationwide SMM activity. You’d go mad trying to interact meaningfully with all those followers without special SMM management tools.

It’s good news for local businesses, small businesses, sole traders and freelancers too, giving us the scientific green light to create small, relevant, intimate Twitter communities instead of feeling we ought to build and manage millions of followers like the big boys. Horses for courses.

Interesting times…

The twitter experiment – Warm glows and positive human connections

| August 5, 2011

It’s the end of my eighth week on Twitter and I’m starting to understand how linking with strangers and following their Tweets encourages goodwill and generates trust.

The effect is even stronger when someone re-tweets my stuff or sends a direct message; that nice, warm glow of goodwill you get when human beings connect positively.

I feel friendly towards Tweeters who make funny, entertaining, interesting comments. I’ve answered questions Tweeted by several of them and enjoyed more warm glows when they say ‘thank you’. I like their style. And if I ever need the services they’re offering I’ll be happy to put them on my short list.

People who Tweet for marketing purposes are by nature putting on a persona to meet the marketing needs of their business. Myself included. I’m not really being me. My Tweets are calculated to showcase a love of words, copywriting skills, direct marketing expertise and engaging personality (hah!). So in a sense it’s artificial. But I can feel it working all the same. And while I have my eccentricities, I’m ordinary enough to realise I’m probably not the only one enjoying warm glows.

All of which is good news for my Twitter experiment. Can I can turn it into a money-making machine for my freelance copywriting services? Warm glows or not, that’s my aim. We’ll see…

The Twitter experiment – A first time Tweeter two weeks in

| July 8, 2011

It took me a while to join Twitter. I wanted to see how the marketing land lay first. It’s been two weeks now. Here’s a quick run-down of my experiences so far.

I’ve gently built up just under 100 followers and I’m following about 110.

It’s quite time consuming finding people to follow but that’s probably because I’m not just following large numbers of people indiscriminately. I’m hooking up when I genuinely think they’re cool, interesting or useful.

I’m being followed by increasing numbers of young, scantily clad ladies. They come in clumps. This morning I had ten at once. There’s no details beyond a name. I smell spam. So I’m not going to follow them back. Instinct tells me I’d rather follow quality than quantity. To be honest, I don’t really know what effect following a load of fake tweeters might have, if any. But it feels like a good idea to steer clear until I do. I can research it online in no time – next on the list.

I’m tweeting a mixture of observations, a percentage of which have nothing to do with freelance copywriting, direct marketing or SEO. I’m going to sneak in one very soft sell every ten tweets or so. My strategy? To create an engaging, honest, non-salesy ‘brand’ (for want of a better word) that reflects me and my services honestly, accurately, consistently and creatively.

I started re-tweeting this morning. Rather than doing it willy nilly I’m passing on tweets I really like. One of them made me laugh out loud and I’m still giggling.  I was delighted to share it. The rest were a mixture of useful information, good causes and fun stuff.

I haven’t re-tweeted anything overtly sales-related simply because they’re not very interesting. It’s boring being sold to all the time and I’ve just about stopped taking any notice. I won’t be the only one, which probably means it’s best not to go into sales overdrive.

I’m very conscious of being myself. I’m a freelance writer selling ‘me’ – there’s no need to create an imaginary persona. If things work out my followers should eventually feel the love enough to get in touch with copywriting projects. Which’ll prove to me that Twitter’s a viable marketing and branding medium for my business.

I am loving the 140 character limit. I try to take it to the limit every time. The restriction is inspiring because you have to make your words work so much harder. At the moment it’s taking me about two minutes per tweet but I predict I’ll get much faster when writing to 140 characters becomes instinctive.

If all this sounds a bit ad hoc, it is. I’m the first to admit I like throwing myself in the deep end to experience new media first hand. I get to ‘feel’ how the medium works without any preconceptions. It’s much more fun than following a ‘how to’ guide. When I run across something I need to know, I research it. And I get to talk about real experiences, not just received wisdom, in my blog.

 

Harness Twitter’s 140 character limit to define web page content

| June 17, 2011

Harnessing Twitter’s 140 character limit to define web page content is an excellent way to clarify what you want to say.

If you’re having difficulties stringing content together, try condensing each page’s sales proposition Twitter-style. Stick religiously to the 140 character limit and it’ll force you to focus.

Can’t do it no matter how hard you try? Then you’re probably attempting to stuff too much information onto the page. Every sales proposition deserves space to breathe. Cramming in multiple propositions usually ends in tears.

You can even include a 140 character snippet at the top of each page, almost like an executive summary, to show visitors exactly what they’re about to read. The easier you can make life for readers, the more likely they are to stick around and buy from you.

Here’s one I could use to drive the content of my home page:

Expert, fast freelance copywriting services with a direct marketing focus – delivered cheerfully, creatively and competently every time, on time, within budget.

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