Tag Archives: Twitter

Twitter Adds New Header Images

Posted on by

If the highest form of flattery truly is imitation, then the social media giants seem to be in a constant complimentary war. The latest ‘battle’ features Twitter following both Facebook and Google+’s leads with the addition of ‘Headers.’

The advent of Twitter headers alters the overall layout of your profile page and allows you to feature a dominant image besides your profile picture and Twitter background. The Header acts as a cover photo, centered above your main Tweet timeline, with your profile photo and basic profile info overlaid on top of the header. It’s important to note that the default font color is white so your cover photos need to be a darker color to prevent clashing. However, keep in mind also that Twitter has been automatically darkening header photos to account for this, which can be problematic if you’ve already chosen a darker photo.

The new Headers allow for some creative uses, such as integrating your header with your profile picture, similar to how many Facebook user’s came up with fun ways of connecting their profile pictures with their cover photo. As usual with social media marketing, all of the visual elements should be consistent with your overall brand personality and offer an interesting visual viewpoint for your company, without overly pushing your logo and/or promotional content, which may seem too pushy for Twitter’s social and conversational atmosphere.

The adoption of Twitter headers does not simply reflect a layout change, but essentially a bigger emphasis on the visual aspect and images in general. For Twitter’s mobile apps, your photo stream, something I believe is sadly underutilized in corporate Twitter-land, will be prominently featured under your most recent Tweets. This will cause photo streams to be looked through more often, since it is easier to access and peruse with a mere swipe of your finger. This is something to remember when developing your Twitter content strategy: Don’t underestimate the need for using photos, as you do with typically more photo-friendly mediums ala Facebook, Pinterest, etc.

The new Twitter headers have been rolled out to all users, but the site has hot forced the layout change. Therefore, you do not have to immediately add a header photo to replace a default that Twitter created.

Conclusion: Use Twitter headers to your brand’s advantage, connecting it with your social presence’s overall design personality. Be sure to cross-promote your strong visual content, not just on  Facebook, Pinterest and Google+ but on Twitter where images are now displayed more prominently, both in the desktop and mobile versions.

For more information regarding the changes and to check out some great examples, visit Twitter’s official blog. Tell us in the comments below: How will you use the new Twitter Headers?

How to Schedule Posts in Facebook without HootSuite

Posted on by

Do you still use HootSuite or other third-party applications to manage Facebook? It used to be a strategic and efficient way to go, but if you’re still using these tools to schedule posts— you’ll want to re-evaluate your process.

There are several reasons why scheduling posts in advance using HootSuite is doing a disservice to your social media efforts. 1. First, as third-party management tools became popular, users got better at noticing and distinguishing between posts that were made in Facebook and those that weren’t. People simply weren’t engaging as much with Fan Pages that weren’t naturally taking the time to post in Facebook. 2. Facebook of course understood this, and developed their EdgeRank algorithm to reflect it. Fan Pages with stronger EdgeRanks are more likely to have their posts appear in fans’ News Feeds, and using third-party scheduling tools hurts your EdgeRank. 3. The best reason why you shouldn’t be using HootSuite anymore? You can now schedule posts directly in Facebook!

How to Schedule Posts Directly in Facebook

It’s really pretty simply once you know it’s there (and until a week or 2 ago, it wasn’t!—What took you so long, Facebook?). When making a post, click on the clock on the bottom left of the status update.

How to schedule directly in facebook

You can directly schedule posts in Facebook up to 6 months in the future and in 10 minute time intervals. You can also “schedule” posts in the past. If you choose a past date, it will appear on the appropriate date on your Fan Page’s Timeline.

Schedule posts in facebook

Continue reading →

New Twitter Features Improve Usability

Posted on by

Not to be left in the shadows of the attention that Facebook and Google+ have been getting recently; Twitter has been busy rolling out changes this week. New platform transition, new activity stream, new @username stream, new share an image feature… new, new, new is always the trend in the world of social media.

New Twitter Transition Complete

The first change has been an anticipated one. As of Monday, August 8, Twitter will no longer offer the option of using its old interface. Although the “new Twitter” first became available in September 2010, users still had the option of accessing the old platform up until now. Changes include a new design with @mentions, retweets, searches and lists immediately above your timeline on the left side of the screen. When you click on a profile or hashtag, rather than being directed away from your timeline to a new page, you see the information on the right side of the page. This was a much welcomed change as it allows you to seamlessly maneuver between your timeline and those that you’re following. With the transition officially complete, everyone’s Twitter experience is now on the same page.

New Activity Stream

When Twitter was created in 2006, the whole concept was based off answering the question “What’s happening?” with a to-the-point, 140 character update. Keep things clear, keep things concise, keep things easy. As social media’s popularity grew, users began utilizing platforms in more complex ways and in turn they continued (and still continue) to grow and develop. The newest Twitter development comes from users wanting an easier way to interact as well as monitor interactions, similar to how you are able to use Facebook.

With Twitter’s new activity tab, you can easily view recent retweets, follows and favorites from the people you follow in one streamlined place. This will more than likely make Twitter more intuitive to use, especially for new and “mild” users. You are also able to follow users directly from the activity stream, making the feature even more seamless.

New @username Stream

The new @username stream is similar to the new activity stream, except it highlights only interactions that your profile is involved with. This includes @mention tweets to you, your tweets that have been favorited, your tweets that have been retweeted, users that followed you, lists you have been added to, and more.

Continue reading →

Social Media Strategy – trigger interaction & response

Posted on by

You do not have to be consumer oriented company to be able to use social media to advance your Brand, thoughts, products, and engagement with your audience. There are plenty of people professionally that look for helpful information for their jobs and will share valuable information with their peers when they find it. It some cases, it is even “cool” to be the first to find a great deal or share relevant information for others.

In the B2B world, you can also help aggregate content for your customers, clients, and prospects, by being a filter for them. You can share relevant information with them that has already “passed” your approval or relevance rating. This becomes almost like a value added service for them. They turn to you, a trusted resource first, before they go hunting on the Internet. You want them to say – “if they haven’t said anything about it yet, then I probably don’t need to pay attention to it yet.” And any savvy Internet person can tell you that just because it comes up “first” on Google, doesn’t make it accurate or right.

If you can get your people to interact with you, you can get valuable information about their habits, wants, desires, and interests. If you can get them to follow you or be involved, you can help your message get in front of thousands with a single click or post because it will not only reach your direct followers, but also post to their network of people because they are following you.

You can choose to have different message via each social medium (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr, etc), or choose to broadcast your message, which will allow your audience to follow you via the medium they like to use the most and you still get your message out to the masses without requiring them to visitor you website. That is power and potentially all from a single article or click.

If you don’t know where to start or what you should be doing we have several tools on our website to help and we have created an great tool for measuring social media success and value of social media efforts to your organization. This will help you determine which social media efforts should be continued by your organization and give you some ways to help measure return-on-investment.

Social Media allows you to listen like never before & respond appropriately

Posted on by

Social Media has made it easier than ever for consumers and business people to get their opinions heard and get them into circulation faster than ever before. It also creates challenges – like should you listen? or what should you respond or how do you get quality responses and exposure?

You have all heard the phrase that the “squeakiest wheel gets the grease”. These are the people who will be everywhere just posting about their experience – especially if it was not a good one. Does that make them less credible? If they are an active poster and only have “complaining” on their mind, they are already less credible and you cannot be worried about everything they say. You should also look to see if they have people agreeing, “liking”, or responding to their posts. If they do, then you have to take action.

If something positive happens, respond and ask for more by more people. If something negative happens, address it and find a way to take care of it – then ask them to post (or update the previous post) after you fix the problem about how you took care of it. Actually have your customer service people ask if you can share their experience with they solve or problem or get a rave from an interaction – it will go a long way to helping you have an unlimited supply of content to use for your blog, Facebook, or social media channels.

Build your brand around building your community of followers and dialogs – the ones utilizing social media are most likely to share experiences and they will be most likely to share – giving you further reach through their network and you definitely want them on your side.

Seven Steps for Social Media Strategy Integration for your Company

Posted on by

I love this article from last summer about the 52 questions to ask when hiring a social media company. This article is spot on if you are serious about Social Media. It goes way in depth in some cases, especially for Small-to-Medium enterprises, but it does a good job in helping you determine what you should be asking a potential partner.

After talking to, working with and pitching dozens of companies and organizations on the principles of social media and why it works for more than just Business-to-Consumer Brands, I have realized that it is a much bigger commitment than just “another marketing or advertising campaign” of sorts.

Here is what you need to do to make sure your social media efforts get the Return-On-Investment (ROI) they could and also why playing around doesn’t really drive effective social media. All of these things really depend on who has what responsibilities within your organization and how it is structured but most are applicable in the larger, national and even global size companies. Even smaller organizations can take away some value as well.

First - Your various business units or divisions and partners should be all be looped in and asked if they participate in social media and how. They should all be informed somehow of what you are doing and why even potentially consulted on how they could improve their social media initiatives so you can have some Brand continuity across all of your channels.

Second - You need to look at your audience structure. Don’t be thinking that a “catch all” corporate Facebook page or blog is enough. People are smarter than that. Speak specifically to them, with content that is what they want – be specific in touching all your audience with content and experiences they can relate to. Don’t make it a “news” page. If you are updating them with content they don’t care about half of the time, they will start to ignore it ALL of the time and that is bad. If you have the resources and a large enough market share, you could consider “several” Blogs(or add filters when they follow so they can select what information they want) and multiple Facebook pages for segments that are big enough to warrant them and truly create a dialog/interaction with a specific customer base.

Third - You have to have some buy-in at the C-level. They should be involved in whats going on and even use them to help aggregate industry news, company news, white papers, blog postings, etc. It is important to help them buy into goals that established and measurement of success – in effect the ROI you want. This might also help you navigate any potential objections from “legal”. Speaking of legal, if you do use a third party source, make sure they can work with someone like Bevelwise to ensure no proverbial “lines” get crossed and they feel like you could get into any “trouble” resulting in ligitgation.

Fourth - offer out incentives of some sort to employees to touch customers (sales, customer service, customer care/support, etc) to help feed you good stories, testimonials, content, and things that make good social media posts. Anyone who touches a client could help generate content and drive the initiatives further – A customer service person that asks “are you following us on Facebook yet – we have specials we run for those fans on occasion” can go a long way to helping build your presence. These people can also get you content for posting MUCH faster and more often than most.

Fifth - all of your web resources, teams, should know what is going on and why. They don’t have to “agree” with it always, but aligning what is happening with the website (SEO/Content) resources, all of your marketing/advertising campaigns (email, online, offline, direct mail, etc) and initiatives and your PR team will help feed you more content and help the “big picture” work together. After all, if you are putting effort in, you want to maximize each effort.

Sixth - If you are big enough, try to find a champion from each internal department, especially those that touch customers, so they can farm for content, feedback and other things you can share through your social media channels. They can work with your social media agency or potentially be trained on making posts – You want to make sure you are feeding the content to touch all of your vertical markets, products, services, audiences etc-especially if you have the resources or need for content specific social media. Internal folks live and breathe your strategy 24/7 – they can be VERY beneficial to an outside resource because of that.

Finally - if you are choosing a partner to help, choose a partner that has understanding across all marketing mediums, but with a specialty in the online channels like Search Engine Optimization (SEO), website usability, online marketing – (banners/PPC, e-mail marketing, and especially analytics. That should mean they know how to set up goals and measure results across the many different channels and mediums that are being used for your overall advertising strategy.

We welcome your social media strategy questions.

Twitter to be Indexed on Google and Bing

Posted on by

Both Google and Bing (with Yahoo SERP going to be powered by Bing they will really be one in the same) plan to begin indexing Twitter tweets in 2010. That will allow them to show the the tweets within the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP). This will more than likely be the first test for real time, non-paid, content to be indexed and shown on SERPs. That means you should position your Brand for more in depth, relevant, and timely tweeting because you will be able to move the bar on the search engines more quickly.

This will also help move Twitter from the social space into the main stream for business purposes because this will make it relevant on so many levels. Effecting real time search results? That is power. I would see Blogs getting the real time priority next(especially those using Blogger if you are Google) as they already help immensely with index-able content on a site. One would have to think that Facebook posts would be on the short list as well to go real-time

Have you locked up your Brand Identity for Social Media?

Posted on by

There are several sites out there that people use for sharing information and more social media aspects that you should consider registering your name. Even if you don’t plan to use Facebook or Twitter, we would advise you at least lock up your name so someone else cannot steal it – which is known as “squatting”. Besides, just because you don’t plan to use either of them does not mean there isn’t the next hottest one around the corner that you should lock up.

This happened with domain names in the mid 90′s as websites were coming into popularity. Several Fortune 500 companies ended up in court trying to get their trademarked names back. There has not been any precedence set for Social Media and if and how companies can get control of their Brand once it has been registered by someone else who is not them. As reference, here is an article from Adage that shows you some of the big Brands that don’t own their Twitter identity.

You can see if anyone has squatted you out and potentially avoid that by visiting UserNameCheck.com. There are 68 different sites that someone could “squat” you on. Some of them you have never heard of, several are familiar and you can find all the different sites people could squat your identity on. You never know what might be the next big fad or emerge so it is best to lock them up and as new “fads” come out, register those as well, even if you don’t ever use them – you can at least know you are protecting your Brand when it comes to Internet & Web Marketing and Social Media.

Social Media Optimization: Business Marketing Mix

Posted on by

Social media optimization is a set of methods for generating publicity & conversations through social media and online communities. Social media optimization is related to search engine marketing, but differs in several ways, primarily the focus on driving traffic from sources other than search engines, though improved search ranking is also a benefit. Search Engines also “love” this type of content because it is updated often, and seen as new and fresh.

A social media campaign means developing a great message and then reaching out to people, while giving them an incentive/reason to pass it on to other people. Social media optimization is a kind of viral marketing, where word of mouth is created through the businesses and people connecting and having 2-way conversations online.

For Business Social Media to work well, you need constant updates and make them interesting!! Also, you need fans who care enough about your message to pass it on to their friends. This is how something (good or bad) can get spread extremely quickly. If people like something and find it useful, they will link to it and tell their friends. Like anything else online – understanding the motivations and culture of the audience is key to making social media work.

Social media software applications include:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Social media should be in your marketing mix, but it needs to be done right! Make it work for your specific target audience. Develop a great message and reach out to people…then hope they pass it on! Social Media is about connections, so make it a 2-way conversation.

Please contact Bevelwise if you would like to add Social Media to your company’s marketing mix and need some help.

Many other sources have assembled lists of social media sites. Relevant Social Media helpful spots:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media
http://www.prelovac.com/vladimir/top-list-of-social-media-sites
http://nextmark.typepad.com/blog/2009/07/top-100-b2b-social-media-cheat-sheet.html
http://www.chrisbrogan.com/my-best-advice-about-social-media/

http://www.mintblogger.com/2008/02/definitive-list-of-30-popular-social.html

Using Twitter in your Marketing Mix for Businesses

Posted on by

Twitter is a good idea for your business if you believe in Social Media as a way for humans to connect and engage in conversation. Twitter can bring great minds together, and gives you daily opportunities to learn and grow as a company. Twitter is like blogging except you only have 140 short characters to communicate your message. It is like instant messaging except it is public and can attract traffic to your website. A Tweet is not directed to just one person because it is visible to anyone.

Twitter is a way to drive real traffic to your site. The way to use it is to build a network of “followers” and people/companies you are “following.” Following people shows that you are not just talking about yourself but also listening to what your potential customers and industry leaders are saying. By interacting with others you are giving people reason to listen to you as well. Think of Twitter as an intercom, not a megaphone.

When setting up your company’s Twitter profile, create your company image that lets your brand stand out. Put up a picture… make it your company logo. Make sure you fill out your profile bio/info. This authenticates your Twitter profile.

Follow your brand and industry in Twitter conversations. Use Twitter Search to look for conversations about topics that are of interest to your company. Look for conversations about your brand, competitors, and words about your industry. This is a great way to build and improve your network. Engage with your potential customers. Try talking about their interest too, not just yourself… you need to show that you are a human. If you are going to bother Tweeting, it means that you want humans to connect.

When sharing content, it is very important to only share information that is useful/fun/interesting. Otherwise, you might sound like you are “preaching” a sales pitch about your company or products to people and they might tune you out. Twitter is not a one-way conversation.

Share content that spreads rapidly such as:

  • New Content/data
  • Links to cool/relevant sites
  • Industry articles
  • Interesting blog posts
  • Videos (funny ones get spread the most)
  • Slides and presentations
  • News releases
  • Podcasts

Information that rarely gets shared:

  • Product info
  • Free trials

After you have wrote some “tweets,” added profiles to follow, and gained followers, you can check out how your profile ranks. Here is a cool free tool to grade your Twitter account: www.twitter.grader.com.

Tips to make Tweeting easier:

  • Use tools like “TwitterFox,” “TweetDeck,” or “Twhirl” to make managing Twitter easier and faster
  • Use services like Twitter Search to make sure you see if someone’s talking about your company. Try to participate where it makes sense.
  • Use tools like TinyURL http://www.tiny.cc/ or http://bit.ly/ to shorten long URLs (because you only get 140 characters)

Twitter can be a great way to attract customers, network, and interact with your current customers, but you have to understand the Twitter culture or you could actually turn these people away. Time to Tweet! Feel free to contact us at Bevelwise if you have questions or need some help.

References:

http://www.hubspot.com/marketing-webinars
http://www.chrisbrogan.com/50-ideas-on-using-twitter-for-business/

http://mashable.com/2009/01/21/best-twitter-brands/