The Twitter Audit
During my new daily routine of scanning Google Reader (big thanks to my supervisor, Sarah Findle, for introducing me to this fabulous tool), I came across a great and rather helpful blog post by Chris Brogan – Take a Twitter Audit.
Have you ever wondered how you or your company is being perceived on Twitter? I’m sure many of you have. But, just to be sure, open your Twitter account and take this quick Twitter Audit. Brogan has comprised a list of 10 questions to ask yourself concerning your activity on Twitter. It’s a great, quick tool to use to determine just how effective you or your business’s online presence is.
Here are a few of the questions that particularly caught my eye:
- How often are you tweeting? Is less more? Is more, more? Are you burying your good stuff?
- How are you feeding Twitter? What are you giving your audience to consume? Do you share interesting articles? Do you point out your lunch du jour? What’s the plan?
- Have you checked the click-through stats on your short links? For instance, if you use bit.ly, take the URL of anything you’ve posted, copy it to a browser bar, and add a +, like this: “http://bit.ly/iOGhJ2+”, and you’ll see the stats. How are you doing?
The last question listed above was entirely new to me, but definitely something I will start to utilize in the future. Knowing how many people are clicking on your short links is the perfect way to gauge what your followers are interested in and allows you to weed out any unpopular subjects.
Be sure to check out the rest of Brogan’s Twitter Audit and give your account a quick test!
Show some love, it’s #FollowFriday!
How do you determine who to follow on Twitter? What are the unwritten rules of following and who writes the book on social media etiquette anyway? Should we follow our friends? Should we follow everyone with interests relevant to our own? Maybe we should ask our friends who to follow? OK, now we’re onto something… More »
Twitter Trends
Hubspot recently published “10 Essential Twitter Stats” proving once again to skeptics of the tool that it is a powerful player in the marketing space. The last four in the bunch stood out to me as some important and staggering takeaways.
7. Twitter users tend to be “early adopters”.
19% of Twitter users are among the first to buy/try new products, compared to only 10% of the general population. An additional 25% of Twitter users buy/try new products before others (though not “first”) as compared to only 12% of the general population.
8. Twitter plays an active role in purchasing decisions.
42% of Twitter users rely on this channel to learn about new products/services, and 41% of them share opinions about products/services via Twitter. Soliciting opinions about products/services and seeking out discounts/coupons/sales are also popular Twitter-based activitities.
9. 67% of Twitter users are more likely to buy brands that they “follow”.
Whether interaction on Twitter is the cause of this greater allegiance or not is unclear—but it certainly seems that extra Twitter love doesn’t hurt.
10. Companies that use Twitter average 2x more leads per month than those that do not.
This, perhaps, is the most compelling reason of all to invest some time on Twitter—particularly if your target customer is educated, affluent, and tends to be an early adopter.
See all 10 stats here.
Preventing social media mishaps to minimize bad dreams
Last night I awoke in a sweat, quickly grabbed my phone and looked at my twitter account (@rachelkaylor). I was relieved to find that my last last tweet was (ironically): “RT @PublicityGuru: HuffPost: The 7 Worst Twitter PR Fails http://huff.to/ihO40C”
Fortunately, it was not the awful image I had seen in my dream. Dream Rachel had mistakenly tweeted terrible, awful words about anything and everything. My dream supervisor (and I don’t mean dreamy) called yelling, “What on earth have you done? Didn’t we JUST talk about this?” More »
When Do You Tweet? Hubspot Webinar: "The Science of Timing"
I participated in my first Hubspot webinar this week with over 25,000 other people. Dan Zarrella shared his research on “The Science of Timing” in a great presentation.
The webinar was so popular because the topic of timing for posting e-mails, Tweets and blog posts has been widely disputed. I learned a lot and I wanted to share some of my key takeaways: More »
Mac & Cheese & Twitter
Kraft Macaroni & Cheese and AOR Crispin Porter + Bogusky have unveiled two new initiatives that utilize Twitter to reach consumers. The first initiative uses tweets as the inspiration for TV commercials, for example:
The second initiative is a Twitter game called Mac & Jinx, which finds Twitter users who tweet about mac and cheese, randomly pairs two users, and then sends them @ messages offering free mac and cheese to the user who responds first.
Twitter was chosen as the social medium to conduct these initiatives because Kraft and CP+B felt that Twitter was the best outlet to obtain ideas from consumers and track ROI.
Earthquakes, Revolutions and Social Media
In a world where social media is becoming second nature, it makes sense that sites we use to keep up with friends and family prove useful for organization and support in a time of crisis.
After the most recent earthquake and tsunami devastated Japan, the Japanese Prime Minister’s Office launched an English-language twitter account (@JPN_PMO) to update the world about the earthquake and its horrifying aftermath. The account duplicates the Japanese-language disaster information account (@Kantei_Saigai) but is translated into English. In only eight hours, the account had close to 9,000 followers.
Social media was also recently used to inspire organization in countries experiencing political turmoil. Throughout the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, activists turned to social media to organize protests, and many credit social media for the success of the revolution. According to an article on Miller-McCune.com, a protester in Cairo commented on the phenomenon stating, “We use Facebook to schedule the protests, Twitter to coordinate, and YouTube to tell the world”.
By providing new ways to communicate, social media has changed our approach to civic action in a dramatic way and its role will continue to increase as future events occur.
Happy Twolidays!
The social media team here at HM&P couldn’t let the holidays pass by without adding on tw- to a random word. (Confused? Check out this article on Twitter speak.) During our annual office door decorating contest, we whipped up a Twitter stream featuring a cast of Christmas characters, from Santa and Buddy the Elf to more familiar faces seen around the office.
Happy Twolidays!
Blurring the lines between "said" and "tweeted"
In 2010, Twitter went from a niche site favored by technology industry insiders to one of the most important marketing, advertising and PR tools of the last decade. The very public, real-time nature of Twitter has changed the ways many media professionals – including journalists – on all sides of the news cycle gather information for public consumption.
More »
Gobble, Gobble – Tweet, Tweet
When you search “social media + Thanksgiving” in Google, a lot of things appear – trending topics, a forum for turkey lovers and Thanksgiving mobile apps, to name a few. Then I stumbled upon an interesting website – spreading thanks with a social media twist.
Epic Change, is an organization that shares and promotes ways to raise visibility and funds for those in need with the help of social media and mediated collaboration. Last year, Stacey Monk, founder of Epic Change, was listed as one of the top ten entrepreneurs to follow on Twitter.
Since 2008, Epic Change has been widely known for its Tweetsgiving project:
