Tips to Increase Your Twitter Presence

Calling all Twitter users! Whether you’re new to Twitter and you’re trying to build your follower base or you’re not-so-new to Twitter, if you’re wanting to increase your followers’ engagement, here are 5 simple tips you can use to build your follower foundation. Keep in mind, you can use these tips for your personal Twitter page or your business/brand’s Twitter page. 

1. Personalize Your Page

Take advantage of all the opportunities Twitter provides to personalize your page and have it represent who you are, what you’re interested in, or what you’re looking for. The left side of your Twitter page should be your primary focus. There you can put photos, logos, or contact information. For bigger brands or public figures, validating your account is a good idea. Also, use the “about” section wisely and put together a to-the-point and effective bio. When followers can quickly get a sense of who you are and what you’re about, they’re more likely to follow you. 

2. Ask Interesting Questions and Ask for Help

Create conversation; don’t wait for the conversation to come to you. Your followers are a great resource for feedback and help. If you’re a brand, questions don’t have to necessarily be about your products or services– asking someone’s opinion and making it clear that it’s appreciated goes a long way. Be creative and make it fun! 

3. Re-tweet and Reply (in Moderation)

Re-tweeting (RT) and replying to tweets is an easy and effective way of acknowledging your followers and letting them know you find their tweets valuable and informative. But most of all, this lets them know you appreciate their following. 

However, make sure your re-tweets and replies are balanced. Creating conversation is important, but remember that you don’t want your Twitter feed to turn into a long list of “@reply” posts. If anything, this will decrease your number of followers, because most of them don’t have the patience to look through the conversation to find out what it’s all about. 

4. Post Relevant Updates

By posting relevant and informative information and links, followers will start to consider you as a good source of information and will find it worthwhile to engage with you. 

5. Go Back to the Basics with Follow Friday (#FF)

Putting some time and thought into a #FF post is worthwhile and a great form of engagement. It’s an easy way to give a shout-out to your favorite followers and let them know you acknowledge and like their tweets. It’s also a quick and effective way to make a recommendation to the rest of your followers on who to follow. 

What tips do you use to get the most out of your Twitter account? We’d love for you to share. 

How Facebook Responds to Inappropriate Content

Ever wonder how Facebook ensures that its more than 900 million users abide by the company’s user policies? This issue requires the work of hundreds of employees. 

Based in Menlo Park, Austin, Dublin, and Hyderabad, these hundreds of employees field user reports of inappropriate posts constantly. 

Reports of inappropriate content, which users submit themselves with just a few clicks, are directed to one of four support teams. 

1. Abusive Content Team: This team handles spam and sexually explicit content. 

2. Safety Team: This team handles threats of vandalism, graphic violence, credible threats of violence, and illegal drug use. 

3. Hate and Harassment Team: This team handles reports of hate speech and harassment. 

4. Access Team: This team handles hacked and impostor accounts. 

If the reported content is found to be a violation of Facebook’s policies, Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, or Community Standards, the content is removed and the publisher is warned. Facebook’s support teams can also block users who post inappropriate content or ban them from certain features.  

Some content on Facebook violates not only the company’s polices, but the law. 

For example, one law enforcement agency discovered photos of a man siphoning gas from a police car on the sight. Others have discovered stolen property, calls for help, and even live-crime updates on Facebook.

When dealing with content such as that, Facebook says it will share reports with law enforcement “when we have a good faith belief it is necessary to prevent fraud or other illegal activity, to prevent imminent bodily harm, or to protect ourselves and you from people violating our Statement of Rights and Responsibilities.”

 

15 Steps to Superior Support

Customer service plays a key role in creating or maintaining a reputable business and brand. These 15 Steps to Superior Support, provided by GoSquared, are great to constantly keep in mind when dealing with customers or clients.

LinkedIn Recommendations: Things You Should Know

LinkedIn is continuing to grow rapidly, which means more people are using the tool for intelligence, recruitment, and networking. A social space like LinkedIn can make specific individuals stand out among others; a specific way individuals can best leverage this social network is by gathering recommendations on their LinkedIn profile. 

Here are some guidelines for LinkedIn recommendations: 

1. Ask For Specific Recommendations

When you ask someone for a recommendation, make sure the request is personal and polite. LinkedIn will autofill the recommendation request text box, but remember to take that out. Replace it with asking the person for a recommentaion for something specific you worked on together. Also, ask the person to include what happened as a result of working together. Specific information showing how your skill or work was used reflects well on you. 

2. Don’t Ask Everyone

Don’t send out a defaulted autofill recommendation to all of your connections, because most of those connections haven’t worked with you close enough. You also want to keep the recommendations business related; you don’t want your best friend or landlord to recommend you in a way that doesn’t relate to business. 

3. Don’t Ignore a Request

If you receive a recommendation request from someone that you don’t really know that well, don’t ignore it. Say something like “Thanks for the recommendation request, but I don’t feel that I can endorse your work, since we don’t really know each other that well.” With a response like this, you have let the person down gently and didn’t just leave them hanging. 

4. Be Careful About How You Recommend

While a lot of recommendations look good, make sure your whole team or all of your co-workers don’t recommend each other. Recommendations like that add little value. 

5. Update Recommendations

It’s not very common, but you might want to delete some recommendations you have made. Go to the “recommendations you have made” link in your profile and withdraw it.  You can also revise a recommendation here. 

6. Say ‘Thank You’

When someone writes you a recommendation, you are given the option to return the favor. Don’t do it unless you feel comfortable recommending the person. Regardless, send the person a note saying thanks for the recommendation they wrote for you. 

Facebook Coupons: The Key to Engagement

A recent study from a report by Wildfire Interactive looked at 10,000 random Facebook campaigns to see which got the highest response rates and earned media. The first thing the study revealed is the lack of correlation between the two; campaigns that got the most earned media did not get the highest response rates. 

If the purpose of your campaign is to increase engagement among fans, offering coupons is the way to go.

If you want fans to share the posts of your campaign, use “pick your favorite” queries, quizzes and trivia contests. 

The report touches on why some campaigns tend to be more sharable among fans. One reason could be questions allow the fan to discover more about his or her personality. Another reason could be the fan wants to show off among his or her friends: quizzes show the fan’s knowledge and “pick your favorites” allow the fan to share his or her opinions with others. 

This study shows broadly that coupons can increase engagement, while quizzes and contests can increase “shareability”. More specifically, this study shows that adding personality to campaigns and allowing fans to share his or her personality is the key to a successful Facebook campaign.

A full version of Wildfire’s report is available here. 

Tips for Authentic Social Media Engagement

If you want your brand’s social media presence to be viewed as authentic, you need to know what your brand stands for and know what is important to your audience. Above all, you must always be honest. Here are three tips that will help your brand’s social media presence appear authentic.

1. Focus on the individual.

Individuals are the most important asset to your brand when it comes to social media, because they provide a real human perspective on the web. When reaching out to your audience, remember your audience is made up of individuals. Try to steer clear of referring to them in the masses, which will take away your brand’s authentic feel.

2. Listen up.

Your brand’s social media presence should remain a form of two-way communication. It’s important to constantly be aware of feedback given by your audience. You also need to be tuned in to what is important to your audience. This will allow you to provide content that your audience is asking for.

3. Keep it real.

Today, millennials can spot an inauthentic brand from miles away. Growing up with the Internet, they have high expectations of what brands should provide them. Millennials expect brands to reach out to them with a real voice, and they want a brand that promotes public engagement.

Use these tips to create an authentic social media presence for your brand. Being authentic on social media sites can be the factor that puts your brand above others.

Benefits of Facebook’s Timeline

The new Facebook timeline has caused a stir among Facebook users, especially users that are trying to build a brand for their business. Although it will take some getting used to, timeline has perks that are great for businesses.

1. Timeline encourages fresh and active content and conversation.

Timeline now makes business pages look and feel more like personal pages. Instead of just acting as a landing page with default tabs, timeline highlights active content, which is the most effective way to drive new traffic to the store and to the page.

2. Timeline provides a richer opportunity for seller expression.

Timeline gives businesses more space to showcase their brand and products. The most obvious example of this is the cover photo. This is a great opportunity to draw new customers and engage current fans. Also, the old default tabs have been replaced with photos, which is more visually appealing to viewers.

3. Timeline offers deeper engagement insights, tools, and analytics.

The old version of Facebook insights did not deliver users with real-time data. With timeline’s new insights, users can now track how a post is doing within five to ten minutes after posting. Other new tools include: people talking about engagements, friends of fans, reach, and virality. These insights provide users with more tracking tools and instant gratification from posts.

As a business, we are getting used to the new timeline and are appreciating the new changes more and more.

For more information on these benefits, check out Mashable’s article discussing reasons Facebook brand pages are good for businesses.

Social networking and blog sites capture more internet time and advertising

Source: NielsenWire

“Americans have nearly tripled the amount of time they spend at social networking and blog sites such as Facebook and MySpace from a year ago, according to a new report from The Nielsen Company. In August 2009, 17 percent of all time spent on the Internet was at social networking sites, up from 6 percent in August 2008.

‘This growth suggests a wholesale change in the way the Internet is used,’ said Jon Gibs, vice president, media and agency insights, Nielsen’s online division. ‘While video and text content remain central to the Web experience – the desire of online consumers to connect, communicate and share is increasingly driving the medium’s growth.’

Among those taking note of this trend: advertisers. Estimated online advertising spending on the top social network and blogging sites increased 119 percent, from approximately $49 million in August 2008 to approximately $108 million in August 2009 – all despite a recession. Share of estimated spend on these sites has doubled, from 7 percent of online ad spend in 2008 to 15 percent in 2009.”

Read full press release.

Why start a blog?

Over the past few weeks, I have been speaking to clients about the ins and outs of blogging. And the question I always try to answer first is, “Why start a blog?”.

For businesses, a blog is a place to begin building relationships with your audience. It’s a place where transparency, honesty, and relevancy all meet.

Blogs allow your business to:

• provide relevant information regularly
• receive feedback from readers and engage them in discussion
• distribute content more widely through search engines, online communities, and so on

Blogs allow your readers to:

• receive regular updates from you when they want, where they want
• easily share your content
• find you through search engines via keywords and tags

Content is key, of course, so create useful content and publish regularly and consistently. Consider using audio and video in your posts. Different people interact with content differently. A podcast or video post might be exactly what your audience is looking for, and it may deepen the relationship if you are the voice/face of your blog. The Flip video camera is a favorite of mine. It is simple to use and with an editing program like iMovie for the Mac, you can create short video segments (vlogs).

Polls, surveys, and contests are also a great way to engage your audience. And they can be fun too! PollDaddy is a great polling tool and WordPress has a plugin that allows you to create and manage your polls through the admin area. WordPress also has a survey plugin, SurveyGizmo, and SurveyMonkey is a great tool as well.

Promote discussion on your blog with commenting and be sure to follow up with your audience. Participate on other blogs as well…it’s a good opportunity for exposure and linkbacks to your site.

David Meerman Scott of Web Ink Now offers some insight on the top five corporate blogging mistakes and how to avoid them.

Any other ideas, tips, suggestions for starting and maintaining a good blog? Let us hear them.

Why is sharing your content so important?

How much value does an idea have if it lives only in your head? In today’s world, very little.

Sharing changes everything. It transforms the way you interact with your community. It builds relationships.

“Sharing is much more important than protecting all of your ideas,” says Loic Le Meur, web entrepreneur and Seesmic CEO.

Adam Ostrow at Mashable posted some data today from AddToAny, creators of a popular widget that offers users on content sites an easy way to share stories across multiple social media sites.

“According to AddToAny, Facebook now dominates sharing, with 24 percent of shares from the widget consisting of users posting items to the social network. That handily beats out email (11.1 percent) and Twitter (10.8 percent), making the world’s most popular social network also the most popular service for sharing content. This is undoubtedly welcome news at Facebook, as the site continues to emphasize sharing and readies its own real-time search engine.”

Even more reason to get on the Facebook bandwagon…stop hiding from your high school friends.