Do you take a Twitter holiday, or do you holiday with Twitter?

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Some of us need to completely disconnect from social media whilst we are away on holiday – others feel the need to update our friends and connections with an hour by hour account of what we are doing whilst we are away.

Some people can not bear to disconnect from the Internet, we have an addiction to our smartphones and get separation anxiety if we try to disconnect. We like to keep in touch.

And Twitter is one of those tools that help us to stay connected whilst we’re away.

Twitter Ads in the UK knows exactly how we use social media on holiday and it has published the results of a survey it carried out showing how holidaymakers in the UK stay connected using Twitter whilst they are away.

Research Now compiled its Twitter Holiday Research 2014 survey. It  surveyed 1,000 Twitter active users in the UK about how they use Twitter.

Almost 90 percent of Twitter users in the UK are planning to go on holiday this summer and two out of three of these plan to use Twitter whist they are on holiday from their mobile device. In fact 71 percent of users will Tweet about their holiday whilst they are away.

75 percent of users will be leaving the UK for their holiday and 57 percent of these want to stay in contact with people they know. 

Half of us use Twitter when they are on holiday to stay on top of the news and 25 percent of travellers will use Twitter to look for local restaurant recommendations.

Almost half of us – 46 percent look for local information and 25 percent of travellers use Twitter to get transport and travel updates. Even when they are on holiday, one in seven of us look for special deals and bargains.

Although the whole world seems to be connected at all times, some of us love to take a well-earned social media break and relax from the hyper-connected world we find ourselves in. Sharing our amazing, envy inducing photos will just have to wait until we eventually get back home.

Eileen Brown is a social media strategist and consultant at Amastra, a columnist at ZDNet and author of Working The Crowd: Social Media Marketing for Business. Connect with Eileen on Twitter and Google+ or contact her to find out how she can elevate your brand and help your business become more social.

Just how valuable are Twitter followers to your small business?

I saw an interesting infographic from Twitter the other day. It tracked the progress of a follow of a promoted tweet. There are some interesting statistics in this infographic which was produced by Twitter in conjunction with Marketprobe International.

73 percent of Twitter users follow a small to medium enterprise (SME) for updates on their products. If you are running a small business it is really important to keep in touch with your customers, and more importantly, your potential customers. keeping in touch with them will turn them into advocates. If they are not ready to buy from you just now, if they like you, they could still pass your message on to other potential customers.

85 percent of tweeters feel more engaged with an SME after following them. They are more likely to favourite your tweet, retweet it or have a direct conversation with you. The personal touch makes them feel much closer to you the brand. Your direct engagement with them will make them more likely to recommend you to others. 82 percent are more likely to recommend an SME they follow to friends.

72 percent of followers are likely to make a purchase after following a company.  Your followers become your advocates. They feel that they have a good relationship with you as an individual and also your brand. The personal touch from an SME makes them  feel more valued so their intent to buy from you is higher.

Here’s the full infographic from @twitterUKI_SME

 

Eileen Brown is a social media advisor at Amastra, a columnist at ZDNet and author of Working The Crowd: Social Media Marketing for Business. Connect with Eileen on Twitter and Google+ or contact her to find out how she can elevate your brand and help your business become more social.

Twitter rolls out analytics for its users

Twitter has rolled out the ability to see a deeper level of interaction and analytics for your Twitter stream. Not only for brands, anyone can now see what is happening with their Twitter account.

If you are curious about the activity on your Twitter feed and wonder why your follower count fluctuates regularly, you can see graphically what is happening with your followers.

The information has been quietly rolled out by Twitter is well hidden for users not familiar with Twitters Ad Manager.  Users need to sign in to Ad Manager at http://ads.twitter.com and select the Analytics tab in the tool.

In this tab you can see your mentions, followers and unfollowers and match the increase or decrease in followers to blog posts and tweets. Often users will follow you in the hope of you following them back. They then unfollow you again after their follower count has increased.

You can see the tweets which have received the most faves, retweets, replies and clicks. Tweets with extra reach are highlighted in the list.

The tool also shows locations of your followers, interests and locations of your followers. It also shows the gender split of your followers and your mutual followers.

Conversion tracking enables you to measure your return on investment by tracking the actions a user takes after viewing or engaging with your ads on Twitter. Twitter’s conversion tracking lets you attribute conversions beyond last URL-click, to include actions driven by all types of ad engagements (like clicks, retweets, or favorites) and impressions.

You should set up conversion tracking on your website if your want to analyze, compare, and optimize your direct response campaigns on Twitter.

Go to Conversion tracking tab in Twitter Ads to  generate the code snippet for your conversion tags.  You need to place the conversion tag on your website where it will begin measuring conversions from Twitter users.

You can specify a time window after a campaign runs to determine what happens after a user has engaged with your ad and discover whether users have seen your promoted content, did not click on it – but later visited your web site

A nice tool – and worth a look…

Eileen Brown is a social media strategist and consultant at Amastra, a columnist at ZDNet and author of Working The Crowd: Social Media Marketing for Business. Connect with Eileen on Twitter and Google+ or contact her to find out how she can elevate your brand and help your business become more social.

Twitter moves in on Storify with Custom Timelines in Tweetdeck

Twitter has added a great new feature to its Tweetdeck product – Custom Timelines. With this feature, you can now control the cons its own page on Twitter.com

Each timeline is public  and has content that you can share with others in a Twitter story.

All you need to do is click the + sign in the sidebar and add a Custom timeline

Once you have named your timeline you can drag relevant tweets into the timeline. Each tweet in Tweetdeck now has a handle that enables you to click and drag the tweet across to your column. You can view the timeline on Twitter.com or embed it into your web site. It has a link so you can share it with other Twitter followers

If you want to see what other Twitter users have saved as Custom Timelines, then it is really easy to find. In Tweetdeck just look at a users profile and click on the tab marked “Custom”

A great new feature for keeping track of related Tweets from different folks – and not cluttering up your favourites section… Nice one Twitter…

Eileen Brown is a social media strategist and consultant at Amastra, a columnist at ZDNet and author of Working The Crowd: Social Media Marketing for Business. Connect with Eileen on Twitter and Google+ or contact her to find out how she can elevate your brand and help your business become more social.

How Twitter has ruined our ability to spell

So Twitter users can’t spell? Well there is no big surprise there then. With only 140 characters per tweet to compose your pithy message, you haven’t got much choice. You have to to truncate your message – or commit one of a whole host of grammar sins.

Research by Brandwatch and a cool infographic shows that we can not spell. Twitter is the worst offender when it comes to spelling. Users are almost twice as likely to deviate from official English than they are on Facebook and 25% more likely to misspell than on Google+.

The US are slightly worse at spelling than UK Tweeters. Females are worse spellers than men with 1 in 169 misspelling words compared with 1 in 192 males.

Interestingly though, females tend to elongate certain words such as ‘looool’, ‘ohhh’ and ‘awww’ whereas males on the other hand shorten words. Males use words like ‘kinda’, ‘gotta’ and ‘wanna’ in their tweets.

The top five grammar errors highlighted by the study are: im, wont,dont, cant and id. The missing apostrophe  is obviously down to the limits of 140 characters in a tweet.

This limit has also encouraged us to use acronyms liberally such as ‘lmao’, ‘lol’ and ‘omg’.

We also misspell words on Twitter. Words we tend to get wrong are: definitely, weird, surprise, separate, embarrass, government, argument and achieve.

We are however becoming slightly more literate in our online conversations – but only by 0.01% per year. At least we are moving in a positive direction.

It is difficult to get your point across in such a succinct way on Twitter when limited by characters. Having to abbreviate words and missing out vowels is not new. We have been using mobile phone ‘txt spk’ for years when texts were limited to 160 characters per message. We have happily transferred our abbreviated language onto Twitter.

But this short form language is now prevalent our day to day verbal interactions. Listen to your children and your friends.The spoken word is now peppered with WTFs, OMGs and LOLs  We are using verbal emoticons to describe how we feel instead of using the longer description.

Twitter and texting has provided us with new language forms and it is not surprising we are adopting these shortened forms of language as our lives become busier and busier.

Perhaps blog posts will start to go the way of the tweet becoming shorter and shorter to avoid the curse of the ultimate blogger insult, TL:DR …

Credit: Sammy0716

Eileen is a 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 elevate your brand and help your business become more social.

Twitter dumps auto-following — but not auto DM’s

Twitter has turned around and tightened up restrictions on its api. It has announced that automated following or bulk following is now prohibited. From the following rules and best practices document it says:                                              

"Aggressive following is defined as indiscriminately following hundreds of accounts just to garner attention. However, following a few users if their accounts seem interesting is normal and is not considered aggressive."

Twitter removed the automated feature that permits automated follow-back for a reason. Twitter prefer that users ‘manually review their new followers and then choose whether or not they would like to follow back individual accounts’.

It also has prohibited the ability to automatically block numbers of accounts as a method for unfollowing them.

Application developers can provide follow back features – provided that they are totally manual. Twitter says that this will improve control:

‘This allows for greater granularity and control for brands and users, and greater opportunity for developers to build social analytics around potential followings: by highlighting the best, most relevant users to follow-back manually this provides a greater potential user benefit than indiscriminate auto-follow-back’

This is good news for curation apps such as Storify which requires manual intervention to create a story and publish it – less good news for hundreds of app developers that sold services to buy you new followers

Twitter is not reciprocal by default. It offers users the choice to decide whether to follow another user back. Some users do feel pressured to follow back, but if a user follows everyone that follows them, their feed would soon be filled with content that is not particularly interesting to them.

You might be trying to buy followers to make you look more interesting to your followers.  However, if not all of the accounts which followed you contained content which was interesting, then you would soon become disenchanted with Twitter and its useless noise.

It is important to choose carefully who to follow and prohibiting auto-follow back will stop the ‘ I follow back’ crowd.

Auto following isn’t a good idea. People who tweet should have some value to me. I don’t want spam or abuse.

I want to engage with people who tweet regularly, say in the last 45 days or so. Manage Flitter helps me to keep track of who does not tweet .

I want to engage with real people.They should have an interesting Twitter bio, profile image and link to another site. It’s an added bonus is if they have a background

I want to engage with people that can respond to my questions within a reasonable amount of time. Automated quotations lessen the value of the whole of your Twitter stream. Give me commentary, links and interesting observations, not just quotations – no matter how good they are.

Have a look at the Developer rules of the road and Automation best practices for more information on developing your app..

Image Credit: Dennis Jarvis                                                                           

Eileen is a 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 elevate your brand and help your business become more social.

Tweetdeck adds engagement metrics to search

Twitter has added a useful feature to its search icon on Tweetdeck. Now you can add engagement context to your tweets.

Here’s a screen grab from Tweetdeck showing a search for the phrase ‘EverydaySexism’ and tweets that have been retweeted over 100 times:

So why would you use this feature?

Getting context for your campaigns are important. After a campaign has started with its designated hashtag statistics start to appear. You can tell which of your messages resonate the most with your customers.

You can check which offers have been rebroadcasted, which messages have been marked as favourites. You can track messages that have generate the most responses to the brand.

You can tailor your messages based on previous popular tweets and generate a higher hit rate by monitoring your activities over time.  Different columns could watch which messages are favourited – and which generate responses. You can then target these customers in other campaigns

It is a useful way to measure your Twitter campaign  — within the Tweetdeck interface and very useful too.

Image: Tweetdeck

Eileen is a 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 elevate your brand and help your business become more social.

Twitter maps the world of Tweets

Twitter has mapped the world of Tweets and displayed images on its blog and its Flickr page. This image of Europe is amazing. Towns, villages and roads perform a network of Tweet density.

Each tweet made with a geotag was captured and used to make the map. Even tweets from ferry routes can be seen detailing the popular routes cross Channel, Irish, Mediterranean and Baltic seas.

The map of Seattle is also fascinating:

The horizontal lines joining the west and east side are the bridges across lake Washington. The northern line is the 520 bridge, famed for its slow traffic, hold-ups and delays.Obviously a perfect place to Tweet

The High density of Tweets on the Eastside isn’t Redmond, but Bellevue. Redmond is the larger area north west of Bellevue with a lesser density of tweets.

Have a look at some of the other cities on Twitter’s Flickr page and the Twitter blog

Images: Twitter blog

Eileen is a 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 elevate your brand and help your business become more social.

Who owns your content?

You don’t own your Twitter updates, you do not own your Facebook updates. If you have a wordpress.com blog, then as soon as you hit publish the content belongs to WordPress. Read the terms and conditions on your own social platform. As soon as you upload the content is no longer yours.

Although these words have come out of my brain, through my fingertips, as soon as I hit publish on this blog, it belongs to WordPress, or on my Social Business blog then ZDNet owns the content.

You own the content on Facebook. However you give Facebook the following rights:

“For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (IP content), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (IP License). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.

When you publish content or information using the Public setting, it means that you are allowing everyone, including people off of Facebook, to access and use that information, and to associate it with you (i.e., your name and profile picture)”.

Your content is also yours on Twitter but you:

“Grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods (now known or later developed)”.

Twitter and Facebook use the information that you have freely submitted. They analyse your behaviour, work out how they can best use this social data gold mine of information. Twitter has been selling access to your Tweets for some time now. Customers pay for this data to work out how best to market to you on social media and influence your buying decisions.

You do not even own your online profile on social media platforms either. You give information away hoping that the knowledge you have shared will enhance someone else’s day.

Just like this blog entry really…

Eileen is a 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 elevate your brand and help your business become more social.

Image Credit: Aturkus

Why I have social media snow stress

Over the last few days I’ve driven over 350 miles to client offices. I’ve been delivering workshops and hands on training sessions on site. Each trip has been over 50 miles from my office. I’ve crossed several counties and driven round major motorways and roads.

And I’ve been very, very stressed about each trip I’ve made.  All because of social media.

Last week, as the snow fell, Twitter lit up with the interactive snow map, produced by using the hashtag #uksnow. People send messages rating the snowfall on their area. 

Local news channels invited people to send in their photos of the snow. Websites showed abandoned cars, gritters, snowplows and people sledging and skiing in town streets.

My own Facebook feed filled with icy gardens, snowmen and white snow covered roads. My friends in the UK rushed to social media to tell their friends just how bad the snow was.

London Heathrow airport cancelled 20 per cent of its flights. I was extremely worried about driving to my client meeting in an office close to Heathrow.

Would I get there, would I have to abandon my car miles away from the office and walk? Would I have to reschedule the meeting?

I asked my Facebook friends how the snow was in each location I wanted to get to. I asked people about the driving conditions on my route. And I scanned the news for real time information.

Saturday was a stressful day watching the weather reports. On Sunday I decided to leave home early and stay with friends who lived closer to the client.  I did not want to risk the 120 mile drive early on Monday morning.  i worried about the trip all day on Sunday finally setting off early complete with emergency supplies in the car, blankets, hot drinks and a shovel.

The drive was much better than I’d imagined. Although it was snowing heavily, the gritters were out keeping the roads clear. There were no hold ups and people were driving at a sensible speed. I had no problems.

On Monday morning, I started my journey an hour earlier than I normally would do – and I arrived at the client offices an hour early on a bright sunny day. My drive home from the client gave me no problems. The greatest amount of snow was in my own driveway. Tuesday’s drive to my next event was smooth and snow free.

I had worried for days – all for nothing. And social media had fuelled my anxiety.

20 years ago, I would have got in the car and made the drive. I might have seen the TV reports, I might have called the client before I left to gauge the snow.  I certainly would not have spent days before the event worrying about the weather and poring over user generated reports.

I would have just gone out and made the journey.  I have driven in all sorts of weathers since I learned to drive.  It didn’t bother me at all – until this weekend. Social media snow stories stressed me out.

I had believed everything I read on Twitter and Facebook about the weather and I worried. Should I have depended so much on all the data I was getting? Thinking about this makes sense. The snow map is more representative of where people tweet about snow, than where snow is actually falling. 

In isolated or rural areas people might not tweet about snow as they are busy clearing it away from the roads. Not everyone in the country uses Twitter – or Facebook.

I was basing my decisions on a huge amount of data – and not making my own judgement calls on the situation. 

So will I check my social feeds the next time the UK has a dramatic fall of snow? Yes, probably. But next time, I’ll follow my own experience and hunches and I won’t be so swayed by the user generated content I see.  Next time I’ll trust my own judgement  — just like I used to. 

Social media will continue to inform me – not stress me out. And I’ll enjoy others’ images of snow – without anxiety  

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.