I wrote a series of posts about using twitter, from creating a profile through to recognising the bad guys out there. There are even assignments to work through to get you started.
| Part One | The Perfect Profile |
| Part Two | The Perfect Tweet |
| Part Three | Followers |
| Part Four | The Twitter Tools |
| Part Five | Fakers and Scammers |
As with any other community on or offline Twitter has its share of malevolent members. Some are merely irritating, some are more distressing and some pose a danger to your reputation.
In this post I’m going to talk about ways to spot some of the fakers, trolls, hackers and scammers, why they exist, and what you can do about them (if anything!)
How to spot them
Here are more signs that an account is fake, and some tools to help you test whether your followers are fake. Unfortunately the creation of these accounts is getting smarter, and the bots behind the accounts have got better at mimicking human behaviour, even twitter can’t always spot them.
Why they exist
The accounts are most likely spam accounts, if you check the profile and the tweets all links published connect to the same marketing site.
It’s possible to buy followers on Twitter, it goes against the terms and conditions of using Twitter, but it’s possible. There’s even a site dedicated to reviewing the various services on offer.
The services are sold as social media marketing; which makes no sense if you’re building an audience of bots. The other sales rationale is that it boosts your online credibility. Well, perhaps, temporarily. Companies doing this often follow genuine accounts in the hope of follow backs to increase their credibility.
What to do
There’s no real risk with these accounts, your follower count is higher and if you follow back your stream has some pointless posts in it. So you can just ignore the accounts. I don’t follow back if an account looks like a spam account. If you sign up to Manage Flitter they identify fake accounts you’re following and allow you to unfollow, the paid subscription allows you to identify fake accounts following you
How to spot them
An internet troll has been defined as “an abusive or obnoxious user who uses shock value to promote arguments and disharmony in online communities”. You can spot them by their consistently mean and abusive comments, and their failure to back down or apologise when called on it.
Why they exist
A failure of evolution? The online world reflects the offline world, there are nasty people offline, you can expect them to also be online. Where anonymity is possible online some trolls use it as a shield to hide behind while they post abuse. Some platforms and some subjects are more famous for attracting abusive comments.
What to do
You have four options;
1 Ignore; Trolls thrive on your outrage, if you don’t provide it there’s a chance they’ll go away.
2 Respond; You can respond, challenging the person. It’s unlikely to change their mind or elicit an apology. It’s more like to earn you further abuse and others may join in, escalating it in round after round of competitive abuse.
3 Block; Twitter offers the option to block users, this means you will no longer see their content including tweets those which @ your handle.
4 Report; You can also report users to Twitter if you think their behaviour is abusive or threatening. If you think a threat of violence is credible you should contact your local police. In the UK this has led to arrest and prosecution.
How to spot them
The scary thing is you might not know until it’s too late, be alert to any strange activity on your account including multiple password resets.
I spotted a hack going on with tweetdeck one day some years ago. I noticed two very strange tweets, supposedly retweets by me, containing a script which mentioned tweetdeck.
I checked whether anyone else had seen this error and there were already a few tweets reporting a problem with tweetdeck, including one linking to a Mashable article. The good thing about sites like Mashable or Techcrunch is they will report real time on attacks and they have the expertise to analyse the problem and tell you what to do. At that point they were saying there’s been a hack on tweetdeck and advising users to logout. I did, reverting to using twitter through the twitter site, where I checked the tweetdeck twitter account. They were already reporting on the issue.
Why they exist
The hackers want to steal your money, your identity or destroy your reputation. Alternatively they want to blackmail you. Sometimes they want to cause damage a the company by stealing data, and you have the bad luck to hold an account there. Or they could be looking to blackmail a company.
What to do
What you can do comes down to prevention and staying alert.
Prevention; secure your accounts with strong passwords, use different passwords for each site, and use two factor authentication whenever possible. Here are more tips to protect yourself (although there’s debate on whether changing your password really does help).
Stay alert; follow the twitter accounts of the tools you use, if you have doubts check reliable sources such as Mashable, TechCrunch and NakedSecurity. If you are attacked your actions depend on the attack. In the example I gave above from tweetdeck the advice was to log out of everything, when returning Tweetdeck advised a password change.
How to spot them
There are the usual scams that promise easy money via work from home schemes, and there are those connected to phishing scams, there are those that spread malware.
They’ll often send you a tweet or a direct message with just a link, or they’ll make an outrageous claim in the tweet, “someone is spreading rumours about you” was around a couple of years ago.
Why they exist
The people behind them want to steal your money, your identity or destroy your reputation.
What to do
Don’t click on links in messages or DMs that you’re uncertain about. Don’t fill in any passwords ever unless the URL of the site in the top bar is what you expect, so https://twitter.com/ for twitter. There are more suggestions on protecting yourself here.
As for the hackers stay alert, pay attention to credible warnings.
There are lots of tools for using twitter, some for tweeting and scheduling tweets, some add greatly to existing twitter functionality, others help you manage your followers, and some focus on data visualisation based on twitter’s data.
In generally they are using twitter’s API to pull publicly available data from twitter and presenting it to you in more useful ways. There are loads of tools out there that are lots of fun to play with, in researching this I found this list of 93 free (or freemium) tools. and this list of 21 must-have tools for twitter. Be warned though, things change quickly in the twitterverse and some tools may already be dead (RIP Storify).
I’ve tried a lot of tools over the years I’ve been using twitter and these are my favourites. PS They’re all free, or have free versions.
I am a fan of TweetDeck, I can manage multiple accounts from it, across multiple devices, and it provides multiple columns which is handy for specific searches and for any tweetchats that you join.
It will also let me schedule tweets. There are social media experts out there who say you shouldn’t schedule tweets, and there are examples where it has gone wrong. But it’s a practical way of managing your account.
Twitter now allows scheduling from company accounts, and their are other tools out there, Hootsuite is probably the most popular and it has the added advantage of giving you some analytics, although the most interesting data is only available for paid accounts. (See the advantages and disadvantages of Hootsuite).
I use twitter’s own analytics tool, just go to https://analytics.twitter.com/ while you’re logged in to twitter and you’ll see basic analytics data for your twitter account.
Twitter’s analytics tool provides decent reports on your follower growth, overall tweet performance, and performance per tweet. The downside is that only 5 months of data are held, if you want to use more you need to download your data regularly. Oh yeah, it’s free.
FollowerWonk works on a freemium model but gives in depth analysis of your followers and who you follow, it has all sorts of neat tricks from suggesting the best time to tweet, to the “Social Authority” of your followers, to their activity.
This graph shows when my followers are most active – it makes sense to tweet more in periods of high activity.
I use Status Brew to track my followers. I’ll generally follow back if the account looks like a real person who is tweeting genuine content, this tool helps me identify fake or inactive accounts. It also shows me who has followed or unfollowed me recently and lets me follow back (or unfollow) from within their application. Manage Filter offers similar options. Both companies work on a freemium model, for individual use the free tools are already pretty helpful.
There’s another tool around that will validate followers for you called truetwit. I haven’t used it but have been asked to validate my account by people who are using it. Most days I only get a few new followers so it’s easy enough to validate them myself, but I can imagine for those on very popular accounts who want to ensure their followers are real, this would be a time saver.
MentionMapp, shows you the relationship between hashtags and people. I’ve used this to find relevant hashtags for posts, and to find people who are currently tweeting about a subject, the presentation is dynamic, and you can click on any hashtag or person and the graph rebuilds.
One Million Tweet Map shows you local clusters or a heat map of where subjects are being discussed based on a hashtag search.
If you want to know the trending hashtags around the world Trends24 lists them all with a national and city breakdown. Just for fun I made a comparison of what LA and NYC are tweeting about. Apparently there’s a thing called The Bachelor that’s the most interesting.
There are a few things you can do on the twitter app that you can’t do in the web version of Twitter.
Tweet Thread
Twitter was tricky to use for long form conversations in it’s original incarnation. Each tweet was only 140 characters and that included hashtags and URLs, writing tweets was almost an art form. It’s improved the character count to 280 which excludes hashtags and links. But still people needed more and came up with a work around, breaking your long story into a tweetstorm, a series of tweets, and using a numbering convention to help the reader; (1/4) at the end of a tweet indicated that this was the first of a four tweet series.
Last year Twitter introduced threading and you can just add a tweet to thread and they will be presented together. Much easier for the reader. This is only available on the phone apps at this stage and it’s really easy to use.
Bookmarks
The latest feature rolled out from Twitter is a real bookmark option, you are now able to save tweets to read later in a private list. There’s now a share button below each tweet, clicking on it reveals a short menu, click on “Add Tweet to Bookmarks”.
You can find your bookmarks saved under your profile and all bookmarks will be there. They’re not visible on the desktop version, yet.
I’ve got one more post in this series – around etiquette and things that can go wrong in Twitter. I’ll publish that next Tuesday.
It’s time to talk about follower strategies and tips for building a solid following. I spoke about this briefly in Part Two, but I’m diving into detail here.
My goal with twitter is to discover new content and new expertise. I also want to share my own content through twitter, so I have tried to build a following of people who will be interested in what I write about. This means I look for people with interesting expertise in the fields I work in and follow them.
Twitter has been around since 2006, and now has 330 million users, so you do know people who are already there. People who already know you through work or professional connections are most likely to follow you back.
Search using the full name that they usually use, if someone is using twitter professionally they want to be found and their name will come up in the search results. Only one person can have the handle @JohnSmith, but an unlimited number can use the name in their profile and a search will find them all.
Click on “People” in the top bar to list accounts using that name. Twitter lists anything close to your spelling, which means that when I searched for John Smith, I got also got Nick Smith. You can refine your search with more terms, John Smith digital for example. But Twitter search engine seems to only look in profiles, so unless John Smith has added digital to his profile it won’t help.
You’ve probably already got an account on LinkedIn in or on Facebook, ask your friends, colleagues and connections to join you on Twitter.
Create a short post telling people you’re on Twitter, include your twitter handle, and invite them to follow you.
Search for industry experts or thought leaders in your field, follow them for their great content and then check who they follow. When you’re starting out look for people with followers in the hundreds or thousands rather than the hundreds of thousands – they’re more likely to follow back.
Search for a topic of interest and find relevant hashtags. If you’re interested in social media use by companies for example then #socbiz is a relevant hashtag, if you’re working on building leadership skills then #leadershipmatters has thoughtful content. Look for the hashtags associated with events, the Digital Workplace conference coming up in June will use #DW18 for conference related tweets.
By searching on the hashtag you can see who is actively tweeting on these subjects/events, and follow them.
Include your twitter handle on your LinkedIn profile, you add it under your contact and personal info. Add it to your profile on your blog or website if you have one. Include it in any posts you publish, it’s common to see twitter handles included in footers on LinkedIn or Medium, sometimes as the author’s preferred method of contact.
This is so important to maintain a following, if someone follows you, follow them back.
I’ll follow anyone back on twitter who is vaguely relevant to my themes of digital, communication, innovation and leadership.
Twitter has put in place some limits around follower numbers in an effort to stop “spammy” behaviour.
You can follow up to 5000 accounts, although only 1000 per day. After that you can only follow more accounts if your own following/follower ratio is close to 1 (the actual acceptable ratio is not published). If you want to follow every politician in the world (for example) you would hit the limit pretty quickly, but there is a way around it by using lists (more in the next post).
I regularly search for new people to follow, and unfollow inactive accounts, but only perhaps 20 at a time. On Twitter aggressively following and unfollowing behaviour on twitter can also result in a ban.
These limits are put in place to limit spamming, and in a normal management of your account you probably won’t encounter them but it’s good to know they exist.
1: Publish twitter handle
Add your twitter handle to your LinkedIn profile (under the contact information section). If your Facebook page is somewhat professional you can add it there as well.
2: Hashtags
Search for hashtags in your field, just pick the keywords associated with your job and look for relevant content. Then see who is tweeting that content and follow them.
3: Follow the followed
Search for 10 people who absolute leaders in your field; influencers, thought leaders, and innovators who are active on twitter. Then look at who they follow, check the profile to find people whose interests match yours, and check their twitter account to make sure they’re active.
Aim to add 40-70 new people in total from tasks 2 and 3.
Last week I wrote about 4 Twitter Basics, this week I want to take a look at some slightly more advanced ways to get going with Twitter.
I’ll cover how to construct a “perfect” tweet, what content to think about in your tweets, when to tweet and building a following. I’m posting here based on several years of tweeting for myself and for (former) employers.
I encourage you to get in and try twitter, the more you practise the more you’ll learn.
Tweets can be 280 characters long; spaces, punctuation and emoticons count towards this total. Hashtags, handles and links do not.
I tweet about digital subjects and I construct my tweets with text + link + hashtags. The text is why this content is interesting, the link is from a relevant reputable source, and I had two or three hashtags to help the search function. The preview is automatically generated by twitter and picks up an image from the article (if there isn’t an image you can add one separately).
I try to balance my content between commenting on things I’ve found on the internet, publishing my own content and interacting with other people. I am probably tweeting most prolifically at conferences and events. I’ve also used it to comment on television programmes (Apprentice and Dragon’s Den in particular). Increasingly I use it to interact with brands – sometimes to to thank them, but more often to get support. Here’s my ‘how to’ for all of these content types.
Your own content – I write this blog and connect it to my twitter account, meaning that every post is publicised on twitter the moment it’s published. This has an advantage because wordpress lets you schedule posts, meaning your tweet goes at the same time.
I’ll also post personal observations, as I’m often in random locations to write there tends to be a coffee theme.
Events – I tweet a lot at conferences and other events, my twitter feed often becomes my “notes” after the event. It’s also a good way to find other people who tweet relevant content, and conversely a good way for other people to find you.
Other people’s content
– As well as using twitter I see a lot of articles, blogs and videos online every day. If I’m sharing a tweet I tend retweet it to give the source credit.
If I find content some other way I will make a new tweet with my own comment. I try to credit the source so if I know a relevant twitter handle I will add it, as shown in the tweet at right.
I want people to credit me when they share my content so it’s only fair I do the same.
Second Screen – There’s a phenomenon going on where people watch TV, while interacting via a social media platform. I sometimes do this, mostly during the BBC shows “Apprentice” and “Dragon’s Den”. It’s fun, and a great opportunity to snark.
Chat sessions – Twitter chats are a way to have an open discussion on twitter, at a specific time and usually structured via a series of questions.
I’ve been involved in the #ESNchat, about enterprise social networks, but they cover every subject from architecture to yoga, from cakes to veganism. I’ve found a twitter chat schedule, with the appropriate hashtag, of course you can also start your own.
Interaction with others – Don’t be shy – twitter become more useful and more fun the more you interact. Just use the @someone function, or reply to their tweets. Most often the person responds. Sometimes good stuff comes from it.
Interaction with brands – Many brands offer a service channel via twitter (or facebook), and customers expectations have grown regarding the responsiveness and the content of the response.
I’ve had mostly good experiences when I’ve used these channels, and companies are increasingly using Twitter as a service channel.
Only people following you will see your content (unless you use the @someone function to address a person specifically), so if you’re sharing content you need to build a following of people to share it with and to interact with. Of course if you’re just using twitter to discover information then this isn’t so important, you can just focus on finding people to follow.
Most people will follow you back, unless they’re in the stratosphere of the twitterati, where the follow back rate is typically less than one percent (of the top ten on twitter by number of followers no one follows more than 1% back). I tell you this to manage expectations.
So the best thing you can do is follow people you find relevant and interesting. If you do this slowly and steadily your follower number will grow.
DO NOT follow hundreds and hundreds of people each day, ( and do not unfollow hundreds and hundreds of people at once). You will look like an “aggressive follower” to twitter’s algorithm, which would then consider your account as likely to be spam. You also look less credible to potential followers, even humans think high follow to follower ratio looks spammy.
DO NOT buy followers, it goes against the twitter rules and it doesn’t really add anything to your account. You won’t see better content, and you won’t have a bigger real audience. All that happens is a bit of PR kudos for having so many followers – until someone looks closer and figures out millions of those followers are fake – then the PR turns negative.
If you post something on Twitter it’s public, and permanent.
Don’t be the guy who tweets about his pay, don’t the sport’s fan that abuses players online, don’t threaten other twitter members, think before you make a questionable joke. Check the public shaming site for more examples.
Twitter has moved to make reporting abusive behaviour on twitter easier, but there are still plenty of jerks around. Don’t be one.
Next Week; Twitter Tools (followed by companies on twitter)
1: A perfect tweet
Publish a tweet in the format shown, include your text, a link, and 2-5 hashtags.
2: Find followers
Find five people in your field who are active on twitter and follow them.
3: Build Followers
Ask your friends or contacts to follow you, you can make this request via other platforms, ask your friends on Facebook or Linkedin to follow you, you can explain that you’re new to twitter and want to build a following.
A friend asked me a question about using twitter, and the first thing I explained was that if you don’t use twitter the way to explain that is “I’m not active on twitter”, not “I don’t do the twitter”. I decided to update and republish a 5 part guide I wrote in 2012.
Twitter is a micro-blogging service available online or via various apps. It was created in 2006, but real growth in user numbers didn’t start until early 2009 which is about when I joined, a year later I started a company account which I ran for about two years. There are now about 330 Million users on Twitter.
I use my personal account (@changememe) to find new content, to post my own content (I will be tweeting this blog post), interact in regular chats and to share things I’ve found online. I’ve met new people, solved service issues, and been invited to speak at a conference via twitter. For me it’s been a positive experience and I use twitter every day. Here’s the basics to get started.
There are a few things you need to figure out when setting up your profile, think about what you want to be called on twitter, what image of yourself you want to present and what background image you would use.
Your twitter handle – essentially what are you going to call yourself. The maximum length is 15 characters, but you can use up to 50 characters for your name. You can only use letters, numbers and the underscore (_), you can change your name at any time. With millions of users a lot of the “obvious” twitter names are already in use so you will have to come up with something new; there’s a tool to help you with that.
If you are a company and someone has the twitter handle of your company name you may need to come up with a creative version of your company name. Exceptions are when the account is being used as a spam account, or when the account is inactive.
Your avatar – the picture beside your name. Twitter recommends an image size of 400px x 400px, this means it will look good on your profile page and be resized for all other uses. I suggest checking how it looks after upload though – you still want it to look good in the 73px x 73px as it appears in the stream. If you are using Twitter as part of your professional branding use a recent high-quality headshot.
Not uploading an avatar means you’ll get an anonymous silhouette image, some people won’t follow accounts that have not bothered to upload an avatar.
Header image – the large image appearing at the top of your profile page. The dimensions for this are 1500px x 500px, but it’s trickier than that because twitter places your image over the lower left of it and repositions the image slightly as it resizes the screen, this guide takes you through how to set up your header image.
Describe yourself – you can add your real name, location and a website link. You can also describe yourself in 160 characters or less, you can use hashtags in this space as well if you want to link to a theme of content.
For personal accounts there seems to be a trend to mix the professional, the personal and the humorous or surprising, as exemplified on Madeleine Albright‘s current twitter profile. Some companies try to follow this pattern, oreo manages to add humour to their profile.
Once you’ve got your profile set up it’s time to take a deep breath and start tweeting. Here’s a few things you need to know to get started.
@someone – beginning a tweet with someone’s user name means your tweet is brought to that person’s attention. So if you send a tweet with @changememe in it, I will see it in my notifications. This is important because I don’t watch my twitter stream all the time and if you don’t use this method I probably won’t see your tweet.
Hashtags – these are ways of adding a subject to your tweet, simply put “#” in front of the word you want to connect to. Twitter users use hashtags to find relevant information, to have conversations and to add humour to a tweet. They’ve also been used for political effect, as the #MeToo movement has shown.
Beneath each tweet there are four functions, here’s how they work.
Reply; tweets a response to the original tweet that appears directly beneath it, and sends a notification to the account of the original tweet.
Retweet; re posts the tweet on your own twitter account. Twitter gives you the option to add a comment to the original tweet before you post. Twitter sends a notification to the account of the original tweet.
Like; this used to have a star and be called favourites, I’m never sure whether to call it like or favourites now. It will save the tweet under your list of likes on your account, so I tend to use it as a “read later” function. Twitter sends a notification to the account of the original tweet.
DM or direct message; opens up the twitter message function.
When you first join twitter it seems weirdly empty, until you start following people. Here are some ways to find people to follow.
Search hashtags – search for hashtags relating to your interests or your company interests, when you see some tweets of interest follow whoever tweeted them. Conferences are a fertile ground for this as they will often use a specific hashtag making your search easier. In addition the audience has already identified themselves as being interested in that theme, and the posting frequency is high for the duration of the conference.
Find Experts – who are the leaders in your industry? who would be the most influential thinkers? look for their twitter accounts, you’ll have an instant stream of content if it happens to be Guy Kawasaki.
Follow people those experts follow – or the people who are interacting and retweeting their content a lot.
Follow people back – as you start adding content to twitter and interacting with others people will start to follow you, it’s polite to follow back.
You will receive a notification when someone
OK, that’s the basic “how to” next post; constructing a good tweet, building a following, tools for twitter use. Also fakers, trolls and scams.
1: Your Profile
Set up your profile with a header image, an avatar image and a short description. Add a link to your blog or your Linkedin profile.
2: Follow
Find five people in your field who are active on twitter and follow them.
You’ve got a Facebook account, you know your memes, your CV is on LinkedIn. A colleague of mine once told me that everything you put online is public and permanent, and if you’re averse to risk you may have avoided building up a social media presence. But at a certain level it’s almost a job requirement, as part of your personal branding. So how do you create a professional online social media presence that survives scrutiny from your boss, new colleagues or your future partner?
Three steps;
We’ve all created accounts and then forgotten about them. I had a very confusing time trying to use Flickr at one point as I had somehow created two accounts with very similar names. So check your existing presence.
Most companies have social media policies in place that you will need to follow. In general a company can’t prevent you from being on social media but they have an interest in what you say if you represent the company. Some professions have best practices that you should consider. Check
With the information from these two things done you are ready to start setting up your social media presence.
How many social media platforms are there? No body knows, I found an article from 2010 listing 57, and the first one doesn’t exist anymore. Another article from last year lists 20 including Vine which resides in the internet equivalent of a hospice. So you’ll need to to research which ones work for you. Think about the size of the platform in your market(s), the type of content you can create to share, and where your audience is. My strong advice is to pick one or two to get started and do those well before taking on more. Here is a summary of the biggest platforms.
Facebook Unless you’re in China or Russia, or have a very niche business you will need to be active on Facebook.
| Population | Almost 2 billion users (April 2017). |
| Demographics | 80% of internet users are active on Facebook and it’s the most popular social media site in most countries of the world. |
| Content types | text, images, links, video all supported |
| Advantages | big audience all content supported reasonable stats on post views and engagement |
| Disadvantages | pay to play hard to get into the stream of even those who like your posts |
You can have a personal page in your own name, and a page that represents your company, your interests or your community.
YouTube Everyone consumes content on YouTube, relatively few people create content. But if your company can find a content niche you can win viewers, customers and PR pages, like the “Will It Blend” channel.
| YOUTUBE | |
| Population | About 1 billion users (April 2017). |
| Demographics | Broad reach, skews younger, gender balanced in most categories (except eg; gaming and beauty) |
| Content types | supports only video |
| Advantages | big audience highly used |
| Disadvantages | harder to create great content hard to get your content seen must monitor comments supports only video |
LinkedIn Although this has a lower total population check its reach in your country and industry. For finance professionals in the Netherlands at least 80% are on LinkedIn, so if you want a professional social media profile as a financial expert here you will need to be on LinkedIn.
| Population | About 106 million users (April 2017). |
| Demographics | Roughly equal on gender, slightly older overall audience, skews towards higher education and professional occupations. |
| Content types | text, images, links supported |
| Advantages | professional audience LinkedIn strategy is to become a content platform most content supported reasonable stats |
| Disadvantages | (limited to) professional audience |
LinkedIn works of a personal profile, allows shared content, and offers company pages.
| Population | Almost 319 million users (April 2017). |
| Demographics | Very general user base, even split on age, gender and education. |
| Content types | text, images, links, video all supported |
| Advantages | big audience all content supported reasonable stats on post views and engagement |
| Disadvantages | pay to play hard to get seen as peoples twitter feeds move quickly text limit of 280 (ish) characters spam and trolls can make it hard to use hard to build an audience |
I like Twitter (follow me @changememe), it’s like being at a conference during a break. But unless you’re following a range of interesting people there it will seem empty.
Instagram If you’re all about the images then Instagram is the highest audience sharing platform.
| Population | About 600 million users (April 2017). |
| Demographics | More women than men, younger audience. |
| Content types | images and short video supported, with new tools all the time allowing stories, boomerangs, mosaic, and portfolio posts. |
| Advantages | big audience low spam/troll as Instagram takes them seriously |
| Disadvantages | images/video only hard to build audience increasing number of ads |
I love Instagram, and post at least one photograph from amazing Amsterdam every day, but if you’re not able to produce visual content every day this may not be the platform for you.
Snapchat et al Auto-delete platforms are the rage with the kids (yes I’m old) and they are fun. Some companies, with a focus on millennial audience, have been making progress, if your brand is in this area you might want to play with his in the mix of your personal social platforms so you really know how it works.
| SNAPCHAT ET AL | |
| Population | About 300 million users (April 2017). |
| Demographics | Even split on gender, younger audience, lower education level overall (due to lower age demographic). |
| Content types | images and short video supported, with stickers, faceswap and image distortion options available. |
| Advantages | big audience young audience fun culture |
| Disadvantages | hard to execute well few brands have credibility to even be here |
Blogging Do you have a lot to say? Blogging is the way to go for long form text content. There are loads of platforms out there, this blog is run on wordpress, which powers about a quarter of internet sites. I also occasionally post on the LinkedIn content platform and on Medium. There are a slew of platforms out there, take time to look at the functionality (is it easy to write and easy to share your content?), audience building, and robust (will the company survive with your content?) before choosing one. I’ve used WordPress for about 7 years (having imported it from Blogger) and still like it, every so often I look at others.
Your profile consists of your name, your biography, a photo and, in many cases, a header image. These should all reflect you and be consistent.
Each platform offers you options to write a short biography, add a photo and, in many cases, a header images. The descriptions should be consistent, and the profile image should be the same headshot.
A word of warning about twitter bios, you have a 160 character limit, but only the first 110 are visible in search results, so put the good stuff first.
You want to build an audience, decide who you will follow and follow back. Be aware that some platforms have limits in place, Twitter puts ratio limits in place when you follow five thousand people, and Facebook has a limit of 5000 on friends (although more can follow you.
I recommend; follow those in your field of interest, who have genuine accounts. Search for these on individual platforms or based on blogs/websites of experts you’re interested in.
I use StatusBrew to manage twitter followers as it helps me identify people who don’t follow back or unfollow me, I want my ration of followers to following to stay at about 1, and this helps me manage that.
You need to pick a sweet spot of subjects to write about; where you are passionate, can be useful and credible. You might be tempted to write about everything, try to narrow it down to a core subject area, this helps your audience know what expertise they can get from you. You can break out of your core subjects occasionally if your passion overtakes your logic; I write about digital, communications and innovation, but have broken out occasionally even to politics which I never thought I’d write about.
The next step is to think about your content calendar, social media is a hungry beast and you need to find manageable ways to feed it. One way to help is to connect your accounts to automate publication, when this blog post is published it will automatically land in my Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook accounts. Technically the best practice for social media is to build content specific to each platform, but out here in the real world cross-platform sharing is a sensible approach.
Social media on a personal level can build your personal brand, and build your credibility as an expert in your chosen field. I’ve had an invitation to speak at a conference via twitter, a freelance gig via Facebook and via LinkedIn? Still waiting for the job offer.
Image: Personal Social Media | Louisa Mac | CC BY-2.0
There’s a figure that gets quoted about engagement; 1, 9, 90. Which is a ratio representation of engagement. For everyone person who contributes content, 9 might like it and 90 will see it. It’s a little simplistic, and there are more forms of engagement now so it’s helpful to think of the engagement ladder.
Starting from the lowest rung of the ladder
How many people saw your image, watched your video, read your content. This is the lowest level of engagement as it requires the least amount of effort from your visitor. It’s roughly equivalent to reach, although you might want to consider how much of your content was viewed or read.
It doesn’t tell you much about the person’s attitude to your brand, or their likelihood to purchase. We’ve all read stuff we don’t agree with, sometimes because we don’t agree with it. To compare this to a classic sales funnel it’s at least awareness.
Liked / Facebook Reaction
The next rung on the engagement ladder is a like, a G+, a Facebook reaction. It’s low commitment, a one click easy reaction, Facebook reactions tell you a more. Personally I’m pretty quick to like posts on Facebook or Instagram, much less likely to do so on Twitter. As likes are visible to others this level of engagement does indicate that the visitor has a possible interest in your brand – but be careful. Facebook rates all reactions the same, but a thousand “angry” reactions won’t translate to sales for your company.
The third rung is comments, or reactions to your posts. If you’re posting on social issues, as Banana Republic did in the screenshot below, you’re likely to attract a lot of comments.
It takes more effort to comment on a post, positive comments are a public endorsement of your brand. It’s going to take some effort on your part to analyse the comments, or to parse the sentiment analysis provided by social listening tools.
If a person shares a post, retweets, embeds your video, they’re increasing your reach as your content is now (potentially) reaching a new audience. They’ve also added your brand to their online reputation, this doesn’t map easily to a step in the sales process, but sits between evaluation and decision. They’ve added your company to a mental list for possible future purchases.
Some of your content might included a specific Call To Action, or CTA. For many companies this is exactly how they sign up more customers or subscribers, you can see some examples of great CTAs in this article from HubSpot. (And I’ve just shared content from a brand I have never been a customer of, but I’m aware of them, and they remain a potential supplier if I’m ever in a purchase decision for their services in the future).
Your CTA might be a subscribe, follow, download, or purchase option.
The ultimate brand accolade, when users generate their own content related to your brand. But it’s a tricky area, with brands needing to pay attention to copyright and privacy issues.
Spotify have taken the step of using the real titles of subscribers’ lists in their own ads, it’s a campaign strategy that is infinite since their users will always be creating new lists. It resonates with their audience really well – seeing your own list picked up for an ad is cool, or whatever the kids are calling it these days.
When your customers take the step of creating content around your brand and sharing it you can bet you’ve got the ultimate level of engagement.
Brands building a presence in social media have to manage the comments and responses. It can seem overwhelming, indeed if your company hits a crisis it may be overwhelming. A response matrix is a simple tool that can reduce the pain of responding to social media responses. It still relies on the expertise and good judgement of your social media or webcare team, but it guides them and simplifies training.
To create your own response matrix think about all the types of responses you might get across your social media channels. There are five generic types of responses you can use as a starting point.
For each type of comment or post you receive define the way in which to respond. I’ve given generic examples below.
You will need to go into more detail on the action steps for some posts. For example if a negative post is a product complaint you will need to detail the actions to be taken to correct the issue, and the actions may depend on whether the product is under warranty or what sort product it is.
In general customers expect a fast response on social media, KLM are responding within 7 minutes on twitter today. However there may be specific “hot” issues that your web care team need to refer to other teams. Work with those teams to make sure that quick responses are possible.
If there’s a common complaint you can even create a standard text. Many years ago I worked for a Dutch company whose legal name included the word “groep”, which is Dutch for “group”. Periodically we received comments from people stating that we had spelt group incorrectly – we had a standard text to use as a response for that, it began “thank you for being so observant…”
Your final response matrix should be a decision tree, a tool to help your web care teams act on customer posts on social media. This is a massively simplified generic version, but I’ve collected real versions published on the internet on a Pinterest board shown below.
Publish your social media response matrix, itTrain your web care teams on your response matrix, they need to;
I recommend a regular review of actual cases handled using the response matrix to ensure that it is covering all relevant issues – a tool that is not relevant will not be used. A quarterly review as a minimum, but you might want to use a higher frequency in the first phase.
Effective response relies on the web care teams using good judgement, the response matrix can’t replace that, you can never define every possible response.
Good luck creating your response matrix, and if you publish it online give me a shout, I would love to pin it.
We’re all on social media all the time, and the social media platforms are stretching into new areas of our lives – Facebook now has an “at work” option called Workplace. So how good are we at using it? Back in 2013 I looked at some Social Media fails (and one brilliant response), now I’m looking again. Are companies making the same sorts of mistakes? Have we got better at using social media?
Some of the same mistakes occurred.
This tweet came from the US Justice Department, clearly not something a US Justice Department employee should ever be saying, so what happened? The twitter app lets you switch easily between accounts, and many people use the app to access their personal and professional accounts. In this case the staffer’s access to the twitter account was revoked, the tweet deleted and an apology issued.
We’re still making this mistake. I advocated keeping accounts separate, or even using separate devices, but I think that this error has become so common that people understand the error and it doesn’t seem to result in lasting damage to the organisation. If this happens to you apologise, delete tweet and move on.
Carrie Fisher died, and the internet mourned. Cinnabon tried to gate-crash the wake with this image, recycled from their May-the-fourth post. The geeks of the internet were not impressed, many pointing out that she was much more than Princess Leia, that she’d hated this hair style, and anyway it’s crass to use someone’s death to promote your product.
As a best practice do not comment on a celebrity death unless they had a direct tie with your company or organisation. If there’s an emergency or an event where people are in danger only comment on the event in ways that are offering practical support.
Some Social Media Fails were more prominent in 2016.
Social media posts almost always have images now, and that opens up a whole new world of pain, as Coca Cola found out when they used a map of Russia in their Christmas promotion. They managed to annoy Russia by not including Crimea, and then Ukraine by adding it.
There are a surprising number of tricky borders around the world and a surprising number of sharp-eyed people ready to comment on it. You’re in a no-win situation, you’re bound to annoy someone so avoid maps of contested areas in your imagery if you can.
Artificial intelligence got a bit hyped in 2016, if Microsoft’s experiment with “Tay Tweets” is anything to go by humans aren’t ready for it. In just 24 hours twitter taught Tay to be a racist bully.
Within days Microsoft ceased the experiment.
UN hires and then fires Wonder Woman
The UN has a whole organisation devoted to gender equality which states that “UN Women is the global champion for gender equality”. But the UN’s track record isn’t so convincing; just three of the 71 presidents of the UN General Assembly have been women, and all of the Secretaries General have been men.
So when they announced that the new Honorary Ambassador for the Empowerment of Women and Girls was a fictional character, specifically Wonder Woman, it didn’t go well. There were protests within the UN, negative feedback in the mainstream media, and across social media.
This is a case of a bad decision being amplified in social media, and it seemed to lead to a change at the UN.
Maybe the people running the MTV Australia twitter account on the night of the Golden Globes thought the humour would work since America Ferrera and Eva Longoria were making fun of how Latina actresses are often mistaken for each other. But it’s one thing to make a joke about your own race/nationality and very different for a company to make a joke about someone else’s. Just don’t.
On the same theme; know whom you’re talking about. Total Beauty confused Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey.
Fake news reached a whole new level in 2016, and is set to reach new depths in 2017. There are thousands of US examples out there but I’m going to choose a less contentious example from the UK.
The Grim Reaper was busy in 2016, and with Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds dying within days of each other we were primed for more bad news. So when Queen Elizabeth II stayed home from Church with a cold a fake BBC account reported that she had died and people fell for it. The report was quickly debunked, leaving twitter embarrassed but relieved.
Which leads to a prediction for 2017; this will be the year we get smart about our news sources. Once I’m earning again I’ll be supporting one or two sources of good journalism.
So what’s changed?
I didn’t find examples of people jumping on trending hashtags any more, or of people sharing information that shouldn’t be made public, so we’ve got smarter. The errors now seem to be more in the area of content creation, social media managers need to understand how their promotional content might land in a global market.
We’ve got better, but the job has got tougher.
Change Meme 