Get Ready For New Twitter : Your 5 Point Checklist
December 15, 2011 at 9:00 am
Twitter was all a-twitter last week about the launch of New Twitter design layout which will empower brands to get their message across in a much more visual way when it comes. New Twitter hasn’t reached our shores yet, but when it does you should be ready. Here are 5 things to start thinking about between now and D day:
- What kind of avatar are you going to use? I think something more exciting than a logo is good, as it’s the main asset that people will interact with. But make sure the image you use works in real tiny size.
- What tagline do we wish to display across the top? You’ll of course be limited in characters, but here is a great place to distil your key marketing message. (Purists will of course be appalled at the use of key marketing messages on their beloved Twitter!)
- The promoted Tweet – now you can also control the first tweet that people see when they land on your page, and it gets displayed in expanded (or open) mode. It’s a good idea to give people a flavour of what you’re really about on Twitter and don’t just fill this with an ad type video. There’s great scope to be really creative here – you could produce a short ‘why follow us on Twitter video’, or post a beautiful evocative image that will make people click follow… highlight your most engaging and important content and better connect with your target audience. Given that images and video are no longer going to diplay as links on Twitter, you might want to reconsider your post types for this platform. Try and incorporate at least 1 or 2 pics or vids a few times a week so you break up the right hand side visually.
- Design skin: there is still room for beautiful design on the left, use it!
- And finally - make sure you include links to all your other digital addresses: Facebook, YouTube, etc.
How Electricity Companies Should Use Twitter
April 13, 2011 at 9:50 am
It’s quite simple really – there are only 3 competitors in the Irish market. Very easy to use Twitter effectively to listen out to people at their ‘point of need’. This could be negative….
Or, er, negative (I couldn’t find any positive tweets about Airtricity, Bord Gais, or ESB!)
Assuming that we’re ESB, the newly relaunched competitor.
How to find people who are itching to switch? And score some positive WOM while you’re at it
- Open up Advanced Twitter Search
- Do a search for “Airtricity”… you’ll find a lot of tweets coming up about the football league, and job ads, etc.
- Insert those words in the “none of these words’ box
4. Review your results. In the case of disgruntled customers, consider tweeting them with a special offer code. It’s very important to get your tone right. Be engaging, empathise. Whatever you do, don’t be too salesy. That will backfire.
5. For the example above about charging higher standing charges, I’d suggest tweeting “ESB standing charges X. Bord Gais X+2. Airtricity X+3 #we’renotsneaky“. Straightforward display of pricing, with a nod to the original tweeter’s use of the hash tag.
6. Wait for the person above to respond – because folks – this IS a conversation and that’s how conversation works. If they choose to engage with you (the brand), then you can come back with an offer code. See what they say, be polite, answer their question, and end with a call to action – preferably a trackable link – for making the switch.
7. I’d suggest creating a switching page on your website that is written to disgruntled Twitter people coming over. Everyone knows personalisation works, so why not write your body copy on this page to talk to directly to these people? All links to this page should be tracked so you can capture the number of leads you’re getting from Twitter.
As regards the positive WOM stuff… I use an example in training about how impressed I was when @VodafoneIreland responded to a tweet I made about Vodafone network being down, Twitter being all I’ve got. Vodafone tweeted me back a few hours later to say “we’re back on now”. That simple tweet was very effective. It turned a negative (the network being down) into a warm and fuzzy feeling (“oh they listen to me… they care…”). Whenever I share this story (telling people = positive WOM), course participants are always quick to jump in with similar tales of positive actions such as this. So apart from hoovering up leads by using Twitter in this way, you’re also generating lots of instances of positive WOM. I still believe that, despite what one of my more cynical buddies on Twitter had to say on the matter yesterday! What do you think?
I do hope you can understand my equation stuff above, I did go to seek out the electricity standing charges in Ireland to use real numbers, but it’s a bit of a minefield and I couldn’t get my head around it in the time I have now. I’ll come back to it.
Note the use of the hash tag. I will write about hashtags shortly. They are, simultaneously, the most abused, and the most well used device on Twitter. Hashtags were invented (by Chris Messina) specifically for use on Twitter. Sadly, they’ve been hijacked by overzealous marketers.
Finally, while you can create searches in Twitter applications such as Tweetdeck to deliver tweets to your app on specific search terms, the big failing here is that you can’t use negative keywords, and you cannot geotarget, so while you can set them up, you may be at risk of getting a whole load of noise. But if that’s what you want, that’s OK. I like the “since this date” feature in Advanced Twitter Search because you can task your team to perform this activity every couple of days (hoovering up sales leads!) – so all they have to do is insert their keywords since the last date they performed this search, and away they go
What about your business?
Are you using Twitter in this way, which incidentally is Number 3 on Mashable’s List of 9 Digital Marketing Lessons. Do you need a little help?
How Large Is Your Twitter Vocabulary?
February 8, 2011 at 2:44 pm
Lovely little app from The Times in which they analyse the language of your tweets and classify you… I’m delighted to see I’m a Word Nerd.
How do they calculate this?
It works by scanning your last 100 tweets, and comparing the words you have used with those stored in Google’s immense NGram¹ database – a collection of several hundreds of thousands of words Google has gathered from its Books project.
Foreign words, non-words (like ‘Lolz!’), and ‘stop words’ – words like ‘the’ and ‘and’ that are used so frequently by everyone as to be irrelevant – are first removed from the list.
A custom algorithm then calculates the distinctiveness of the words you’ve used by examining how frequently each appears across the books from which Google’s NGram database is derived. (A word that appears more frequently scores lower, and vice versa.)
You are given an ‘overall score’ based on the distinctiveness of each individual word in your tweets, and ranked in one of four ‘performance quartiles’.
Visit The Times Word Nerd calculator.
Great Things About Ireland Twitter Meme
November 17, 2010 at 6:42 pm
In case you’ve been living under a stone, you might have missed the good vibes and intelligent humour emanating on Twitter about what’s great about Ireland. Seemingly it was started by @shanehegarty at The Irish Times and it just ran and ran – mainly on Monday through to today. Here’s a list the Irish Times published of their top 50. A nice feel good but valuable insight too into what makes us tick.
Tags: greatthingsaboutireland, twitter meme
Proactive Use Of Twitter – Careful Now!
May 10, 2010 at 4:53 pm
I’m a firm believer that Twitter, when used correctly, can be a great customer service tool. For example, Tourism Ireland has notched up plenty of successes from engaging with people who tweet about coming to Ireland. Imagine this – you’re sitting at home in Washington and you comment to your mates that you’re looking forward to your vacation in Ireland. Next you get a tweet from Discover Ireland (who have checked your profile, see that you like hillwalking) suggesting some ‘off the beaten track hill walks’ that you might be interested in. You’re pleased. You respond with a question about them, and so a conversation begins.
This is how to do it.
In response to a tweet about ’9 days in Ireland in June’, read from bottom to top:
Here’s how not to do it!
Read this from the bottom up…
Sorry eircom! While it’s to be applauded that you’re using social media, I think your team need a little more training in what steps to take before actually engaging. It’s not a numbers game where you tweet to as many people as possible. It’s important to read the person’s profile on Twitter, click the link to their blog/website and get a feel for who they are. If you had done this, you’d know that Jon Handelaar is a very tech savvy person indeed who would not respond well to being marketed to during his busy day. 
Tags: proactive twitter, twitter fail, twitter for marketing
How To Get Followed On Twitter
April 13, 2010 at 9:29 am
Apart from the obvious – quality tweets – here’s what I look for when perusing follow lists and deciding whether or not to follow someone on Twitter:
- Location - fill it in, tell people where you are.
- Your last tweet will display when browsing lists of other people’s followers. I just followed someone whose last tweet was “can you tweet from prison?”! It kind of grabbed my attention. Similarly, if your last tweet is “duuuuddde…..” it’s unlikely you’ll get followed (by me).
- When was your last tweet? If it was more than a couple of days ago I don’t want to know you.
- Avatar - I’ll glance at. If your avatar is a default Twitter one or a potential porn merchant I won’t follow.
If I’m looking at you on Tweetdeck, I’ll click ‘view profile’ and have a look at all your recent tweets.
- If you use hash tags all the time, I don’t want to know. Useless filling up of space and irritating for your followers.
- If you only Retweet others I might think you’re a bot, so no thank you.
- If you only ‘open the conversation’, ie. do not reply to people or generally chit chat, then I’ll think you’re a PR company tweeting on behalf of your client (but one who doesn’t really get it… ) – then I’ll choose to just take your client’s RSS feed. After all what’s the difference?
Generally I’m looking for someone who has something to say, is there and is not hawking a product.
If this sounds like you, and I’m not following you (check it out here) - please tweet me using @maryrose and I’d be delighted to meet you! The only reason I’m not is because I turned off the ‘alert me when someone follows me notification’ a long time ago, so I fear I’m missing out on lots of potential new Twitter friends.
Tags: get followed on twitter, twitter followers strategy
How Not To Use Twitter
February 1, 2010 at 10:51 am
Back in the heady days of summer, I applauded Toyota Ireland for their use of Twitter and their innovative idea to promote the Toyota iQ by giving 4 bloggers the to drive and blog about for 6 months. They reached out via Twitter and selected four people (including myself) who would blog monthly and post about their experience of using the car. Good for link love and great for PR. It was an inspired idea.
Today I’m sorry to say that the very same people are to be noted for how NOT to use Twitter.
There has been a lot of media coverage over the weekend about the car recall Toyota. Toyota have had to recall several models due to an accelerator problem. On Newstalk this morning they were talking about the Toyota car recall. I’m sure it was on all the media – for many people (like me) I’d expect to be hearing about it online too. While the Toyota Ireland website has some information in its news section. There is nothing on Twitter.
There are countless examples of organisations failing to use Twitter during times of crisis management. The Channel Tunnel at Christmas was the most recent example and countless commentators have written about the lessons to be learned. Here in Ireland, Bord Gais are simultaneously lauded for their blogger/Twitter outreach programme last year, but knocked for forgetting all about it when people were wondering what was going on with the stolen laptops.
Now Toyota is making the same mistake.
Screenshot of Toyota Ireland’s Twitter page this morning, not a word about the recalled vehicles:
This is probably because Toyota Ireland have outsourced their “Twitter management” to an agency. The agency isn’t showing any pro-activity by contacting their client to see if they want to use this important channel to communicate with their audience. Toyota, God bless them, are probably running like headless chickens dealing with the crisis. I place the blame on the agency. They sold the Twitter concept in to their client, they should at least be assisting their client to use this new medium in this difficult time. I would love to be writing a post this morning applauding Toyota for their use of Twiter in communicating with clients.
Correction: I’m told that the agency:
ran the IQ competition with them on Twitter. We did not sell in Twitter to them as they already had their Twitter account running. We have no other involvement with their twitter account.
My mistake. I was obviously buying the portfolio propaganda which said:
Eighty:Twenty were briefed to create an innovative launch campaign for the Toyota IQ without any supporting media spend.
And no, I’m not being harsh, someone is not responsible for the management of the Twitter iQ launch campaign.
Last week I tweeted about my last Toyota iQ post and whoever was twittering for Toyota tweeted back (a day late) asking me (very directly I thought) if I was going to buy the car. As I had already had a discussion with Toyota themselves about this (and decided I needed something with a bit more poke), I went to DM on Twitter to say no. I didn’t want to embarrass my car benefactors by stating publicly that I didn’t want the car. But I was amazed to see that Toyota Ireland wasn’t following me, so I was unable to DM.
If you look at who Toyota Ireland is following – it’s a list of other Toyota offices and PR people. Not one of the bloggers they gave a car to. No car enthusiasts. No target market. Nothing.
If you look at the recent Twitter stream – the conversation is about pushing sales messages, every couple of days:
The only chat comes at the start and that’s when I told them they weren’t following me. And they got my name wrong.
So it’s another one to enter the Twitter Hall of Fail.
I really don’t understand how so many can get something so easy so wrong.
Tags: toyota car recall, toyota ireland twitter fail, twitter fail
The Most Comprehensive Research On Twitter Use – Ever!
January 19, 2010 at 9:20 am
Sysomos, a US agency, analysed 11.5 million Twitter accounts and produced a report in June 2009, the findings of which just don’t resonate with me to be accurate or truly representative. I’m sceptical because nowhere does it mention how the 11.5 million accounts were sourced. The following stats just don’t ring true:
- 72.5% of all Twitter users joined during the first five months of 2009
- 85.3% of all Twitter users post less than one update/day
- 21% of users have never posted a Tweet= 2.4 million of the sample have blank twitter pages?
- 5% of Twitter users account for 75% of all activity
- There are more women on Twitter (53%) than men (47%). – that’s not my experience of it, and it’s certainly not what’s showing in Ireland’s most influential (see below)
Apart from the 4 companies on there, they are all men! Source: WeFollow.com
They’ve Got The Average Age All Wrong
“Based on a sample set of users who disclosed their age, 65% of Twitter users are under the age of 25.”
But only 0.7% disclosed their age, it was optional. Would the correct statement on this be that, of the participants who completed the survey or allowed access to their Twitter page, only the 25 year olds were happy to say how old they were!
Many under 25 year olds are college students. I’ve been reading a lot about college students and their habits this year as they tend to be the most typical sample used in academic research. They are big on IM and texting, loving Facebook, but not so into LinkedIn or Twitter. It would be interesting to have run the research on this same sample about LinkedIn – there could be shocking headlines now “0.005% use LinkedIn more than once a month” – which is clearly not the case!
Consider the graphic below – look at the high proportion of 15-19 year olds – again I ask Where Did They Get Their Sample From? High school prom night?
5% Make The Most Noise
Sysmos discovered that 5% of users accounted for 75% of all Twitter activity.
A closer look reveals that nearly all of them are bots operated by hotels, news and weather services, financial aggregators, and tagging sites such as del.icio.us. You’d expect they’d have removed the bots from the sample and reported on the top 5% of non-bot users? But no they didn’t. Probably because it wouldn’t have generated such an interesting headline.
I’m not celeb-lover but I have been known to browse the mags while getting my hair done – and yet I have never heard of 3 out of the 5 top celebs. Have you heard of Tyrese (@tyrese4real), Alyssa Milano (@alyssa_milano), or Tila Tequila (@officialtila)?
There’s a whole lot more, but really it’s quite underwhelming. Read full research findings here.
And so the quest for realistic Twitter research continues…
Tags: Twitter research
My 3 Years On Twitter
December 7, 2009 at 9:17 am
By Bernard Goldbach, aka @topgold:
Bernie’s been using Twitter three years now and he wrote a good and succinct post about his thoughts on the experience.
During the past three years, Twitter has been most helpful in curating content for me. I use mobile phone RSS feeds to pull information from 12 Twitter accounts onto the screen of my phone where they’re often as informative as news headlines. I’ve learned that even when some people stop tweeting, they continue marking content as “favorites” and those favs are part of the genre of curated content.
I have discovered ways to boost blog readership, to increase the number of views of a Flickr image and to attract viewers to my movie clips by posting summaries of that kind of content on Twitter. I’ve also seen a bothersome rise of self-promotion, petulance and pettiness on Twitter. Like in the real world, packs of little minds run around on Twitter but the wonderful thing about Twitter is that you can just unfollow the pettiness with a single click.
You can read the whole blog post over on his blog, Inside View From Ireland.
Tags: Twitter
LinkedIn Tip To Save You Time
November 18, 2009 at 8:33 am
If you’re on LinkedIn and you’re in groups, then you like me will be well used to receiving the ‘high class spam’ that comes daily to your inbox. Lots of it is repetition; same people starting the same discussions on different groups. Increasingly, I’m noticing spammy ‘get rich quick’ schemes being posted in their CAPITALISED GLORY promising FREE STUFF. It’s too much. I resent the time and energy it takes me to delete it from my inbox.
LinkedIn Tip: remove yourself from all updates
Log in to LinkedIn. Click on groups. Select a group that annoys you a lot. Click on More/My Settings and deselect all the contact settings:
Now you’ll still want to keep up with what’s going on right? Simply diairise it to go in and have a little look around. I don’t live on LinkedIn as much as I do on the other social networks. In order to remind myself to keep my profile up-to-date, I add little reminders to my Google Calendar that send me to LinkedIn. Now I go in once a week and check out all the (in)action I’ve been missing out on by removing the daily emails.
It works for me. It might work for you too.
On a similar note, last year I deactivated the setting on Twitter that notified me whenever anyone was following me. I did this when I was at around 500 followers. Now I’m on more than 800. That’s 300 emails of no substance I’ve removed from my consciousness!
Again, you’ve got to make sure that you’re not missing out. So I have a custom landing page for people who are checking me out on Twitter. It asks them to say hello to me on Twitter and that way I’ll know them and follow them. It works for me. Might work for you too.
Tags: LinkedIn tip, Twitter tip
