Tag Archives: Twitter

social media

What Are The Most Effective Social Media Platforms For Your Business?

 

If you are over 40, social media might seem like a minefield. The news is filled with social media gaffes and blunders. If it’s not gaffes and blunders, you hear about the latest controversies sparked by celebrities and politicians. Behind all of that, though, is a remarkable opportunity to grow your business — one that shouldn’t be ignored.

While new social media platforms are popping up every single day, for this article, we’ll talk about the top seven, and each of those seven are distinct and should be used very differently. Not only do the main social media platforms have varying and specific purposes, they have very different demographics, and to ignore that could mean wasting a lot of time and even money.

Before venturing into social media, determine your goals. Are you looking to grow your business or stay in touch with existing clients? Do you want reviews, or perhaps you just want to show your expertise. Your goals will determine how much you post and what you post to what platforms.

Facebook

In many ways, Facebook is the Grandmommy of all social media platforms. It’s not the oldest, but it’s perhaps the best known. Its users span the generations, although young people have begun an exodus. Still, Facebook’s 1.5 billion daily users are spread out over a large age range. They do skew female more than male.

Unless you advertise, Facebook is arguably best for maintaining relationships, since your content will target your existing followers.

You should post on your Facebook business page a couple of times a day. Aim for sharable content that might go beyond your followers. While you absolutely want to share things related to your business, like pictures or blog posts, you should also share links that appeal to your customers. For example, if you run a furniture store, post links about design trends. Whatever you share, make sure the headline and featured picture are compelling.

Facebook is growing as a review site. Watch your Facebook page like a hawk and answer any questions or reviews within the same day.

Twitter

Thanks to our President, Twitter now has the reputation of being the epicenter for political spats and quick one-liners. While that is true, it’s also younger and more male-oriented than Facebook and it’s a great place to cultivate relationships and to prove your expertise.

Twitter is fast-paced, so tweet often throughout the day. Draw relevant followers by following social media influencers in your industry.

Despite the fact that Twitter moves very quickly, its reach is generally higher than Facebook’s, often twice as high. Use Twitter to help build your business.

LinkedIn

Most social media platforms are geared toward B2C companies, but LinkedIn is best for B2B, although both can benefit. You should post a few times a week, but LinkedIn is more about who you know than what you post. If you are a Realtor, for example, you should connect with mortgage brokers in your area. All of your social media efforts should reflect your expertise, but LinkedIn perhaps more than all.

Instagram

Instagram’s demographic is young, and its visual format makes it a good platform for those in design, fashion, restaurants and any industry that appeals to aesthetics. Post a couple of times a day and build a following.

YouTube

Of all the social media platforms, YouTube is by far the most time-intensive. To build an effective YouTube channel, you want to stick to original videos, ideally less than two minutes long. Look at YouTube videos as a way to share your expertise. It’s also a great way to build content to share on other platforms. While engagement is critical on social media, you might want to make a exception of YouTube. YouTube comment sections are notorious troll havens. Opt for turning comments off.

Pinterest

Like Instagram, Pinterest is a visual, photo-oriented platform. Unlike Instagram, Pinterest’s demographic is a bit older and female. Pinterest is good for those in design, travel, the food industry, etc. Post frequently. Pinterest is ideal for nurturing existing relationships.

Yelp

Yelp may not fit some people’s definitions of social media, but if you are in a B2C business, you will have a Yelp account whether you want one or not. Take control of your Yelp account by posting a lot of pictures and with inviting business descriptions. Keep control of your Yelp account by answering every review, whether positive or negative. Note: while you should always encourage reviews, Yelp has strict rules against specifically soliciting Yelp reviews.

Featured image via Jason Howie/Flickr.

My Experience With Buying Twitter Followers And With Fiverr

A few months ago, I wrote about the boom industry of fake Twitter followers. Since then, the practice has become even more mainstream – so much so, that I thought I would try it out for myself.

Very recently, I began a personal side project (no clients involved) with a brand new website and a brand new corresponding Twitter feed. There’s nothing more discouraging than looking at a Twitter page with a single digit number of followers, even if you know that that number will grow fairly quickly. So, I thought about buying some Twitter followers.

I didn’t want my new Twitter page to explode overnight, and I didn’t want to spend a lot of money on the experiment, so I turned to the site, Fiverr – where people do any number of things (from singing Happy Birthday in a Marilyn Monore voice to SEO) for starting at around $5.00.

After doing my due diligence and reading reviews, I settled on a “seller” named “everythinggirl,” who promised me 1,000 “real” (as opposed to bot) Twitter followers within seven days. I approved the $5.00 charge through my PayPal account and reluctantly gave everythinggirl my Twitter password, which she said she needed because my account needed to follow people to get followers.

It didn’t take long. Within hours, Twitter followers started dribbling in. After around 24 hours, and a couple hundred Twitter followers, I logged into my new Twitter account to see what was happening, only to find that Twitter had suspended my account for following people too aggressively.

I checked the box promising to never do it again, changed my password and immediately instructed everythinggirl to stop the campaign.

Everythinggirl responded with a curt message blaming me for the suspension – saying it was because I was unfollowing her followers. Even after I explained that I didn’t start unfollowing people until after the account had been suspended, everythinggirl continued to blame me. She also continued to correspond with me, even after I left her several messages asking her to cease.

Eventually, she offered me a refund, which I refused, saying that I’d rather review her services. I have also taken the matter up with Fiverr and their response, thus far, is that I cannot review her services because she didn’t complete her services – despite the fact that she didn’t complete her services because I wasn’t happy with her services. Quite the Catch-22, huh?

In all sincerity, I didn’t want a refund of my $5.00. I learned several valuable lessons, including a how-to in the relatively seedy world of fake Twitter followers. If you so desire, you can gather fake followers with a simple search. Today’s fake follower thread is #follobackinstantly. If you follow the person posting that hashtag, they will, presumably follow you back. Interestingly, all of the followers everythinggirl provided had similar hashtags.

I also learned that the reviews on Fiverr are rather suspect because if a buyer does get a bad service, the service has to be complete before it can be reviewed. If a buyer cancels before completion, their opinions will not be registered. If the seller fails to complete the service, the buyer can’t register a review – they can only get their money back.

Twitter seems to be on to the scam of fake Twitter followers. There are more “legitimate” companies who provide fake followers, and presumably not through the various “I’ll follow you back” users. Of course, they do cost more money.

As a business owner, you have to ask yourself if fake followers are worth the risk. Even if they get by Twitter, your feed will be loaded with “people” who seem very out of context with the rest of your Twitter page. It will be clear to any Twitter savvy real followers that the others are fake.

My new fake Twitter followers are now gone. Within a bit over a week, I have almost 100 real Twitter followers. Sure, that number is still very low, but it’s growing on a daily basis.

 

How Small Businesses Navigate the Digital World Better than Big Businesses

Katy Keim of Ad Age recently wrote an op-ed in which she warned of the fickleness of social media followers.

A customer’s love for a brand is nothing close to the unconditional positive regard we give and receive in relationships. The second you slip, deliver a disappointment, stop giving them reasons to engage, or stop acknowledging and rewarding their participation, they’ll drop you in a heartbeat.

Today’s brand-consumer relationships are not balanced. Make no mistake, the consumer is in control. Never before have consumers been so empowered. Social media today lets customers broadcast their sentiment over brand experiences — good or bad — to enormous audiences.

……..

Today’s consumer-brand dynamic is decidedly lacking in many of the characteristics we normally associate with relationships. There is little forgiveness, zero privacy and customer love is 100% conditional. There’s no kissing and making up with social customers when you disappoint them. Further, they turn others against you when they go. Fifty-seven percent of social customers say they won’t buy any more of a company’s products or services after a single negative experience, and 40% say they are also likely to warn others to stay away after a poor experience.  And with social media at their fingertips, they can exercise those inclinations in just 140 little characters.

There is a lot truth to Keim’s observations, although I’m not comfortable placing the blame entirely at the feet of social media. Never before have consumers had so many choices. Gone are the days when a trip to the grocery store meant choosing from a handful of brands of toothpaste or laundry detergent. Supermarkets and big box stores have doubled, tripled and quadrupled in size just to keep up with all the product they need to stock – and their selection dwarfs in comparison to what you can buy on Amazon.

Services are no different. In the past, the best even an educated consumer could do was to pick up the Yellow Pages and maybe talk to a few friends and neighbors. Today, we have not only social media, but auction sites and sites like Groupon which offers dramatically discounted coupons for everything from cruises to yoga classes to plumbers. Some of the most savvy shoppers I know refuse to buy anything without a Groupon.

A popular trend in TV reality shows is “extreme couponing,” where consumers, generally women, spend countless hours collecting coupons and arranging their shopping schedules around supermarket sales. They often walk away with hundreds of dollars in free groceries. While the wisdom of making buying decisions around coupons can be debated, coupon shopping is not a behavior that leads to brand loyalty.

Consumers are fickle but it doesn’t have to be that way. The reality is that consumers don’t complain as much as Keim would have us believe. Two years ago, a Spanish company conducted a survey of 90 million reviews – across the review site spectrum. The result was that 60% of reviews were positive and only 12% were negative. The rest were neutral. Granted, if one of my small business clients had only 60% positive reviews, I would consider it something to work on, but those statistics are a good place to start.

Small businesses have a tremendous advantage in the social media world. People are far more likely to post positive reviews and (more importantly) to return to a business if they establish a personal relationship with someone at the business. Recently, one client had a customer who was relatively unhappy with the service but because he had such a great rapport with the owner, he still gave a four star review. The owner, of course, did his part by bending over backwards to rectify the customer’s complaints. The customer is now expected to change his review to five stars – the maximum.

A restaurant I frequent knows me by name. Like all businesses, they’ve made mistakes. There have been times when the food wasn’t up to my expectations, but for the most part their food is excellent. I forgive their occasional screw-ups in the same way I forgive the screw-ups of my friends and loved ones – because they feel like friends to me. I doubt I could ever have the same sort of relationship with an Olive Garden or a Red Lobster.

Another example of how less is more when it comes to navigating shrinking brand loyalty is Trader Joe’s. While Trader Joe’s is far from a small business, they act like a small business. They treat their employees very well. The employees generally stick around long enough to know many of the customers by face, if not by name. A funny thing happens to businesses that treat their employees like numbers – they also treat their customers like numbers or in the case of many big box stores, bits of data.

Trader Joe’s also contradicts the idea that consumers want vast amounts of choice. They do have a large variety of goods, but they carry only a limited number of each item. For example, they carry “only” 10 varieties of peanut butter while a supermarket might carry forty. The perception is that Trader Joe’s opts for quality at reasonable prices instead of quantity. Sure, they have some products that are really awful, but people have learned to see the bad as an anomaly as they return time and time again for the good.

Big businesses have another disadvantage when it comes to social media – the number of fingers in the Twitter pie. Giving a poorly trained employee the passwords to a company’s social media campaign can be disastrous. Last October, an employee at KitchenAid sent out this tweet:

@KitchenAidUSA: “Obamas gma even knew it was going 2 b bad! ‘She died 3 days b4 he became president”.”??? Wow!” #nbcpolitics

Most (although not all) companies try to stay above the political fray. It seemed that KitchenAid was no exception. They were forced to issue an apology and they said they would fire the employee.

How can this sort of thing happen? I’ve worked in large marketing departments. Passwords to social media campaigns are not locked in a vault. If a social media manager is busy, that job might be delegated to even an unpaid intern. The same thing could happen in a small company, but typically, only the owner and maybe two other people have those passwords. When employees are more vested (either financially or emotionally) in the success of a company, they are less likely to do something so risky.

Social media, as Keim says, is a double edged sword, but if a small company treats their customers well and responds to negative reviews, they will be in a much better position than their larger competitors. All in all, it’s an exciting time to be a small business owner.