Using Twitter for business success recorded webinar - 12 March 2012

So what are we going to be covering? First we're going to start with the stats and facts
of what other businesses are doing on Twitter and really how you get started on Twitter.
There's a lot of noise around Twitter and I'm going to help you cut through some of
that. We're going to look at selecting an appropriate Twitter name if you're not already
set up on Twitter. If you are already on Twitter you may need to look at starting a secondary
account for your business or starting one in a more professional manner.
We really are going to look at some of the basics of getting you started the right way.
For those of you that are already using Twitter, I'm going to show you how to maximise it to
connect with people. I'm also going to show you all how to find people to follow, why
it's important to identify some key influences in your market and how to put your Twitter
marketing really, really on steroids. I will tell you that Twitter is my favourite platform
and it's one of the first social media marketing methods that I use.
I've been using social media since early 2008. I actually started in video marketing and
it was actually while training with a guru from America on YouTube marketing that I was
introduced to Twitter. At the time I thought 'Wow, that's great for teenagers but what
can it do for my business?' I saw a lot of noise around it and I learned to cut through
that. I now have a Twitter following in excess of sixty thousand people over several different
Twitter accounts and I'll show you why I've done that. I also have one hundred thousand
views on my YouTube channel along with thousands and thousands of friends and 'likes' on Facebook,
ClikPic, Linkedin, Pinterest, Google+ and you name it and I'm on it. The most important
thing for all of you to get from that is that I walk my walk and talk my talk. I have built
my entire business by using social media marketing and what I'm training you in today is what
I use in my own business each and every day to maximise my results with social media.
The very nature of this call and the fact that I'm working with The Creative Collective
was borne out of Twitter. They actually found me on Twitter initially to do some training
for them. She went to look for the most Twitter followers in Queensland to find that. From
there we've actually created a very profitable business relationship.
So, what is Twitter? Twitter is a social networking site combined with micro-blogging. Basically,
think of it like text messaging on the internet. You only have one hundred and forty characters
in your messages or less and it's really about what's happening right now. Twitter has been
used extensively in disaster relief efforts and things like that to let people know what's
happening. It originated in 2006 so it certainly wasn't the first social network to be created.
In fact, it's the most recent of what people would call 'the big four' which are Facebook,
Linkedin, YouTube and Twitter as well.
It's had a phenomenal amount of growth and there are a lot of businesses that haven't
yet caught onto the benefits of Twitter so that can be a massive advantage for all of
you that are on the call right now.
I've had a few questions coming through and I encourage people to pop those questions
in. 'Where do you get the time for all of the social media accounts?' Fred, I'm going
to show you today how to be really time efficient with not just your Twitter marketing but all
of your social media marketing. I'll admit I spend a little more time than most because
my business is social media marketing but I do need to make sure that I'm spending time
on the areas of my business that create the greatest amount of income and not just spending
all day and every day on social media. We'll definitely cover that for you.
Onto Twitter itself. Twitter now has over two hundred million users. Of those, one hundred
million are active users every single month and half of those log on daily. So that's
fifty million users a day. Of those two hundred million registered users there are one point
eight million in Australia. It's a small percentage I guess of the overall total but it's nearly
ten per cent of our population so it has had good penetration in terms of user numbers
in Australia. Twitter.com received about four hundred million visits a month, on average,
last year and it its' growth was about sixty per cent for the year. They're predicting
another twenty-five to thirty per cent growth this year so the growth just keeps going.
It's interesting for me that forty per cent of Twitter users don't actually tweet every
month but are there, what they call, lurking and watching other people tweet.
Onto some Twitter facts and specifically the ones for us here in Australia. Of those one
point eight million users in Australia, surprisingly for most people, the largest demographic is
in thirty to forty-nine year olds. That is followed closely by the eighteen to twenty-nine
year olds. Just by a show of hands, and pop your hand down if it's up from previously,
whose target demographic is in that thirty to forty-nine year olds or in the eighteen
to twenty-nine year olds? Lots and lots of you do. If you see there, too, the fifty to
sixty-four year olds are fast progressing as well. I think there's a perception that
Twitter is just for teenagers and as a mother of five teenagers I can tell you that they
don't generally turn on to Twitter until their late teens when they're starting to care about
the world around them and what's happening right now.
That's interesting; two thirds of you have that demographic. If your target audience
is using Twitter then it's a place that you should be marketing your messages in order
to get in front of them. It's also interesting to note that forty-three per cent of Twitter
users follow a brand, a brand or business, on Twitter for special offers or deals. Your
clients that are on Twitter are looking for your brand to give them something special
for their interactions with you on Twitter. We'll talk about maximising Twitter later
in the webinar but keep that in mind, that forty-three per cent are sitting there going
'I want to connect with you on Twitter because I get something different by using this platform.'
It's important that what you're doing is not just copying your messages from the other
social media networks but giving those clients and potential clients something special from
their Twitter interaction with you. In terms of what's happening right now, this stat here
that fifty-five per cent of users are accessing Twitter via a mobile platform, this is where
Twitter has seen massive growth in its' strength.
These are stats by a company called retrevo and at the bottom right corner there you can
see the whole study on their site. This one asks whether you check/update Twitter first
thing in the morning. The green is under age twenty-five, the blue is over age twenty-five
users and interestingly the yellow or gold on your screen is iPhone users specifically
looking at that one type of smart phone that they're using. You can see here that it tends
to be 'Before I get out of bed in the morning' with the young demographic. 'Yes, before I
turn on the television'; this is the one that people are first interacting with outside
media and it's evenly spread across the two age groups but massively increased for the
iPhone users. Importantly, 'This is how I get my morning news', and certainly for me
that is how I get all of my news. I don't watch network news anymore because to me it's
out dated news. I've already heard what's happening in the world as it's happening because
I'm connected through the tweet stream. In things like the Christchurch earthquake, the
Queensland floods and the Japanese tsunami people were tweeting from the scene, actual
reports, while the tragedies were unfolding. We also could prove the validity of those
reports by talking to people live, if you like, and tweeting from the scene.
Though that has shown a huge amount growth in Twitter for businesses, obviously, we're
looking at using Twitter slightly differently. Yes, Twitter can be great for tweeting from
live events, while we're on a live webinar like this one perhaps, to create the buzz
around your events, to get conversations going on and to have support in the background.
Also, you can be using Twitter to develop your brand, interact with your customer base
and track what people are saying from your customer base. In fact, having a look at the
bubble points that are on the screen, just pop your hand up if you can see something
you could use Twitter for in your business. Or perhaps type into chat if there is some
other reason that you'd like to use Twitter for in your business or that you're currently
using Twitter for in your business. I'd love you to share that with everybody as well.
For me, Twitter is also a fantastic way to get hold of search engine results. Twitter
ranks very, very well in Google and all of the major search engines and to be found by
people not just searching for your products and services but for you and positioning you
as a leader in your industry. Again, that's how the relationship and the joint venture
with The Creative Collective came about.
There are a few questions on statistics, 'Were they Aussie demographics or global demographics?'
The specific ones on retrevo were global demographics but the previous slide was all Australian
ones.
Catherine, you're using it to lead back to your website. Yes, I see Twitter really as
a touch point. I like to use the expression of throwing the cast net after bait and you
kind of drag potential clients and leads back to a property you own i.e. back to your website,
back to your other social media sites like Facebook etc.
As local government, Beth, you're using Twitter to reach a wider demographic in the community.
Yeah and potentially you could have friends of friends and people who know friends.
'Do we use our brand name for Twitter?' Robert, we're going to get on to that in a moment,
whether you actually position yourself or your business on Twitter as well. Fantastic;
let's get straight into that.
For those of you that Twitter is brand new to I don't want to blow you out of the water
completely, I want to really inspire you to get started with Twitter. This webinar is
being recorded and both the webinar recording and slides will be available in the coming
weeks for you to go over and review. If you're brand new to Twitter rather than go off and
do these things as I'm speaking I encourage you to watch the screen. For those of you
established in Twitter by all means log in and let's start using those hashtags. When
you first start to Twitter it's simple enough; go to www.twitter.com.
What I recommend you do is rather than try to put your full name or username on the front
page, click the yellow button here where it says 'Sign up for Twitter' and it will take
you through to this larger page here and it will allow you to play around with your username.
There are two parts to the Twitter handle here. The username is your Twitter profile
name, if you like, and then your real name is generally your name. If you have branding
on your business then your username should be as close as possible to what people are
searching for on your business name. When you come to enter your real name you can still
choose to enter a business name if you wish or it may be an individual that's very important
within the business. I could use 'SocialMediaShortCut' and I could either have put 'Zoe Wyatt' within
the business or I simply could have put Zoe@SocialMediaShortCut. The big proviso here is that you only have
fifteen characters for your username and twenty characters for your real name. In my case,
we'll talk about branding going forward, but I initially branded on my personal name and
I used 'zdeluca'.
The big challenge I've now come up against is I've recently married and my surname has
changed. I have a number of business entities so I'm actually going through a complete re-branding
exercise now. I have one Twitter profile in my personal name and I have another Twitter
profile for each of my business names because I have multiple business. I'm finding that
the interactions I have on each of them are different. The fantastic thing with Twitter
is that I'm allowed to have as many profiles as I like at this stage. What I encourage
you to do if you're not really sure at the moment is to go and claim a Twitter profile
for your business name, for your personal name and for any other inclinations of that
because what you can do, as I'm going to be doing with the 'zdeluca', is I'm going to
change that name but I'm going to keep a 'zdeluca' profile and simply have written on the top,
'If you're looking for Zoe deLuca she's now Zoe Wyatt and you can find her over here',
at my new Twitter handle. Keep people connected and not have people jumping on and using my
name for marketing.
'The US office does the same', that's great. B2B, business to consumer, business opportunities
tend to come from Facebook for you May. Yeah, I do find that as well although in terms of
events and promoting events it's very much on Twitter for me. We'll look at the ways
your business can benefit and how you craft your messages differently for those different
markets.
I've got a question here from Sue-Anne, 'How do you connect individual staff members Twitter
accounts to the business account?' You don't really connect them up in Twitter but I'm
going to show you a tool at the end where you can monitor what's going on. What you'll
find lots of organisations have done is allowed individual staff members, as we have at The
Creative Collective, to have their own Twitter profiles but then we make a abundantly clear
if they're working on Twitter as part of the organisation or not. A lot of media outlets
do this where they'll have the individual reporter using Twitter in their name but in
their biography they have that 'the ideas or views expressed are my own but not of my
employer'. Whereas someone like Dell has a number of key employees @dell written into
their Twitter profile.
To let you all know, there will be an extra ten minutes at the end for other questions
but I'm happy to keep taking questions as we go through as well.
Let's get to the language of Twitter. Twitter has a language all to itself and it's probably
the greatest hurdle for most people in starting to use the program. The interface has recently
changed to make it a little clearer when you're interacting on the site. They give you a 'Home'
page which has a news feed very much like Facebook if you're using that already. 'Connect'
is the @ symbol so again the same way you would tag people, think of the @ symbol as
who you're connecting to, who's speaking at you, about you and who's mentioning your name.
If you have the @Mention or @Reply it simply means the @ symbol followed by the username.
In this case it's @creativecollective and we could be saying I'm talking to you, about
you or replying to a comment that you've made.
In terms of the hash key that has now been linked under 'Discover'. The hash key is for
talking about a general topic or about an interest area that people are sharing. It
may be people sharing similar tweets to you, it may be the same industry or as I've recommended
for today the hashtag for this webinar,# #QldBiz. So everybody looking at #QldBiz and growing
QldBiz, not just necessarily on this webinar although it's a powerful tool for that, but
we can be supporting each other and growing QldBiz and using that tool every time I'm
putting out some sort of information that will benefit other Queensland businesses in
growing, accessing training or improving their bottom line.
I've got an interesting question from Fred here, 'Can you buy a name that is in use by
someone else?' It's actually against Twitter's terms and conditions to pay for usernames.
I have heard of instances where people have relinquished Twitter names, they've actually
signed them over to people. If there was money changing hands for that Twitter certainly
don't want to know about it, I will tell you that Fred, but I have heard of it occurring.
They really discourage that because there were a lot of people just doing what they
call profile squatting, going and securing a huge number of Twitter profiles. That's
why there are two hundred million users and only one hundred million active ones. I believe
there are a lot of people with profiles that they're just kind of sitting on at the moment.
If anybody is infringing your copyright or your trademark issue then you can apply to
Twitter to have those released and they will take them off the other people.
So, I was saying with the hashtag, great question from Eve there, 'In terms of #QldBiz does
it need to be capitalised or upper and lower case? Does it make a difference?' No, it definitely
doesn't make a difference but you will see that when I use the 'QLD' in capital letters
it does pop a whole lot more so I recommend when you set up your hashtags that you use
upper and lower case and encourage people to use that but your hashtags will be picked
up the same way in upper or lower case it won't make any difference. It's exactly the
same with your Twitter profile names, your Twitter usernames, as well. For me I have
'SocialMediaSCut' because it wouldn't so I put the first letter of each of those words
in upper case just so it pops from the page a little bit more as well. With QLD being
standard in upper case I would certainly be encouraging you to use it in upper case but
it doesn't really matter.
The last one here is a special one, it's #FF and it stands for Follow Friday. Hashtag follow
Friday simply means that on Fridays everyone gets out and makes recommendations of great
people to follow. I hear you all say 'What's follow?' So, on Facebook we have friends or
we have likes whereas on Twitter we have following or followers. The people you are following
are the people that you've chosen to read their tweets. You tick a little box to say
'I want to follow them'. The followers are the people that have chosen to read your tweets
or what you're talking about by ticking a little 'Follow' button. So following are the
ones you choose to follow and followers are the ones that have chosen to follow you. It's
pure and simple; following and followers. If you are both following a person and they
are your follower, they're following you back, then it becomes a reciprocal follow and you
can send each other direct messages. It's like both being friends on Facebook if you
like. They're reading your tweets and you're reading theirs and you can go and have DM's
or Direct Messages privately on Twitter.
If you have a #FF, or hashtag Follow Friday, then I will recommend #FF great people to
follow. I don't suggest you just do a list of Twitter handles like @'thetwitterusernames',
but rather you give that a context i.e. 'Thank you for interacting with me this week, great
people provide information on social media. It's fantastic to have these people on #QldBiz
webinars this week' and you could hashtag Follow Friday them.
Why would you do that? Because social media is inherently just that, social, so any interaction
or action that you would like others to take need to be doing those yourself first. If
you're saying 'these are fantastic people to follow and I recommend that you do as I
listen to what they're saying', then it's more likely that people will do that for you.
So, whatever action you want people to take then first of all, do it yourself. If you
want to recommend people or share great content, give them a Follow Friday recommendation or
simply thank them for following you or posting something you've already posted.
The last one there is this one here, Re-tweet, which is 'RT'. It simply means to re-tweet
or re-post something that somebody else has written. It's a uniquely, I believe, Twitter
phenomenon in that it's encouraged to directly pick up somebody else's post and re-tweet
it and spread it to your audience. It gives the post more life but it also says to that
individual 'I'm listening to what you're saying and I find it of value'. It's probably the
greatest compliment someone can give you on Twitter, to re-tweet your posts. While I don't
thank every single person for a re-tweet I certainly do so selectively. If you think
about the fact that I've got over fifty thousand on my personal Twitter account I can't be
thanking every single person that re-tweets me but I do look more heavily at their accounts
and decide whether I can be assisting them in growing their business as well.
So now that we've got some of those basics down let's get into it. How do you actually
leverage Twitter for business and not just for chatting? I'm sure you want to hear that.
First and foremost you've got to set up your profile really professionally and I'm going
to show you how to do that. You've got to establish your follower base or your 'twibe'.
Basically in Twitter language, anything you put 'tw' on the front of becomes a Twitter
word. We're then going to look at delivering quality content which is called a tweet. Then
engagement, interaction and connection; how do you build that community and how do you
get conversations going and how do you cut through the noise?
Eve has just said 'Like sharing on Facebook?' That's right; Twitter's re-tweet is really
like sharing on Facebook and it's super easy to do but also it's really, really strongly
encouraged.
Then we're going to finish off with management, integration, automation and transitioning
the leads back to your business and back to a property you own. That's the step that I
see people missing on Twitter as well.
I've already spoken about choosing your Twitter handle or username very carefully. A great
site I have for you on the screen here if you're looking at just starting your Twitter
or you're branding or re-branding as I am, is www.namechk.com. Be careful because it's
namechk.com, it's not a typing mistake that's really the website's name. This will show
you the availability of names across hundreds of social media sites and will even tell you
if the .com website address is available. A word of warning on this one, a little bit
of caution, is that it won't tell you if it's suitable for use on the site it will only
tell you if the name is available. If I had tried to put SocialMediaShortCut into the
name check it would tell me that username is available on Twitter whereas I know it's
more than fifteen characters. It's not perfect but it's a fantastic site. Try and get the
same name and the same branding across all of your social media sites i.e. www.twitter.com/yourname
and www.facebook.com/yourpagename as closely mirrored to your website address and your
email address as possible. Think of how it's going to look on offline promotions such as
fliers and business cards. Stay away from numbers, they look spammy, unless that's part
of your brand and stay away from underscores, dots and dashes. You can't have any spaces
in them either
By setting up your Twitter account… For those of you that are already on Twitter,
just pop your hand up for me if you have more than one profile, if you're running a personal
one and a business one. Okay, there are couple of you so we've got a few advanced users here
as well. Some of you may want to go back through and do this but this is a great way to separate
your personal and business Twitter accounts as well. Did you know that you can actually
change your design and customise your account? This is a really powerful part of Twitter.
For those of you that are already on Twitter, just pop your hands down again. Can you pop
your hand up for me if you've gone and customised your Twitter accounts; you've got your own
branding, your own background, you've changed the colours or done some of that work? There
are very few of you and in fact only a handful. This is vitally important and if you go and
have a look at Twitter profiles, most of you are going to get that nice clouds and sea
look with the blue Twitter background. You can actually customise it, as you can see
with The Creative Collective one here, way more than just a great profile photo in which
we've used our logo. I do recommend that if it's a business account. You can pick a design
for not just uploading a beautiful background but you can customise the font colours, the
link colours and really get them very close to your overall branding of your site. Although
people are coming to your Twitter site you still want to make them feel really comfortable
that they're in the right place. When you get to The Creative Collective's page it may
be 'creativecollective' at the top but we've branded it with all of our colours, it's orange,
it's familiar and you feel very comfortable that you're in the right place and connecting
with the right organisation.
To do that it's up in the top right hand corner of the navigation bar. Up here, under the
little down arrow, you'll find 'Account settings'. Click on, when it comes up, 'Design' and then
you can pick from a theme, you can upload your own and you can play with the customisations
in colours. It's fairly self-explanatory once you find where it is. Everything in terms
of your account settings is up here underneath the down arrow in 'Account settings' and you
can play with the 'Profile', the 'Words', the 'Design' and really make this look professional.
Once you have your account set up the way that you want it to look it's then important
who you start connecting with.
I did have a question before, 'How do you actually follow?' Fred, you've got two business
ones. Ray says, 'I have to go', that's great Ray we will have the recording as well and
pop any questions in before you go if you'd like to do that.
Eve, you're saying you realised your Twitter account is a real mismatched when it comes
to your personal and your business accounts. What I recommend you is you set up a new business
account and that's exactly what I'm doing right now, moving all of my personal branding
into a business account and I speak on my business profile a lot more promotionally,
about my business, training and things like that. On my personal account while I still
share tips for social media training, I'm more open in my dialogue and I'm more relaxed.
For instance, I sent a tweet the other day to the Queensland Police Media Unit, while
I was sitting in a traffic jam, asking them how long it was going to take to clear etc.
I don't want that sort of conversation or twittering on my business account as I don't
think it looks professional. I'm separating the two even though I'm very much my brand.
So when you come in here and start looking at who you can follow, I would suggest first
and foremost that you actually put about ten tweets on your page before you start following
people. The reason for that is you don't want people coming across and looking at your page
and going 'Oh, she hasn't done anything yet; why would I want to follow them?' If you're
not offering value then why would people want to follow what you're saying? When you're
ready to start following then come in and log in to your account. Up the top you'll
see a spot called 'Discover' and it will help you go through it. There are a number of ways
to do it. You can either go into 'Discover' and it will show stories and activities closely
related to what you're tweeting about. It will also give you an area where you can pop
on one of these and go across to an individual's Twitter account.
I will say here that the Twitter search function, which is the search bar at the top of the
account that you can see with the little magnifying glass, is a good place to look for a Twitter
username. If you know the exact username and the example I've used here and encourage you
to look at is BusinessQLDGov. That's for the Department of Employment, Economic Development
and Innovation, DEEDI, who are holding this webinar today. Go across and look at what
DEEDI are doing and BusinessQLDGov are doing because not only have they got great tweets
and great information going out but a lot of the people that are interacting with them
may be appropriate for you to build a network with or to be promoting to. I'm going to show
you how to do that in a moment.
If you know the exact name then the Twitter search is great. If you don't know the exact
name then I recommend that go across to trusty old Google and put in your best guess. I'm
looking for 'Queensland government business webinars on Twitter' and put 'on Twitter'
in your search and then you can look at the search results of the ones that actually come
up in Twitter.com.
Once you've located them in one of these ways then you can click on the individual name
that comes up here, it will bring up this little mini profile and you can simply click
'Follow'. If you want to know more about them then click on their name here and it will
open up their full profile. Probably the biggest question I get is 'How do I find people to
follow?' 'How do I follow the right people?'
Just by a show of hands; can you pop your hand up if that's a concern for you and if
you're worried about you just don't know where to start or where to go for people to follow?
That's a really common one, they're a lot of hands going up so you're not alone with
that one guys. You're really not alone with that.
I would suggest thinking about the some influences in your market. Who are the people that are
already doing a really good job with Twitter? If you don't know where to start then start
with BusinessQLDGov, with The Creative Collective and myself. We may not be the perfect influence
but it'll give you an idea and we could link you through as we have a huge footprint on
Twitter especially. I'd be encouraging you all to utilise that to your best advantage
as well. I'll just pop those hands down.
There are a lot of other search engines to be using to find followers. I've mentioned,
already, trusty old Google so 'business webinars qld government on Twitter'. The gold here
is the 'on Twitter'. The other one, too, is that you can put a Twitter name or topic anywhere
on Twitter. You could be looking at your product, your services or your geographic area on Twitter
as well. There's a site here called www.tweet.grader.com and what this does, it looks like this one
down here, is you can enter any Twitter name. You need to know the username first so you
need to have gone to Google or found them on Twitter. You can enter in their username
and find out how well they're doing on Twitter. Even more powerful, though, is if you scroll
down the bottom here you'll see that it shows the Twitter elite in the same region as these
guys. See here it has 'Twitter Elite Sunshine Coast', so you can click on here and it will
bring up all of the people in the geographic region. The other way to do it is by categories
on a site called www.twellow.com which is like a Yellow Pages for Twitter. How cool
is that? I love those two sites, you'll find plenty.
Once you do then you can be looking up related followers and this is the goal in Twitter.
So, I found, let's say, The Creative Collective and I went and followed them by the method
we just showed you. In their tweets here I also found who to follow. They've given me
some suggestions of some related followers. It brought up Business.qld.gov.au, which is
BusinessQLDGov for their Twitter username, and when I went across and followed them,
as I started showing you, I'll see they have 'Following' and 'Followers'. Here's the gold
in Twitter; you can legitimately lift your greatest competitors or people that are already
doing a fantastic job in your niche, or even those that aren't your competitors but have
exactly the same target market, you can see not only who they choose to be following on
Twitter but who is choosing to be their followers. If you click on their followers then it will
bring up this list in their account. So, click on their full profile and down to followers
and it will show you all of their followers. You can simply go down the page and click
'follow', 'follow', 'follow', 'follow'. You may want to click on some of these profile
names and see if they're appropriate for you and start following those ones as well.
How many of these people do you follow? Do you just follow them all? Well, it's up to
you but for me Twitter is a branding exercise. I am looking at large numbers so I'm going
for more to get to a mass market and I'm not too precious about who I follow. I won't follow
people that are obviously spam or porn and I generally don't generally follow people
that haven't changed at least their profile picture because that, to me, says spammy.
I'm very hesitant to follow anyone with numbers like mikeb26, mikeb27 and mikeb28 and if I'm
not sure then I'll click on their profile and have a look. You can create a great circle
from this as well.
Great question from Michelle, 'Do you recommend following competitors?' I do; absolutely.
I love seeing what my competitors are doing and it's one way where I can see what they're
up to and if there are opportunities. Also, if they have potentially the same target market
as me then not only do I click on them and follow them but I click on their followers
and go and have a look at them. It's not like I'm going to drag their clientele over to
my office by simply connecting with them on Twitter but I am sticking up my hand and saying,
potentially, if their followers are interested in what company 'a' is tweeting about and
they're a competitor for me then they may well be interested in what I'm tweeting about.
Remembering that I can start following this, people, but it is completely up to the other
user if they become your follower, if they follow you back. This is the way start following
people.
The way get followers is to give them a reason. Provide them with great content. If you just
go and start following thousands of people and spam them with marketing and advertising
messages then no-one is going to become your follower other than maybe automated robots.
May said she's learnt a lot from her “competitors”, I agree May. Some of my key influences and
also other joint venture partners and people I'm going to events on I look at how the people
are using Twitter all the time and I learn a lot. Their marketing strategies can be interesting
to learn from as well. That's one of the strengths of Twitter; it's like having a little black
book opened up in front of you. Does this mean that other people can do this to your
business? Yes, it does. I wouldn't be carrying on important conversations on Twitter as it's
not the platform for that. It's for the buzz, the branding and the connecting. You can have
direct messages off to the side but I then always take that conversation back into my
regular marketing funnel i.e. an email, a phone call or a face-to-face meeting and not
having it in the open stream. I'm not going to discuss a client's project or resources
in the open stream on Twitter.
'Can you remove someone who's following you?' You can certainly block people, yes, you can.
'If you choose to follow people to they have to accept you before you can see their tweets
or can anyone and everyone see your tweets even if you aren't their follower?' You choose
to start following them and you'll automatically see their tweets unless they have protected
their tweets. You can actually protect your tweets and lock them up and only approve users.
If you're using it for business purposes then I don't suggest you do this because you've
broken it and now made a one way conversation and it's the greatest challenge actually getting
that follower base. Twitter is all about virality; you want messages to go viral with a retweet.
If you want followers, you want to open it up then what I suggest is you control the
content of those tweets. Don't be giving away anything that you wouldn't want your competitors
to know, for instance.
'What about if your account has been hacked?' If the account has been hacked I suggest two
things. You can change your passwords immediately and look at any of the computers that you've
accessed it on, particularly mobile devices. This does happen from time to time with all
of the social media sites. If you're getting messages sent out from your account then you
may even look at closing the account and starting a new one. For most people if you change your
password immediately and remove the virus from the computer or platform you're tweeting
from then you should be all set and ready to go.
For any of you that are receiving direct message, remember those private messages that I talked
about, that look strange like 'I've seen this blog post about you', 'They're laughing about
you here', 'I can't believe this photo was you' or 'Have you seen the horrible things
being said about you' with a link and you don't know the person, you've got no idea
then ignore it. Do not click on the link because the minute you do that spam will be sent to
all of your followers as well. It's like anything, buyer beware, and if it doesn't feel right
then it probably isn't. Don't be clicking on links that you don't know or aren't expecting
in direct messages.
'Can you back track or delete a mis-tweet?' Kiralee, you can. You can actually delete
it if it's gone. The difficulty with that is if the search engines have cached in the
meantime then it's still in the cache and there for good. I say to people 'Be very,
very careful with what you're doing in your tweets.' You can delete anything you've posted
but not anything that other people have tweeted to you, at you or about you.
Yeah, if you get a direct message from somebody you know and it still looks a bit iffy, May,
I'd be sending them a message, not clicking on the link, back saying 'Did you send a message
to me?' Even more so, let them know. If it's someone you know and there are weird spammy
messages coming from them then let them know that you think their account has been hacked
and let them know as quickly as possible. In the last three or four years of being on
Twitter this has actually happened to me once and it my audience that let me know it was
happening. We'll go onto posting messages and we'll move forward.
Once you've got all of these followers I suggest that with your following cycle manually be
going in and adding about twenty to fifty people a day, wait for people to follow you
back and if people aren't following you back then maybe they weren't the right target audience
for you. There is a two way conversation so I don't want to just be blasting my message
out; I want people to listen as well. I don't want to just be getting everybody else's messages.
For me, personally, I follow back everyone that follows me. The reason for that is I
think if they're willing to read my messages then I'll be polite enough to read theirs.
If they start spamming me then I block them, I un-follow them and I can even block them
and take it a step further. The reason you need to keep you follow to following ratios
consistent is that Twitter will allow you to follow up to two thousand people and then
they allow a ratio of ten per cent between how many followers you have and how many people
you can start following. This way you can't get onto Twitter and follow one hundred thousand
people and hope that a percentage will follow you back. So the first two thousand you can
go fairly freely on but then there's a ten per cent ratio. So if you have two thousand
followers then you can only be following two thousand two hundred. If you have four thousand
followers you can only be following a maximum of four thousand four hundred. You need to
make sure that you're not just mass following and then mass un-following to achieve this
because what you'll find, it's called churn and burn, is that Twitter will shut down your
account for doing that.
I don't recommend automated tools for that reason because it's too easy to have your
account shut down and you'll also find that your followers aren't even targeted. If you're
not doing at least a little bit of research and finding out if these people are likely
to be interested in your message then they're likely to be of little or no value to you.
'Can you delete tweets from other people on your own page?' On your wall, no, you can't
but they're not seen on your profile or on your newsfeed by your own followers, they're
only seen by you.
Also, participating in follow Friday is a great way to speed up your follower list.
I've had a few coming through on how to post and the simplest way is to post from the home
page on Twitter. Sign in to your Twitter account and put a post in. I encourage all of you
that have Twitter accounts right now to log in whichever way you normally do it. I've
given you an example message here which is 'Tks' and I've used 'tks' because Twitter
does use texting, plain type terminology because it uses less characters. I've done “Tks
@BusinessQLDGov”, remember that's the '@' mention so I'm talking to Qld government, “for #QLDBiz
webinar on Twitter for business – loved it!” You don't have to say exactly that
if you're putting something in but if you could use '@BusinessQLDGov' and '#QLDBiz'
it will be seen by everybody that's using the hashtags as well. You'll get a response
back and not only that but it'll allow me to go in and retweet some of your posts and
put them across in The Creative Collective's account and let's give you some massive exposure
for your Twitter campaign. Who'd like that, their tweet retweeted, on a Twitter account
that has fifty thousand followers? If you put something of value on there and thank
me for the webinar today then I'm going to retweet that if I find them. I'm going to
be inundated aren't I, but why not, let's give you some maximum exposure for participating
and moving your business forward with Twitter.
The other way is that you can use third party application tools.
The hashtag name is #QLDBiz and it means talking about a specific topic, niche or event so
we're talking about the QLDBiz webinars in this case. Okay, thanks Lena. Fred says, 'yes
please'. You want a retweet; okay.
The other way is to post from third party applications and tools and I'm going to share
with you in a few moments my favourite application tool. There are a lot of mobile phone apps
and I'll be honest with you, I rarely use Twitter.com itself. The Twitter mobile application
is not too bad and is a whole lot better than it used to be. I use a third party on mine.
Remember there's a one hundred and forty limit on characters so get used to using some of
the terminology. It has been shown to be better to use one hundred to one hundred and thirty
characters and not max out the one hundred and forty. The reason for that is if you fill
up the one hundred and forty and then somebody like me wants to retweet your it's going to
put RT and your twitter name at the front of the message and a part of the message cut
off down the other end.
Get in the conversations, use the @replies and #hashtags. For a little more advanced
technique for those that have been using Twitter for a while, did you realise that if you put
the @username at the front of your message that it's only seen by that individual's Twitter
profile? In my message if I'd said @BusinessQLDGov then it would have spoken just to BusinessQLDGov
and gone onto their Twitter feed. If you put some words in the front here then this message
will be seen by all of their followers potentially as well. Unless you just want to get that
person's attention and really speak directly to them then I recommend putting something
in the front here and then the @mention to them. There's a ninja tip for the more advanced
people.
Michelle has said, 'Do you have to know the hashtag address?' No, you can search for the
hashtag, it's normally in use. A more advanced technique when you're running events and things
is that you'll register the hashtag and give it to participants just like I've given it
to you today. You can search on Twitter and even better search on Google for 'what is
the hashtag for this event?'
What to post and when? On Facebook I say one good post per day but on Twitter you can get
away with a whole lot more. Be careful that they're spread evenly throughout the day.
Most people I see tweeting for business use about one to ten tweets a day spread across
the day when your audience is most likely to be online. Make sure they're not all just
self-promotional or marketing or advertising though. I use the thirty, thirty, thirty rule
for anyone that's done any training with me before. Generally thirty per cent is self-promotion,
thirty per cent is for promoting others and thirty per cent is in valuable content so
just finding value on information that is targeted to your perfect clientele that's
relevant.
I post a lot of information on Twitter changes and how to maximise your Twitter users. I'm
posting a lot of information, even on Twitter at the moment, about the new changes happening
on Facebook or how to maximise social media for your business. It's not all about 'You'll
find the answer here and come and buy the course from me' or 'Come and do my training',
it's about 'This will help you to utilise my product or service more effectively in
your business.' You become seen as an information source. You don't want to go so far the other
way that all you do is become an information source without promoting your business. I
would highly be encouraging people to ask questions, to respond to your @mentions and
be promoting the events you're attending so people can see who you're networking with
as well. Promote others and your content.
What are some suggestions? You guys can type in there things you're suggesting that you
could add in to your content. Or, the existing users, what are you already tweeting about?
What has been really powerful for you? They're using it already, someone's saying, and they've
connected the Twitter profile @QPSMedia. People are saying they're using it a lot because
it's helping people with what's happening on the floods and on the roads. That could
also lead you to other people in your industry in a similar area. That one's been good for
breaking news and comment. 'Changing industry legislation', that's an interesting one Sue-Anne.
You're really letting people know when things change which I guess is like me in my industry
and letting people know about changes on Facebook and social media. 'Video releases', I love
video releases, Fred. In a couple of weeks I'm actually doing video marketing and optimisation.
My gold on video marketing is to put your video up on YouTube but then come across to
your other social media accounts and promote the link that way. You can imbed it in your
link and then promote the link. My primary traffic driver for videos on my blog and on
YouTube is Twitter. It gives me far more referrals than Facebook but what I do find is that on
Twitter I can promote my video that's over on my Facebook page.
A little bit of gold for all of you in terms of promotions is that when I'm linking for
my social media I can send out a lot more tweets than I can put posts on Facebook without
appearing spammy. This allows me to provide a lot more content and also to be posting
the same content but at different times of the day or at different times of the week
and engaging my audiences on. I have clients in seven different countries and deal in multiple
time zones so I can actually post a link to a video on my blog maybe now at 10am or 11am
in the morning for my Australian audience but then do it at 4am to be hitting at the
ideal time for my audience in America.
I've been asked by Lauren, 'Has Kony 2012 been as big on Twitter as it has on Facebook?'
Actually it's been huge on Twitter and it was, interestingly, launched on Twitter first,
Lauren. It actually got tweets sent out on Oprah, Ryan Seacrest and a few of the big
names. They tweeted it and sent a link to the Facebook page. Anyone that hasn't heard
about Kony 2012 go and do a Google search on it after this. It's a worldwide phenomenon
on the power of social media. I want you to look at it as a business owner and think 'How
could I do the same thing?' 'How could I utilise it in a similar way?' You know what they did?
They got some key influences on their market, they got them to spread a very intentional
message through Twitter accounts that have massive followings and they linked that back
to their Facebook page where they gave the promotional message and where they delivered
the video. They then linked from there to YouTube. So Kony 2012 is the perfect example
of how to maximise social media but instead be putting your marketing and your services
in rather than the Kony message. I'm going to use it as a case study from here forward
because it's the ideal way to use social media to promote your business. While it doesn't
have to be as emotive as Kony 2012 because people don't need to have a stronger reaction
but it does need to have an edge to it so that people sit up and take notice.
Lauren has said, 'I just mentioned that a lot of big celebs tweeted Kony 2012, should
you be following celebs?' My business intent says to me that celebrities aren't a key influencer
in my market so I don't. I have some because I want to see what they're actually talking
about. We've heard a lot about Charlie Sheen winning and those sorts of guys like Oprah
etc. If Oprah is a key influence for you then yes, by all means. If she's got the right
target clientele then that could be something for you. I'm not really, Beyoncé hasn't got
my clientele, interested in what she's saying so there's no real reason for me to start
follower her accounts and having that clutter up my stream.
Okay, Roger, you've had that hacking issue. You need to change your password as quickly
as possible and go back in and write a tweet. Just do an open tweet from your account to
say that it has been hacked, it's been fixed and ask your audience to not click on any
links in DM's that they've been sent as they're not from you. Ask them to 'Please retweet'
and put RT on the end of that so they'll get it across to other followers.
Kony 2012, May, is K-O-N-Y 2012. It's a great example and I encourage you to watch the video
too it's really quite moving. It shows the power of social media as it's happening right
now. It all started on Twitter and it is massive. Look for #Kony2012 and there's also #InvisibleChildren,
that's the organisation that's coming up behind it.
Let's look at some social media marketing tools before we move on to question time.
We've had a heap there in terms of how to post. My absolute favourite tool is a tool
called HootSuite. If you go to www.hootsuite.com you can sign up and you can have up to five
social media accounts on here totally for free. You're looking at one of my tweets here
in the HootSuite form. Each of these tabs represents a different Twitter account, Facebook
page or Linkedin account. Not only can I put one message in here and choose to send it
to different social media accounts but more importantly, for me, I can schedule them.
I can write a tweet right now and have it scheduled to go out at 7.30pm this evening.
In a more advanced training I do look at HootSuite analytics where you can look at when your
users are most likely online. You can look at the type of posts they're clicking on the
most and you can get some wonderful stats from this as well.
There's also a great follower management automation service available called SocialOomph. I don't
represent any of these companies. SocialOomph has some very basic free services but the
main reason that people use them is for if you want to auto-follow back. So if someone
follows you then you set it up so you automatically follow them back. That's about the only automation
tool that I do use on some of my accounts. You can also vet that account but purely because
my numbers are so large I don't want to spend all day and every day going in and following
people back. It is a paid service and is only a few dollars a month. So have a look at those
ones and their complete instructions are on the website. They have instructional videos
to set you up as well.
Just by a show of hands, can someone tell me if they're using HootSuite or any other
tools for those existing users of Twitter? It has an iPhone app as well; I love HootSuite.
Basically, I spend fifteen minutes in the morning and fifteen minutes in the evening
and that's my social media covered for the day. If I go into Facebook or Twitter it's
to socialise and not to do my business marketing. There are only a couple of you using HootSuite.
For the established Twitter users we've probably got about ten or twelve, wow. Go and look
at HootSuite.com. Are any of you using TweetDeck or MarketMeTweet or any of those others?
'They said I have Facebook feeding Twitter which in turn feeds Linkedin; good or not?
Should I be using HootSuite?' Vicky, I'd really recommend HootSuite. Facebook to Twitter,
Facebook messages automatically going to Twitter, is not so bad but you've got to mindful of
the fact that you've got a lot more characters in Facebook. If your Facebook posts are over
one hundred and forty characters long what happens is that only the first one hundred
thirty or so characters go on the tweet and then it has the link back to your Facebook
post. That link back to your Facebook post is actually really powerful. Never, ever,
ever go the other way guys; don't have your Twitter feeding your Facebook page. We've
just spent five minutes on the language of Twitter and probably a number of you are very
confused. Can you imagine taking that sort of language and ten or twenty tweets a day
and throwing them onto your Facebook page? It's just going to look like spam. So Facebook
to Twitter I don't mind but Twitter to Facebook is an absolute no-no.
With Linkedin, I wouldn't have anything automated going to Linkedin. Linkedin is a professional
business networking site so you need to be really selective about what tweets or posts
or messages are going to your Linkedin account. You can use some short cut keys and selectively
post to Linkedin. My recommendation, Vicky, is to get on HootSuite. Get into HootSuite
and actually decide to go over here and click 'yes', I've got Linkedin and this one is appropriate
for Linkedin.
JJ, you're asking 'What's a good way to delete people that have not followed you back?' There's
one called TweetFlitter. There's a super, super tool that I'll share with you all that's
not on the slide here but it's for the more advanced and it's called SocialBro. If you're
brand new on Twitter don't go and jump on that one as it will confuse you. SocialBro
is an absolutely awesome tool.
Matty, 'Is there any cost for HootSuite?' Up to five social media accounts are totally
free with the one user email address. If you want to put team members or anything like
that in then it becomes a paid service. You can get started for absolutely free and they
have videos to get you started, connecting your accounts and it's a fabulous tool. I'm
not making money from HootSuite at all, it's a tool that I recommend as it completely revolutionised
the way that I ran social media for my business and has cut down my management time massively.
I don't set up a client on a social media site anymore without building a HootSuite
account for them and teaching them how to use it.
Let's look at what we've covered today in terms of promoting your Twitter profile. We've
already covered quite a number of these but I recommend you get your Twitter links on
absolutely everything. Link it back to your website, 'find us on Twitter' and be adding
your posts. We've mentioned business cards and fliers. This one here is called a Wise
Stamp signature and it's actually an app that you can get. If you want to put Twitter in
your signature it's a really super easy way. I'd also be encouraging you to link it with
all of your other social media sites. We've mentioned how to re-tweet things across to
Facebook and to connect them.
Sue-Anne's asked me, 'How do you connect individual staff's Twitter accounts to the business account?'
You don't connect them as such, Sue-Anne. It's another reason that I actually like HootSuite
because you can go in and approve that one HootSuite account so you can look at what
each of the accounts are doing if you have their login details. If not then it needs
to be covered in the bio in terms of what role they're taking with the organisation.
Are they representing the business or merely representing themselves on Twitter? That's
a big part. You can have them all with a standardised name and a standardised hashtag and in HootSuite
you can set up search terms each time your business name or that hashtag is mentioned.
I recommend for each and every one of you to have Google Analytics. Yvette has mentioned
that previously in her other calls and I've mentioned it on Facebook as well. Google Analytics
can set up a search so you get a notification every time your name, your business name or
your product names are mentioned in the search engines as well.
There are a few more questions coming through so let's just follow up with the summary and
I'll get to the rest of those questions for you. For the newer people make sure you're
setting up a powerful profile, you're establishing your Twitter base and building your followers.
Then, most importantly look for those key influences you need and connect to those people
that are only valuable by way of creating quality content. Also, develop a strategy
for your Twitter posting so that it's ongoing, consistent and persistent. Investigate some
of those tools and applications that I've mentioned so that it makes management of your
account easier, you can do it on the run, you can schedule it in advance and sit down
on a Sunday evening. If you're going to schedule something to go out at a later date then make
sure you don't pretend that it's live. That can get you in a lot of trouble; saying 'I'm
sitting here doing this', while you're really not. Make sure you add your Twitter profile
to all of your marketing activities and not just saying 'Find us on Twitter' but putting
your Twitter username on that as well.
Onto some of those questions that you had for me; we've already covered a lot but I'm
going to go for more. Is there anyone that has audio that would like to ask me their
question over the audio? Sometimes it's a lot easier to ask the question than to try
and type it in a few words. Just put your hand up if you'd like to ask me a question
and I'll bring you up on audio.
Fred, are you there, I've got you unmuted. He doesn't seem to be coming up.
[Fred] Yeah, my question was, are there any good whitepapers on what you should say and
what you shouldn't say?
[Zoe] Oh, great question Fred. There are number of really good whitepapers and a company that
I really recommend is called HubSpot. They have a fantastic guide on using Twitter for
business including Twitter etiquette and appropriate language to be using. You can download it
completely free of charge and I recommend HubSpot for a lot of their marketing collateral.
They offer a social media marketing tool for standard price level one but their free training,
e-books, whitepapers and downloads are invaluable. Connect with them on Twitter too, guys, at
@hubspot. I highly recommend those guys as well.
[Fred] Thank you.
[Zoe] Thanks Fred. I'm just going to pop all of the hands down again because we have a
few up. If you've got a question you'd like to ask then pop your hand up again. Sue, I
just saw your hand go up. Sue, have you got a question for me?
[Sue] Yes, I have but I typed it in actually. I'd just like to know, if my business is called
Type Transcripts and my name's Sue Jacobs then what should my account name be?
[Zoe] What's your primary intent with your Twitter account? What are trying to achieve
with it?
[Sue] Well, to promote my business.
[Zoe] Okay, are you trying to get your business name, Type Transcripts, in as a profile name?
[Sue] Yes.
[Zoe] In the real name, do people generally come to you because it's Sue for the transcripts?
[Sue] No. Well, some do but some don't.
[Zoe] Yep, if you're integral in your own brand you might want to put 'Sue@TypeTranscripts'
but that wouldn't quite fit as we've only got twenty characters. For most people I'm
saying that it's easier for people to interact with an individual. It's much nicer for me
to say 'Hi Sue, thanks for the great work that Type Transcripts did' but you can still
put Sue in the bio information. Use Type Transcripts, put the real name as 'TypeTranscripts' and
then in your little biography, it's like an 'about' paragraph, say 'I'm Sue Jacobs from
Type Transcript, me and my team look forward to servicing you for all of your transcription
needs' or that sort of thing. You can still work it in so that if you sell the business
then you're able to change that bio without losing any of the collateral and the strength
and the followers on the Type Transcripts name.
[Sue] Okay, thank you.
[Zoe] Thanks for your question Sue. I've got a lot of people asking similar questions so
I hope that covered a lot of those. A few of you have to go but I have a few more questions.
'I have an old mobile so how do I tweet via that?' Cassie, it depends; is it a smart phone
and can you access the internet? If you can access the internet then you can certainly
just go to twitter.com on the phone. I don't know what version or variety of phone you
have, but most of the major smart phones that you buy now have the applications for Twitter
and the tools do as well now. For HootSuite you would have to download the app for your
iPhone or your Blackberry, they have android one as well. It's probably limited if you're
looking at an older Nokia as it's a service that may not be app compatible but if you
can still get the internet then you can certainly go to twitter.com. It's a lot more cumbersome
for you to do that though as it goes into the mobile version.
'Does Twitter have any pay per click advertising like Facebook?' Great question Tamara; they
have promoted links. You need to have a very large chequebook at the moment to access them.
They're looking at rolling out a mainstream platform that will more like a pay per click
model but it will actually be a pay per tweet model so it's more like pay per view or pay
per impression type one. At the moment you need to be a verified account manager to get
into those promoted tweets. There are a few grey hat services that tweet promotional messages
from multiple accounts. I don't recommend that you use any of them. I don't recommend
you buy Twitter followers as it's the quickest way to get your account shut down and all
it will do is give you warm, fuzzy feelings as your numbers are larger but the people
are not interested in your products or services.
'How do I add Google Analytics to my Twitter and Facebook accounts?' Google Analytics can
go on your Facebook page but it can't go on your Twitter profile. What I should have said
before was Google Alerts. Google Analytics is great on your Facebook page but the service
you want is Google Alerts. It alerts you when your business name, your product name or your
service name is mentioned. I think I might have said Analytics there before, my apologies
for that. It is Google Alerts that you want in terms of alerting you to what's happening
on what's been mentioned on Google.
'How do you create a hashtag?' Sue-Anne, that's a more advanced technique but you can certainly
Google it. You don't need to register it you can just set up your own hashtag. What I recommend
you do are two things. Have a search for the hashtag you'd like to use. Put in # what you'd
like, what it means and find out if someone else is already using it. Then there are a
number of places where you can go and register a news hashtag so it becomes convention that
it's yours although you can't actually own it. I recommend www.hashtag.org which is a
very good place to start. Google 'how to' or 'where do I register a hashtag?'
We also have a list of resources, help is available. You don't have to be alone in business.
This is an amazing resource, www.business.qld.gov.au. Of course, connect with BusinessQLDGov on
Twitter (www.twitter.com/businessqldgov) and Facebook (www.facebook.com/businessqldgov)
and maximise the potential for your business on the established foothold. Let the world
know that you're a forward thinking business owner and you're increasing your learning
through these webinars and the value you got from them. Show us what you're putting into
action on your own accounts so we can promote those for you as well.