Tweet on a Saturday to increase click through rates

Are your Twitter click through rates lower than you expect from the amount of followers you have?  Check out this Infographic from Sign up to and stop trying to get more followers… 

Focus on engaging the followers you have and initiate conversations using the @.  Broadcasting messages will not catch all of your followers. If your followers are following hundreds or even thousands of people, there’s a really good chance that your tweet will get lost in the noise.

Remember that there is a best time to send your tweets too

 

Eileen is a social business and social media strategist and consultant at Amastra, a columnist at ZDNet and author of Working The Crowd: Social Media Marketing for Business. Contact Eileen to find out how she can help your business extend its reach.

Flora cuisine crowdsources new recipe book

Flora, the healthy spread has turned to its Facebook page for inspiration. It has created a Lets get cooking cookbook and is giving away copies of the book on its Facebook page after a competition earlier this year.

You have until 26th October to enter to win for one of 750 copies on Facebook. You can also have a look at the crowdsourced recipes and download a soft copy.

Flora chose 30 copies from over 500 entries received during its Facebook competition.  It is now asking for ‘bite-sized’ recipe reviews on either its Twitter account or directly onto the Flora website.

The recipe book coincides with a set of boards on Pinterest, activity on its new Twitter account and campaign based activity on its Facebook page, designed to aid engagement with its fans. Flora has had a Facebook page since March 2010 and is extending its reach across other social platforms.

Crowdsourcing ideas such as recipes means additional engagement through social pages.  Getting the community involved and sharing recipes on platforms such as Pinterest ensures brand awareness and recognition. This is a neat idea that can be repeated regularly to maintain engagement and interaction with the brand .

Crediting the winning recipes is a nice touch too – and will encourage others to enter – if they want their names in print when the next edition is released.

Eileen is a social business strategist, ZDNet columnist and author of Working The Crowd: Social Media Marketing for Business. Contact her to find out how she can help your business extend its reach.

Kitchen Aid’s Crisis Management success

What happened to Kitchen Aid the other week could happen to any brand  During the presidential debate, one of the team that managed the Kitchen Aid’s official Twitter account made an error that blew up very quickly.

The official @kitchenaidUSA account tweeted:

"Obamas gma even knew it was going 2 b bad! ‘She died 3 days b4 he became president,"

Kitchen Aid deleted the Tweet, and issued an apology

Deepest apologies for an irresponsible tweet that is in no way a representation of the brand’s opinion. #nbcpolitics

— KitchenAid (@KitchenAidUSA) October 4, 2012 followed by:

I would like to personally apologize to President @barackobama, his family and everyone on Twitter for the offensive tweet sent earlier.

— KitchenAid (@KitchenAidUSA) October 4, 2012

It was carelessly sent in error by a member of our Twitter team who, needless to say, won’t be tweeting for us anymore.

— KitchenAid (@KitchenAidUSA) October 4, 2012

Cynthia Soledad, head of Kitchen Aid went on the record to talk to Mashable and apologise for the Tweet. She immediately took responsibility, spoke freely to the media and quenched the social media fire that burned.

It seems to have worked. Mashable published this image from Simply Measures showing how quickly the mentions of the brand reduced as the apologies and media interviews were broadcast.

Crisis management depends on three things:

Swift ownership of the issue by senior leader

Immediate apology or retraction of the offensive statement

Availability for follow up information

In the background, at the brand other things are important to ensure that damage is limited:

Adequate training and awareness of crisis consequences

Defined lines of communication and crisis plan

Damage limitation and virtual messaging team (PR / spokespeople / exec team)

And most of all – a co-ordinated response across the relevant channel. If it happens on Twitter, rectify it on Twitter, if it happens on Facebook, rectify it on Facebook.  Then ensure that other channels point to the apology and damage limitation statement. It has got to be authentic, it has got to be open, it has got to be honest.

And it has got to be done quickly – before brand perception starts its downhill slide

Eileen is a social business strategist, ZDNet columnist and author of Working The Crowd: Social Media Marketing for Business. Contact her to find out how she can help your business extend its reach.

Image credit: smith_cl9 and Mashable

Sina Weibo beats Twitter Olympic tweet numbers

We talk about Twitter and its dominance in microblogging.  We often forget that other, non-English speaking countries might have an even larger share of the conversation.

The next web reported that Sina Weibo, China’s version of Twitter smashed all of Twitter’s records during the Olympics.

Twitter reported that around 150 million tweets were sent during the games. 116 million tweets per minute happened during the closing ceremony. Sina Weibo however reported in an infographic that 119 million messages were sent during the opening ceremony and 393 messages throughout the Games itself.

With the Paralympics underway and twitter lighting up – it will be interesting to see how the numbers stack up again – especially with China once again dominating the medals table so far…

Credit: bfishadow, itsjusthugo

Eileen is a social business strategist, ZDNet columnist and author of Working The Crowd: Social Media Marketing for Business. Contact her to find out how she can help your business extend its reach.

Automatic and Manual retweets on Twitter: The differences

Jillian emailed me with an issue she had after attending my Introduction to Twitter workshop the other week:

If I press the retweet button I can’t edit anything so presumably I have to copy and paste it into another tweet.  But then the link doesn’t go with it.  for instance I wanted to retweet your fibre optics post and say where does she keep the rechargeable batteries, but the link doesn’t go over and so when I go back into your tweet to pick up the link the RT has gone too!  Spend far more than half hour each day on this as I go all round the houses. 

Twitter uses the automatic retweet button for its own analytics. It can tell how many times a Tweet has been rebroadcast

Clicking on the Retweet link brings up a dialogue box.  you can not edit the link, but reproduce it entirely.

If the automatic Retweet button is used, then Twitter can tell exactly how many times this has been retweeted.  See the example below which must have appealed to a lot of people as it has been retweeted 11,659 times so far:

It is much easier to edit retweets if you use one of Twitters clients.  Here’s an example of using the edit and retweet button on Tweetdeck

Choosing ‘Edit then Retweet’ appends RT to the start of the tweet.

Other clients use “Quote tweet” as a way of copying the original tweet into a new tweet window, allowing you to edit the tweet and credit the originator of the tweet..

Eileen is a social business strategist, ZDNet columnist and author of Working The Crowd: Social Media Marketing for Business. Contact her to find out how she can help your business extend its reach.

US leads the world in terms of Twitter users

Semiocast has been analysing which countries use Twitter the most. the US leads by a very long way with over 140 million users.

In June 2012 Semiocast listened to over a billion Tweets and worked out the location of users based on fields such as user profile, language, time zone and GPS co-ordinates.

The US now represents over 27 per cent of all Twitter users.  These users produced almost 26 per cent of the Twitter traffic.

Interesting that certain cities come out well individually. London is 3rd in the world by numbers of posted tweets. With 32.2 million user accounts, the UK is 4th in the worldwide table.

These numbers are not a true representation of all of the microblogging that happens in the world as Twitter, although world wide, is not the platform of choice in all countries.

In Taiwan, the preferred platform is plurk, with 37 per cent of all plurks coming from Taiwan. Qaiku is popular in Finland. Tebncent Weibo is popular in China (although Sina Weibo is the most popular site in china with over 30 per cent of internet users). Fafou is another Twitter clone.  Me2day is popular in South Korea.

But as the leader in Microblogging platforms – by a long stretch, Twitter is doing well with half a billion users. it won’t be long before it catches up with Facebook as it tries to reach a billion accounts in 2012.

Eileen is a social business strategist, ZDNet columnist and author of Working The Crowd: Social Media Marketing for Business. Contact her to find out how she can help your business extend its reach.

Technorati Tags: Twitter,statistics,growth

How to create lists in Twitter

I had a question from one of the attendees of my Introduction to Twitter course, so I thought I’d blog it to help others who might have the same question

How do you create lists?  I notice that some people are followed by 1000s of people how do you get to more than one person or do you have to write to them each separately?  It’s a shame none of my fellow Menta twitter participants aren’t out there tweeting, it’s great fun!

Well the answer is quite simple.  If you use Twitter, then the Lists option is here:

Click on the Lists link and sort your followers into Lists.

If you are using Tweetdeck, click on the + (Add column) sign at the top of the screen.

CLick on the second tab down which says Groups / Lists CLick on the button that says ‘New list’ and create your list:

You will find a similar way to do this in other Twitter clients such as Hootsuite or Seesmic

Start organising your Tweeps

 

Eileen is a social business strategist, ZDNet columnist and author of Working The Crowd: Social Media Marketing for Business. Contact her to find out how she can help your business extend its reach.

 

Technorati Tags: Twitter,lists,Twitter management

Sync your Amex card with Twitter for hashtag offers

This is a nice bit of innovation from American Express.  Now you can sync your American Express card with Twitter and receive offers when you Tweet or check in with Foursquare.

When you use Foursquare to check in to a location where an Offer exists, a message will be sent to your mobile device notifying you of an available offer (such as, by way of example, a statement credit or point of sale discount).

If you would like to take advantage of the offer, you must first activate certain offers by pressing the “Load to Card” or similar button. To redeem an offer, follow the instructions and use your Card for the purchase.

On Twitter you need to look our for special offer hashtags from American Express or the brands that are partnering for the offer. using the hashtags loads the offer onto your synced card. Once the offer is loaded onto your card, use the card to pay for the offer and the offer is applied as a statement credit on your account.

This is a great way for Amex to measure levels of engagement through hashtags and offers. The merchant bears the cost of the discount and pays Amex the transaction fee for each transaction.

Currently the brands offering discounts seem to be US based, but the offer conditions also apply in the UK according to the terms and conditions on the web  site.

How long will it be before other debit and credit cards follow the lead of Amex and connect their social activities together too?

This is a good initiative which ensures that future campaigns will be seen by as wide an audience as possible – for the minimum of investment.

Eileen is a social business strategist, ZDNet columnist and author of Working The Crowd: Social Media Marketing for Business. Contact her to find out how she can help your business extend its reach.

Technorati Tags: American Express,Twitter,Amex,Social Media

Twitter now sells access to your old Tweets

Over on my ZDNet column, I wrote about the privacy implications now that Twitter has allowed access to historical data in its partnership with Datasift

since I published the post, I’ve been thinking more and more about how you will feel about Twitter gaining access to your personal Twitter streams.

We search for information on Twitter using the hashtags, and we have a limited time window to search out tweets from others.  We then use the data to our advantage, finding out what our customers think about us.

As a user, are you happy that customers have access to all this data?  After all, what you tweet is a social data gold mine for businesses.  It gives brands the opportunity to find out more about you to target their marketing more effectively.

But we do tend to forget that we’re not having a 1:1 conversation with our friends.  Twitter data is public.  The data isn’t private, ever.  Even if we send Direct messages to each other, then Twitter could be requested to expose the data if called on by the US government invoking the patriot act.

In my book, Working the Crowd I try to hammer home the point that you should ‘Never say anything online that you don’t want to have quoted back to you in a court of law’.

And now with the Datasift: Twitter partnership, this advice is even more valid for us all…

Eileen is a social business strategist, ZDNet columnist and author of Working The Crowd: Social Media Marketing for Business. Contact her to find out how she can help your business extend its reach.

Credit: hyku

Technorati Tags: Working The Crowd,book,Twitter,Data Mining,Privacy

Women asking for violence on Twitter: Chatting to friends or gross stupidity?

Twitter throws up some sad reflections on society.  This one is about domestic violence.  But the worst thing is that the tweeters were ENCOURAGING it.

Chris Brown appeared at the Grammys last night, 3 years after he was arrested for domestic abuse allegations against Rhianna, his girlfriend at the time.

But the comments on Twitter about him just beggared belief.  Here’s a link from Buzzfeed with several unbelievable tweets whilst the show was airing, plus a couple I saw from Toney and kmoney saying the same sort of thing..

 

I’m baffled.

 

There is enough domestic violence and abuse going on already.  Why on earth would a woman publicly ask for a beating? What is going on?

Twitter seems intimate enough when you’re chatting to your friends from your mobile device or iPad.  This sense of ‘intimacy’ might make us share more than we intended to.  What seems like an ‘in joke’ between friends can be taken totally out of context in an unemotional Twitter search.

Perhaps we need to re-educate Twitter users on the reach of the product.  This is not secure BlackBerry Messaging.  This is an open platform that can be read by anyone. 

Perhaps this in naivety, perhaps it is innocence.  Perhaps we need to spend time responding to the originator of the messages and remind them that what they say stays on the Internet… somewhere….

Forever…

They might one day regret their boasts…

Eileen is a social business strategist, ZDNet columnist and author of Working The Crowd: Social Media Marketing for Business. Contact her to find out how she can help your business extend its reach.

Technorati Tags: domestic violence,Twitter,abuse,stupidity