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Day THREE: What to Tweet

& Measuring Success

The small print:

All this material, whilst given freely for this course, is for your use only, and not for dissemination to anyone else, even inside your own organisation. Please do recommend that your colleagues sign up for the course so that they can participate too at http://twooc.wordpress.com

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DAY 3: Outline

“What to Tweet” & measuring success

Activity:

Search for yesterday’s conversations using #twooc on your Twitter profile, and get a feel for what’s going on in our “classroom”.

Following the instructions on pages 37 – 47:

• Decide on the message, the audience, and the offer of your Twitter account.

• Compose a few tweets you can send today to begin to build your evidence of expertise

• Open an account at https://bitly.com

• Use bit.ly to shrink links for you to use in tweets

• Replace the web address in your profile for a trackable link using bit.ly.

E-tivity:

• Send a tweet with an interesting link to everyone, using bit.ly and #twooc

• @Reply to someone

• Make an introduction between two people you know using @mentions

• Send a DM (Direct Message) to someone else on the course. (You can use the list or search for #twooc to find someone)

Tools:

www.bit.ly

Resources:

http://support.twitter.com

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Day Three

We’ll start with a warning . . .

Spamalot! OR A word about spam

Unfortunately Twitter attracts the same kind of loonies, chancers and plain nasty tweeps that other online tools and forums do, so you have to keep your wits about you. People may have talked to you about their Twitter account being “hacked” – but this simply is not so in the strict sense of the word. Twitter is very secure. The problem is caused when a Twitter user chooses to click on a link, that activates an “authorisation” program that gives their login and password to someone else. This means you have to click on the link to start the process off, so the ability to spot a “dodgy” link is something you should cultivate.

How to spot a spam link:

These links will come to you, through Twitter, in one of two ways,

• In an @mention – someone will tweet @yourname with a link that leads to a dodgy site. This usually happens immediately after you have tweeted something, so they know you are active online at the time, and more likely to click. It will be from someone you don’t know. (A Twitter Robot in fact). Often, it’s simply a link with a list of names, or just yours, and no actual text in the tweet apart from the link.

• In a Direct Message (DM) – you’ll get a direct message from someone you probably know who has been hacked – it can seem quite personal.

Usefully, these spam tweets are usually (but not always) badly spelt with poor grammar – and that alone should put you on your guard, especially if it purports to be from someone you know.

Examples of spam Direct Messages

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Examples of spam @mentions

This is an example of a SPAM mention – messages addressed to you rather than DMs. They don’t necessarily have links, dodgy or otherwise, they are usually just trying to get followers or sell something. You can BLOCK or BLOCK & REPORT these users, MUTE them if you think they are irritating rather than malicious, or just ignore them.

Fiona on our course had this tweet addressed to her yesterday. Because the spammers are aware they can be blocked, they use a second account. In this case they think if you are going to block anyone, you’ll block @RenythaCynta, but in fact you should block and report both @RenythaCynta and @Alfianzhy. (“should” because Twitter is largely a self-policing community.)

How to mitigate the risks

• If you’re unsure, click on the person’s name to view their Twitter profile – if they have hardly any followers, a dodgy photo and have sent loads of similar tweets it’s likely to be a spammer

• Never click on a link that is shared with you by someone you don’t know and appears to be unrelated to anything you’ve been saying or a link unconnected to a direct message conversation

• If you think it could be genuine, send a message to the person to check before clicking on the link

• Click on the profile of the offender, click on the head icon next to where it says ‘follow’ and click on ‘Report for spam’.

How do I know if I’ve been hacked?

Look in your Direct Message list (see later today), and see if you have sent the last few direct messages, if not, someone else is using your login and password to send them from your account.

What if I get hacked?

• Go to your settings in Twitter and change your password • Tweet and DM any people that might have been affected and tell them to change theirs.

It’s a good idea to change your Twitter password regularly. Now you are safe to start tweeting, let’s crack on!

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What to |Tweet

There are three questions I get asked by every client about social media, and always in this order:

1. How much time will it take me?

2. What will I say?

3. How will I know its working?

On this course, I hope to demonstrate that the answer to question 1 is it need not be more than ten minutes or so a day, once you’re up and running, to maintain your profile. Even with an active marketing campaign, half an hour a day should suffice.

Today we are going to look at question 2 in detail, and along the way give you some ideas for measuring success to answer question 3.

So in order to decide what to tweet about, think about the answers to these questions, paying particular attention to any areas of overlap:

1. What are your three key messages?

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2. Who are your three aspirational audiences?

3. What three offers or calls to action do you have?

Where the messages intersect is what, who and why you are tweeting, and you should tweet in this intersection most often. If the thing you are tweeting about does not fit into any of the three circles in any of the three Venn diagrams, you have gone off topic. This isn’t a crime, you just need to be aware of it.

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Of course, a tweet that just reaches people on Twitter is great for conversation, but won’t lead to any conversions. What you want to do is to use Twitter sometimes as a signpost to take people elsewhere. Perhaps to your own blog, perhaps to a great article that confirms your own thoughts, or perhaps to a great case study that demonstrates your expertise.

The way to get conversions – whatever that means for you (thinking about the REACH model) is to get clicks.

And, whilst we are on the subject, nobody wants to go to the homepage of your website. What people want to see is evidence that you are an expert in your field, and that you can do everything you claim you can. They don’t want to know the year your company was formed, your health and safety statement, or your address. This means driving people deep into your website – giving them links to the exact thing you are tweeting about. Or driving them to your LinkedIn profile, with all its testimonials, or an article you wrote for someone else’s website, or a poll you are conducting, etc.

It’s about specific content on specific subjects for specific audiences, and really mining the niche where your experience and expertise lies, and concentrating on providing evidence.

Twitter’s advice on what to tweet about

Twitter gives the following advice in its Help section (http://support.twitter.com)

• Share: Users come to Twitter to get the latest news, so give it to them!

• Listen: Regularly monitor the comments about your company, brand and products

• Ask: Ask questions of your followers, and show that you are listening

• Respond: Respond to compliments and feedback in realtime

• Reward: Tweet updates about special offers, discounts, and time-sensitive deals.

• Demonstrate wider leadership & know-how

• Champion your stakeholders: Retweet (we’ll come to that) and reply publicly to great tweets posted by your followers and customers.

So now, are you even thinking about tweeting “Just had my first coffee of the day, looking forward to a productive morning.” ?

I sincerely hope not.

Your mind should be alive with all the proof you have of how brilliant you are at what you do, and you should be thinking about ways of signposting it on the web. Nicely, informatively, and not in an overtly salesy way. If you evidence your expertise online, people will find you.

Trouble is, Twitter only allows 140 characters in a tweet, and if I’m signposting people to a blogpost like this: http://www.bigbookend.co.uk/indie-writers-fest/

That’s going to take up a lot of my 140 characters, and leave little room for an explanation of why people should click it. That’s where the magic of URL shorteners comes in . . . .

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Shrink my Link

There are many URL shorteners out there, have a google if you like, but essentially they do one thing really well, and sometimes come with other features. They shrink long weblinks into short ones that you can tweet easily. You may have noticed that when you put links into LinkedIn status updates, it has a built in URL shortener, and the same with Facebook. Twitter has one too, but it’s sadly unreliable.

I like to use Bit.ly (you’ve probably noticed me using it already):

• It shortens long links

• It allows me to save them as something memorable: eg. http://bit.ly/followingtheleader

• It tells me how many people have clicked on them

• It works with all the other online tools I use.

You can use Bit.ly without a login just to shorten links, but if you want to track, customise, or integrate with other applications, then you need to create a FREE account.

Go on, you can do that now. It only takes a few minutes. I’ll wait: http://www.bit.ly

By the way, remember what we said about having a consistent username across all social platforms on Day ONE? You might want to consider using the same username here, if only for the sake of your own memory.

Some of the statistics that Bit.ly collects on each shortened link.

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Measuring Success

Bit.ly can provide us with a part of the Return on Investment measurement, by letting us know how many people have clicked on our links, and some information on our audience demographics.

Over time you can find out what is your most popular content, and post it again, or create similar content:

These are my most popular posts ever (also some of the oldest). Notice that the top three are from my own blog (at the time) and the fourth one was our event, demonstrating how valuable people find ORIGINAL content when you share it.

Bit.ly also tells you who is sharing your content – so you can make contact and thank them, or whatever is appropriate. So bit.ly told me about these guys:

Thanks, Rowena and Simon!

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How to Tweet

So we’ve covered what to tweet, and how to shrink links to signpost additional information. We’re going to look now at the mechanics of How to Tweet. If you’re experienced in Twitter conversations, you can move right along now. Go straight to the e-tivity. There’s nothing to see here.

@mentions

Once you have some followers, you'll want to make contact. Early on, you'll want to welcome all your followers individually using @username. This is the format for starting a conversation with a specific person on Twitter:

@username Nice to meet you, tell me more about what you do

You can send a message to anyone on Twitter like this, by starting the message @username – this will be seen by your followers in their timelines if they follow both you and the user you are sending the message to, or by anyone who goes to your profile page. But you don’t have to be a follower or to be followed to send it. Twitter calls these @mentions.

Here’s an example from yesterday:

By starting with @WhitakerJoan I made sure the tweet was highlighted in Joan’s stream. You will have seen both sides of the conversation probably, because you were following us both.

If you weren’t following both of us, you won’t have seen it (unless by searching on #twooc)

Twitter is making sure I can’t tweet someone anything horrid that then automatically gets seen by all their followers.

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If you would like to talk about someone, or to have a conversation with them that goes in your public timeline (e.g. if you want to amplify their message by tweeting about what they do), you put something before the @. E.g.

Thanks @TrinityVisionUK for a brilliant course on how to use Twitter.

Again, you don’t have to follow someone, or be followed by them, to send this.

I often use this to introduce people on Twitter e.g.

Hi @Lukeb3000 have you met @TrinityVisionUK? You’re both video enthusiasts!

This is why you sometimes see a tweet that starts ”.@username”. The fullstop at the beginning is simply a way of making sure the tweet will be seen by all your followers, not just by the person its aimed at. (along with anyone who already follows you both).

DMs or Direct Messages

Direct Messages are private and cannot be seen in the public domain. You can send direct messages to anyone who follows you, but you can’t direct message someone who isn’t your follower.

If you both follow each other – and are “friends” – you can have whole private conversations in Twitter – but you are still restricted by the 140 character limit.

To send a Direct Message, select the messages icon at the top of your screen:

This screen will then appear, and you will see any Direct Messages you have already received or sent:

I can see my last message was to Mary (Hello Mary!), and the one before that was a group direct message (a feature launched just a few days ago that we’ll be exploring next week)

To send a new direct message, click on the ‘New Message’ button.

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You can start typing the name of the person you want to direct message in the search box, and Twitter brings up a list of names.

(Now you see why your name needs to be easy to remember and spell. Twitter isn’t too helpful here.)

As of last week you can choose one name, or more than one. So I can direct message to both Katies on the Trinity Vision Social Media team at once. Then when I’ve ticked both names, I click [Next]

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#Hashtags

If you use the search bar at the top of your Twitter profile to search for #twooc, you can see how easy it is to follow a conversation spread across lots of users when hashtags are used.

One you’ll see a lot on a Friday is #ff – which stands for #FollowFriday. People use this to recommend people to follow to their followers. It’s a lovely way of thanking or highlighting people who deserve a bit of your, and other people’s attention. But do use #ff for just one name per tweet, and a sincere reason to follow.

Other popular hashtags are #bbcqt, #hignfy, #xfactor, #SCD, #bbcf1 – so now you know what it means when they pop up on your TV screen!

We’ll look at hashtags in a bit more detail on day 9 of the course.

TIP!

To save a hashtag search – once you have the search results up, click on “Save”:

Links

So now you can practice with shrinking a link, and copying and pasting it into the tweet e.g.

Please give me a LinkedIn testimonial if you enjoy the course http://www.bit.ly/lizcable

#notahintatall #noreallyimeanit #notahint #atall

Until tomorrow,

Happy Tweeting,

@LizCable

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