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5 Useful Twitter Tools

Posted on July 25, 2011 by mary

As we know, Twitter is a great tool to use to listen to and engage with your customers. There are additional tools around the basic Twitter.com interface that you should be aware of to make your use of Twitter more time efficient.

1. HootSuite (www.hootsuite.com)

I use Hootsuite to monitor all the Twitter accounts that I am managing as well as monitoring Facebook and LinkedIn. I have upgraded to the paid option, but I would recommend (and teach) the free option to get started. HootSuite is useful to monitor Twitter lists or groups, schedule tweets as well as monitor mentions of your own Twitter account. There are other tools including TweetDeck and SproutSocial, but I choose HootSuite as I like the user interface and the fact that you can access it from the internet. No downloads and the internet access means that I can access the same setup from my mobile, my desktop, my laptop and any other internet location.

2. Twilert (www.twilert.com)

I run Twitter workshops in Oxfordshire. I use twilert to inform me whenever anybody mentions similar workshops or training within 50 miles of Oxford. This means that I can keep an eye on my competition as well as see anybody who is looking for training. I can setup a number of keywords and receive a daily digest of tweets mentioning the keywords.

3. Tweepi (www.tweepi.com)

Shows
a) Who you are following who is not following you back and
b) who is following you that you are not following you back
There is nothing wrong in following people that are not following you back – you might find their tweets interesting. It is worth going through the list every so often to see whether you need to remove anybody from the list – spammers for example.

You might want to keep an eye on those people following you who you are not following – particularly if you don’t automatically follow back using tools like SocialOomph (see below).

4. SocialOomph (www.socialoomph.com)

I have used Socialoomph for a couple of years. I only use the tool for automatically following , setting up automated welcome messages and keyword email digests – but it can do much more. I personally prefer the user interface of tools like HootSuite. Setting up automated messages and automatically following are now paid options on SocialOomph – but I do get interest from my automated welcome messages, so personally I think it is worth the small fee.

5. Tweet Chat (www.tweetchat.com)

A tool which enables you to chat with others on Twitter in real time focused around a

particular #tag. For example, I occasionally take part in the #lrn monthly chat. If I setup Tweetchat to monitor the #tag, it will show all relevant tweets. You could use a search term to do this, but tweetchat allows you to pause the stream, change the speed of the refresh and automatically adds the # tag to any post that you send.

This isn’t an exhaustive list – there are other tools being developed all the time. What tools do you find particularly useful when you use Twitter?

What do I say on Social Media?

Posted on May 26, 2011 by mary

One of the things I am often asked during my Social Media Workshops is what should I say?

The exact content and frequency of your updates is dependent upon your audience and your type of business and also the Social Media tool that you are using. For example, I would recommend a quality update once a week on LinkedIn using the 160 characters available, whereas Twitter lends itself to more frequent, informal updates.

Suggestions for content

- Add Value, give people a reason to follow you

- Give people tips that are relevant to your product or service

- Give answers to questions you are frequently asked about your product or service

- Promote events that you are attending / have attending or are presenting / exhibiting

- Ask people their opinion of a topical subject

- Give ideas of questions that people should ask if they are going to buy your type of product or service

- Celebrate your successes (keeping client confidentiality)

- Ask for help (in finding a supplier or solving a problem)

- Link to / comment on interesting news items

- Share articles that you have read that are related to your product or service

- Personal, real time information (infrequent, but come over as a person)

- Reply to other’s comments.

- New products or promotions that you are selling (but be careful not to overdo this)

I would suggest that you write down a list of things you could talk about and then identify which update should appear on which of the tools that you are using and which can be scheduled to happen automatically in the future.

Take the time to set up scheduled updates on your tool of choice every week or every month. Make sure you put time aside each day (if possible) to engage in real time conversation with your followers.

Over time, monitor the results – which type of update do you get the most engagement from? Do make sure you review and update every few months.

What do you talk about on Social Media – do add your suggestions for everybody to learn from.

Have you used Facebook Questions?

Posted on April 27, 2011 by mary

Have you seen the new polling feature that is available on Facebook?

This is part of facebook questions which appeared for UK users at the end of March 2011.

If you look at your share bar, you will see an additional icon – Question.

You have two options -

1. Ask a question that people can answer on an adhoc basis

2. Provide answers and ask people to vote on their favourite answer

When you have written your question (and options if appropriate), click Ask Question.

The question or poll will be displayed in the News Feed of all your contacts (if asked from a personal profile) or your fans (if asked from a business page).

If a friend or fan answers one of your questions, it will appear in their friends’s News Feeds, which increases the number of people who can view and answer your question – as this spreads, you can get answers from people outside your immediate friends.

To answer a question, simply click on the option that applies to you.

Your profile picture will be displayed next to this answer and the question with your response will be displayed on the News Feeds of your contacts.

As you can see from this image, although I originally gave 5 options in the poll, only 3 are displayed with the option to click on 2 more. This might be worth thinking about when you create your question. Also, as you can see, only part of your answer options are displayed – again worth thinking about when creating your question.

To get an idea of questions that your contacts have asked or answered, click on Questions on the left hand side of your Facebook Home page. You might need to click More to see this option.

What do you think of Questions? Can you see a business use for them or do you find them to be an annoyance? Let me know.

Do Facebook Page Changes Affect You?

Posted on March 6, 2011 by mary

Have you looked at a Facebook business page recently? You may notice some changes!

1. MastHead

Each page has been given a new masthead (top of the page) of the five most recently added images in a random order. With some thought, you can use this to your advantage – try adding some images that reflect your brand. Just a note – the images need to be 97 pixels wide by 68 pixels high.

2. Tabs

Tabs have disappeared and have been replaced by navigation links on the left hand side. Spend some time looking at these to make sure you only show relevant links, and it is worth sorting them into a logical order of importance.

To sort the tabs into order of importance, you first need to make 9 tabs visible. To make tabs visible, click Edit Page > Apps. Click Edit Settings for the Apps that are not already displayed and click Add. Repeat until 9 tabs are visible, you will then see a ‘More’button displayed. Click More and Edit to be able to drag and drop tabs into the correct place. Hide any irrelevant tabs by using Edit Settings and Remove.

3. Use Page Profile

One great improvement (in my opinion) is that you can now use the page persona to like and comment on other pages (rather than using your individual profile) – but be aware that other pages can now comment on your page – so you will need to be viligent about checking posts on your own page. You can’t comment on personal profiles – just pages.

4. Featured Pages

It has always been a good idea for pages to ‘like’ other pages. You can now choose which of the pages you have ‘liked’ are featured on the bottom left of your page. To do this, Edit your Page and click the Featured button.

5. Email Alerts

Admins can now opt to receive an email alert whenever a comment is made on one of their pages.

Over To You

I would love to know what you think of the changes to Facebook. Are you finding it easier to use or not?

Changes to HootSuite

Posted on November 29, 2010 by mary

If you have been on one of my Twitter workshops or had training from me, you may be using HootSuite to manage your Tweets. HootSuite has recently offered a paid version and is currently asking all current users to decide whether they want to go with the paid version. What are the main differences? Here is an outline:

Free Option

You can have up to 5 profiles on your HootSuite account. This may be made up of 1 Twitter account, 1 Facebook, 1 Facebook business page and 1 LinkedIn. If you manage more than 1 Twitter account – you may need to upgrade.
Stats – up to 30 days history. Probably enough since you can download to a csv file
RSS Feeds – set up your blog(s) to automatically get displayed in your Social networking feed. You can set up to 2 – perhaps 1 to your Twitter feed and 1 to Facebook

Paid Option ($5.99/month)

Unlimited number of profiles,
Unlimited number of RSS feeds
Unlimited days of Stats
You can see which other Social Networking sites your followers belong to.
Include Google Analytics in HootSuite – see your website visits from within Hootsuite and overlay your tweets to see the impact your tweets is having on your website visits.
Ad Free
Add a team member. You can have more than one person manage your feeds. Each team member will see what each other is doing.

For most people, the free option will be sufficient but you may that it is worth the money each month to be ad free and see Google Analytics from HootSuite.

HootSuite vs Tweetdeck

There will undoubtedly be people who decide to try out Tweetdeck as an alternative to paying for HootSuite. I used to be a big supporter of Tweetdeck, but am personally prepared to pay a small amount for the additional features that HootSuite gives me including teams, tabs, Google Analytics integration, the available anywhere nature of the internet based application.

Are you going to use the free version of HootSuite or are you prepared to pay?

Using Twitter in Schools

Posted on October 12, 2010 by mary

Recently, I’ve been involved in a really interesting project developing a course to Introduce Twitter to schools. Some schools may want to use Twitter as a marketing tool in a similar way to any other business, as part of their marketing mix. Schools can also use Twitter in a number of areas within the school. Some ideas are listed here:

To Develop The Teacher’s Teaching Practice

Teachers can develop their own knowledge and reflect on their own practice, by sharing ideas, opinions and resources with other teachers and non-teachers on Twitter.
Teachers can keep up to date with news and important changes in their specialist field by following appropriate influencers and media outlets.
Teachers can learn to speak the same language as their pupils.

As a Learning Tool

Teachers can ask their Twitter network to tell them and their pupils something about where they are eg. Location, Temperature, Historical fact. The information can be used to do further research, ask more questions, discuss the results or compare and contrast answers. The learning is based on up to date information with a real story and encourages higher order thinking skills.
Use www.twitterfall.com to look at what is being said about a relevant topic e.g. global warming. Clicking on links can give the teacher or class more information about the topic or they may want to ask the tweeter more questions.

Within School development

Using a protected Twitter account,

School administrators can use Twitter to keep parents up to date with school activities in real time. The emphasis is on the parent to follow and check their twitter updates.
A teacher can set up a class account and ask pupils to follow. Use this to remind pupils when homework is due and respond to questions about homework.
Set up a class account and invite parents to follow the class. Parents can be kept informed about what the class is doing and they might like to interact.

Do you know about schools that are using Twitter? How well is it working? What would you add to this list?

Use Social Media to Advertise Your Events

Posted on September 28, 2010 by mary

I was asked recently for a complete list of places where up and coming events should be listed. This is particularly relevant for me since I am running a number of workshops over the next month or so. Based on the saying that you have to tell people something 7 times before they listen it is worth listing in a number of places even if you have an overlap of audience. I would also recommend updating people as you get closer to the event. Have a look at the following:

Eventbrite
A place to advertise your event and take bookings using paypal, credit card or paypal. You can set early bird tickets as well as full price tickets which is useful. You can upload your email contact list into Eventbrite and send emails directly from Eventbrite.

Facebook
Publish your event on your business page and / or link your facebook account and business page with Eventbrite to publish updates. Don’t forget to share the event with your contacts and nearer the time, put an update about the event on your status with a link to the details.

LinkedIn
You can create an event on LinkedIn and send the details to your contacts. Again, include a reminder update nearer the time. I think this works better if you have a good relationship with your contacts and a decent number of contacts. You can list events on the promotion page of any groups that you belong to, but this is a new feature of LinkedIn and I am not sure how effective it is at the moment (watch this space!)

Twitter
Set up scheduled tweets to advertise your event regularly during the weeks beforehand. Be careful not to overdo it, you don’t want to annoy people so they turn you off, but do tweet at various times of the day and a few times a week to make sure that everybody gets a chance to see it – and thank anybody that retweets or forwards the message on. It is a good idea to direct people to the Eventbrite link that you have set up.

Business Scene
I have found success when I have registered events with Business Scene, there is no knowing who might be looking. You can always link to the Eventbrite listing to get people to book.

4Networking
Over 36,000 members belong to this site and use it to participate in discussions, search for companies and advertise their own services. There is a face to face networking side to the site, but it is worth joining for the forums and discussion even if you are not going to use it for face to face networking. List your events under the forum ‘Blatant Adverts & Classified’.

Industry/ Geographically Specific
Are there sites that your audience will be looking at on which you can advertise events – or in your geographical area? It is worth checking….

Your Email Newsletter
You do write an email newsletter,right? A great way of letting your contacts know about your latest events. You can also include special offers and discounts for your subscribers. Don’t forget to include useful information for your readers in your newsletters. They want to get something out of reading it, other than your latest events.

Your Website
Don’t forget that this is central to your marketing. All your future events should be listed – and don’t forget to remove those events that have past – or at least make it clear that you know the date is in past (otherwise it makes your website look old and ‘uncared for’)

What else?
Don’t forget the personal touch, picking up the phone and announcing at face to face networking sessions definitely works as well – but you may reach a larger audience using some of the methods given above.

Do you have any sites that should be added to the list?

Why are you using LinkedIn?

Posted on August 12, 2010 by mary

LinkedIn is a great professional networking tool that can be used for a variety of reasons:

1. Be Found. Fill in the details of your profile so that when people search on LinkedIn for what you do, you appear. Make sure your company also has a profile so it will be included in search results.

2. Be Visible. At least once a week, fill in your network update (found on your LinkedIn home page). All your contacts can see your network updates – not only will you look busy, but it is a great way of telling people the range of services or products that you can offer. Make sure that you use a good quality photo in your profile, this reminds people what you look like. Some people are better at remembering and recognising faces than names – give these people the opportunity to remember you.

3. Connect with people. Think about who you want to connect with on LinkedIn. Yes, connect with the people you see regularly, but what about the people you used to work with, but have now lost contact with? It is a great excuse to make contact with people you used to know well but haven’t seen for a while.

4. Extended Contacts. You can see contacts who are three degrees away from you. For Example,

Mary is connected to Paul

Paul is connected to Jack

Jack is connected to Susan

Mary and Susan can see each other.

I would probably only actually make use of two levels of contacts. How valuable could it be if Jack is a manager in a company that I have targeted? I could contact Paul and ask for an introduction / recommendation?

5. Groups – get involved in group discussions. LinkedIn groups exist for many face to face networking events as well as your market sector and your target market sector. By getting involved in the discussions, you are raising your profile amongst others in the group.

6. Answers – Anybody in LinkedIn can ask a question about anything. Anybody else can answer any of the questions. The person who originally asked the question, gets to nominate the best answer. If you are nominated as best answer, then you become known as an expert. Imagine being known as an expert in your area of knowledge by everybody who uses LinkedIn?

7. Jobs – About 10% of jobs are found on LinkedIn – a great tool to find and post jobs.

There are other uses of LinkedIn, including events, polls and other applications. What do you use? What would you recommend to others?

Why use Twitter for Business?

Posted on June 23, 2010 by mary

“I don’t have time for Twitter” is the phrase I often hear when presenting Social Media for business. Twitter need not take up any more time than face to face networking if you understand why you are using it, who you what to talk to and what is your marketing message. Twitter can help market your business in a number of ways including:

- Brand building. More people know about Concise Training because of Twitter than would know about me if I didn’t use it. I have been given testimonials on Twitter, my tips have been forwarded to others and people know who am I when I walk into a room because my face is on Twitter. The buzz that has been generated about the quality of my training through Twitter has definitely resulted in people approaching me for work and partnerships. I have 2600 people following me – that is 2600 people who get a message when somebody has recommended me……

- Customer Service. There is a good chance that people will be talking about your company whether you are on these social media sites or not. Hopefully they will be talking good things – but do you know if they say anything negative? Your clients are using these sites, you can respond to what they are saying, if you are using them to listen.

- Advertise your latest offers or services. People have chosen to listen to you on Twitter – tell them about your services. Don’t only talk to them about your services or they will soon stop following you, but drop them in every so often.

- Share articles that you have found interesting relevant to your industry – this shows that you are taking a professional approach and are in the right space. You will also get kudos from the people you share – don’t forget to acknowledge them.

- Talk to your customers, colleagues and networking friends. Keeping in touch through Twitter is a great way of finding out what is going on in the lives of the people you know. This allows you to build a better relationship – and as we know, business is all about relationships.

Twitter isn’t for everybody – but have a look before you dismiss it altogether. Make it easy for yourself – use tools (Tweetdeck or HootSuite) to help you manage the people you are listening to and use a combination of real time and scheduled messages.

How do you use Twitter for your business?

You should know about this...

Facebook Timeline for Business Read it!
LinkedIn Changes Completeness Calculation Read it!
Social Media Buttons Read it!

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