Just in case you were still wondering if ROI – Return On Investment from social media was possible, this short video gets straight to the point.
The Video features loads of well known brands from Ford to Dell who have all used Social Media to generate sales and grow their businesses – using lower marketing budgets.
As the author of the video, Erik Qualman asks, “Why are we trying to measure Social Media like a traditional channel anyway? Social media touches ever facet of business and is more an extension of good business ethics”
“You can’t buy attention anymore. Having a huge budget doesn’t mean anything in Social Media. The old media parading was Pay to Play. Now you get back what you authentically put in. You’ve got to be willing to Play to Play.”
Alex Bogusky, Co Chairman, CP&B
“No more Spray and Pray” Gary Jennings, Weboptimiser.
“Think of Twitter as the canary of the coal mine” Morgan Johnston, JetBlue Airways
My favourite quote, apart from Garys is from MacDonalds, “our head of social media is the customer”
Recently, as you may have noticed, Twitter has introduced some quality changes that seems to range from deletion of mass accounts and the suspension of accounts that appear to contain the wrong type of tweets. For a long time we have known that Twitter is capabable and active in suspending poor accounts but more recently there seems to have been more activity by Twitter that all adds up in our opinion to make Twitter a better place.
Tougher to do business in, but a better place. It all started a few months back with Tweetlater, now known as SocialOomph rejecting the automation of identical tweets and just a few weeks ago the update of user terms and conditions in a mass email sent out to all account holders. It would now seem that this email was a kind of early warning and that failure to follow Twitter ‘Rules’ could result in an account being suspended and in the worst case deleted.
You may wonder why it would matter. It matters if you are a genuine account holder and you have tuned the account for business development – or just enjoy talking to many followers. To lose a long list of followers would be quite a loss, not to mention that the name of the account may be precious and of course, for some, a high number of followers infers bragging rights.
As can be seen by the graph below the more followers you have the more tweets people make.
So now we know the main changes and some of what affects the quality of a twitter account, what can we do? – In a phrase – tweet more often! It seems that not only should your tweets be unique but the majority should be conversational and not include any links.
The acid test to me is that your tweets should ideally be RT’d (re-tweeted: forwarded by others). I am pleased to say that on many occassions our ‘offer’ tweets, those that contain links are RT’d across the Twittersphere.
These are technical considerations but where does that leave the time poor business man who is interested in Tweeting for fun whilst building up their network. Well I am pleased to say, still in the game!
These ‘rules’ are my suggestions based on my opinion and experience. Indeed, as we concluded with SEO and Pay Per Click, we can conclude that there are certain ethics appropriate to Twitter marketing that should be employed for best practice.
Twitter account holders needing to be more inventive and creative is not such a bad thing and in my opinion should help the market place. Twitter account holders need to create more offers and tweet more often.
So to help, we have compiled a database of 2800 ideas, quotes and jokes and set up a twitter account where we will twitter one idea, joke or quote daily. You can follow us at http://www.twitter.com/dailytweetideas or simply check in for some instant inspiration.
For clients we deliver a unique set of 3 jokes, 3 quotes and one idea per day – plus bonus information – only useful to subscribers… It is possible for you to simply retweet the ideas and in the case of quotes and jokes that is all you can do. The objective however is to provide a joke, quote and an idea in order to spark your creative juices in order to lead you to use the quote, joke or idea as a stimulus to create a unique twitter blog post, standard blog post or even as I have discovered, to create video content.
Of course, quotes and jokes by definition are worth repeating and are not unique by and of themselves and simply retweeting is a possible option, but not the best one. The best outcome would be for them to work as a conversation starter that will lead to ongoing relationship building.
The intention is to ensure your twitter account is original and has varying tweets, some with links, the majority – 85% without.
The safest thing to autotweet is a quote. It is harder to autotweet a joke as jokes can have many meanings and often offend as well as entertain as a number of comedians have found out. The joke above, will no doubt offend some of the French, although not intentioned, it serves as an example that could cause some offence.
Jokes are not always good for business either. Everyone will have a different opinion on this, but in my opinion, a light hearted approach with serious intent generally works well.
With regard to tweets with links, we need to get more creative. Often I find we are limited to what we can tweet as Clients usually have a limit of ideas and offers we can tweet about.
I have created a mind map dedicated to digital product development that you can download and use as the basis for creating digital proposals to attract enquiries.
It is intended that this mind map is only available to fee paying clients, so I can’t give you all the answers here. You can sign up as a Tweetmaxi client and you will get access to this and a ton of other resource material.
Most of the ideas outlined requires clients to do nothing apart from watch their in-box and let us know how they would like the content delivered.
If you would like us to help you further with idea development please note that this is a chargeable service that we are happy to provide if you want more help.
