Category Archives: Twitter

Why Social is Sexy and Search is not

Posted on October 28, 2010 | 2 Comments

Back in 2006, when “social media” was still “social bookmarking,” search was king. People were rushing to do the things necessary to get first place on Google for anything that had to do with their business. (And paid search budgets were through the roof.)

Four years later, things seem to have cooled for search. Sure, there are still a lot of smart marketing managers who realize they need to be found on Google in order to keep money coming in, but the talk has turned rather sharply towards how to use Facebook, Twitter and sometimes Linkedin to gain customers.

This despite the fact that social networks don’t convert customers very well at all, and search does.

The reason is simple, but deceptive, in my opinion: Search takes work, and time, to do well. If you want to get first place for your product market, that means writing content that contains keywords, keeps visitors from bouncing off your page, and getting other web sites to create quality links to it.

Like I said, work. If you’ve ever tried to get just a single inbound link with anchor text from a PR7 website, you know it can take years off your life and cost you a pint of your own blood to make happen.

The payoff, though, is being found by people who specifically want what you’re selling. They likely aren’t just cruising around killing time. If someone searches for “golf bag sale,” they’re looking for golf bags. On sale. And if you sell golf bags, and have a discount sale, how much business do you think you’re going to do ranking #1 on Google for that phrase?

On the other hand, social media is EASY! (It isn’t, but it’s easy to do incorrectly, anyway.) All you have to do with social is connect a feed to your Facebook page or Twitter account, let it post for you, follow a bunch of people to get them to follow you back… then sit back and count your money, right?

Of course, it isn’t right. Have you ever used Twitter or Facebook for your own enjoyment? How willing are you to break away from a conversation with your friend in order to follow some company’s link to their latest sale? Maybe you will keep the company’s name in the back of your head, but if they bug you enough you’ll remember them as, “those idiots who keep ruining Twitter for me.”

“Top of mind” isn’t always what it’s cracked up to be.

A lot of marketers have been fooled into believing that social is important, but for the wrong reason. It isn’t important because it’s easy to blast people with messages, it’s important because it’s an easy way to get in touch with individual customers. That entails a lot of difficult work actually talking to them.

Search remains important, because that’s where quality leads really are. Yes, more people use social sites to screw around. But that’s why they are NOT quality traffic: They’re there to screw around! They are not necessarily in the market for anything. If someone wants something, they can easily go looking for it, and likely will.

Pestering people will not make them suddenly want what you’re selling.

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Posted in Facebook, Search, Social Media, Twitter

10 Ways to make Twitter Work for you

Posted on October 18, 2010 | 3 Comments

1. Listen more than you post – Too many people only post on Twitter without reading what their followers are doing. If you spend a few minutes a day reading what others are up to, and responding to what you think is even mildly interesting, you’ll both have a lot more posts and show that you’re someone who is worth keeping up with.

2. Don’t automate you posts – I go off on this a lot, but it really can’t be overstated. Relying on tools to send “thank you” messages to anyone who follows you, or having feeds create posts for you shows you really don’t want to engage anyone on Twitter. If you need to use these, Twitter probably isn’t for you anyway.

3. Connect every service you can to your account – This may sound like it flies in the face of the last bit of advice, but it doesn’t. Posting from an automated feed means you’re never responsible for what gets posted. But when you post from other services like YouTube, Foursquare, Yelp, blogs or news sites, you’re sharing something you yourself found interesting.

Keep in mind, with the new Twitter layout, people can view some of your content without leaving the site. So people will appreciate the YouTube videos or Flickr pictures you share with them.

4. Share things that are fun – If you only post links to your latest blog post and your company’s latest promotion, you’ll be boring and no one will want to engage with you. Don’t be afraid to have fun with Twitter. Post pictures of places you’d rather be, or links to funny stories you find, or just something you over heard. If it’s interesting to you, it will be interesting to someone else.

5. Don’t be afraid to retweet – This also gives you something to post, and shows the person you’re retweeting that you’re listening. It has the added advantage of not requiring you to come up with something to say. If you’re not big on actually writing posts, that’s a pretty neat deal.

6. Make a list of your favorite followers – After a while you’ll probably follow a lot more people than you actually interact with. That’s okay, but you should keep a list of the people who you do interact with often, and who respond to you. They may need your help reposting something some day, and could help you out doing the same thing if you need to get the word out about something.

7. Don’t just follow anyone – On Twitter, you are who you follow. If you are following a lot of company profiles that never interact with anyone, that’s going to be how you experience the site. Don’t follow someone just because they follow you. If they don’t post anything of interest to you, forget about them. Maybe they’ll unfollow you later for not returning the favor – but if all they do is promote their own products, who cares?

8. Use hashtags – Sometimes a conversation topic will turn up on your profile page as trending:

If there’s something in there that you’re into, use the hashtag yourself and join in the conversation.

9. Spend 15 minutes a day with Twitter – You don’t have to do this all at once, either. Go to Twitter for 5 minutes in the morning, the afternoon, and the evening. Then Devote yourself to reading other people’s posts, writing responses, retweeting, and adding anything you feel like to your feed.

10. Don’t worry about how many people follow you – Again, I’ve touched on this before. Don’t think about how many people are following you, but how many people engage with you. Social media is a bad place for broadcasting. It works best when you’re communicating with people one-on-one. That’s what Twitter is best for, and it’s really how you should be using it.

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Posted in Social Media, Social Networking, Twitter

Tagged social media tips, twitter followers

12seconds.tv Shutting Down

Posted on October 4, 2010 | Leave a comment

12seconds.tv, the micro vlogging site, is closing it’s doors this month. All of it’s users received an e-mail today (included beneath this post) from founder Sol Lipman saying goodbye.

I have mixed feelings about this, frankly. Last year I posted about the reasons I felt 12seconds never took off like so many people thought it would initially. After that I used the site more, and found I rather liked it – even though my initial criticism was, I feel, correct: People who post video want more than 12 seconds worth, YouTube has a larger potential viewership, and most people aren’t brave enough to constantly shoot video of themselves.

http://embed.12seconds.tv/players/remotePlayer.swf
12erator: The Song That Best Captures How I Feel Today on 12seconds.tv

Above: An example of 12seconds’ embedding code not working. Among all of the other points I made in my initial review of the site, this one is still the most annoying to me. Ah well – what do you want for nothing, right?

Still, the concept for 12seconds did grow on me. After a few months I managed to shoot some bits at least I was happy with. It seems the real magic of 12seconds was that, since you’re only on the spot for a short amount of time, you can only make yourself look so stupid – so go for it because how bad can you possibly make yourself look in 12 seconds?

The problem is, with 20% of social media users actually producing content, far fewer of them are willing to regularly broadcast video of themselves. Not when a Tweet or a Facebook update takes less effort and doesn’t make them self-conscious. It’s a subtle issue that they could never have gotten around, as it was baked into the concept of 12seconds itself.

Actually, given the recent news of Twitter’s updated page, and how they were going to partner with 12seconds.tv among other sites, I thought they were doing better. I had even planned on using them for a project coming up in a Twitter/12seconds hybrid campaign. I guess I’ll be going back to Vimeo after all.

What’s strange to me is that no other site stepped up to buy them. It seems like the kind of concept Facebook would be all over, getting more users to post free content and hopefully make a run for all that YouTube traffic. Perhaps Twitter would have found it more useful, as the only major site that doesn’t have it’s own in-house video solution? Perhaps the site didn’t seek out any offers, and simply wanted to lay it to rest rather than sell it?

Hopefully there will be more details in the coming weeks. Suffice it to say, though, you’ve just lost one more use for that dusty webcam on top of your monitor.

Dear 12ers,

Nearly 3 years ago, David Beach and I decided to grab a beer at a local pub and talk about startup ideas. I told him a dumb idea and he told me about one called 10seconds. I said, “we should do that one.” He said, “okay.” And that was it. That is until we figured out that 10seconds.tv was already taken. 12seconds sounded pretty good to us too.

We set out on a journey that would take on a wild ride of ups and downs. We experienced birth, death and (Beach) even battled cancer.

Today we are announcing the end of 12seconds.

Why? As you probably know, everything has a life cycle. 12seconds is in its twilight. After all the new product launches and attempts at a revenue model, fundraising with VCs and late night coding sessions with Jacob hunched over his monitors – it’s time to call it. It is time to end 12seconds.

However, if 12seconds had a bucket list it would have filled it up with amazing life experiences! We launched an innovative micro-vlogging system, built crazy mobile apps, created revenue with legit sponsors, we were nominated for awards and had the best users on the Internet – our beloved 12ers.

12seconds is not a failure – it is a life well-lived. It really is about the journey. I know this because I’m at the destination.

You’re thinking, “holy crap I made like 1000 12second videos, what do I do?” Later this week, we’re going to release a download tool for you to capture those moments in time. It will be available until we pull the plug – on October 22nd.

If you have any questions or want to say goodbye, feel free to reply to this e-mail or click here (goodbye@12seconds.tv) to wish us all well.

There were a lot of team members and users who made 12seconds an incredible experience. I can’t possibly list them all here but you know who you are. Finally, to my co-founders Beach and Jacob – I love you guys.

Sol Lipman
Founder

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Posted in Facebook, Interactive Marketing, Internet Technology, Online Tools, Social Media, Social Networking, Twitter, Viral Content

Twitter Redesign doesn’t show Posting Source

Posted on October 1, 2010 | Leave a comment

I really want to like Twitter’s redesign. It does a lot of things I like, and I know I have a bad habit of finding the bad side of most anything.

Unfortunately, the redesign does remove a post’s source, and this is a big, big problem for me.

I know it sounds minor, but it isn’t. I’ve posted at length on this blog about discarding potential followers because they use autoposting services for their tweets – particularly the Twitter API itself. On the old Twitter page they look like this:

I don’t have many, if any followers that use the Twitter API, because I unfollow them as fast as I find them. But here is someone who uses Twitterfeed, which helps users commit the same sin: Auto posting from a feed.

Auto posting is a way to continuously have content pouring into your Twitter profile, so that you never have to read anyone else’s posts. It’s an acceptable tool if it’s part of your overall posting strategy, but if you only want to import stories, you aren’t really on Twitter.

And I shouldn’t have to put up with you.

With the redesign, you can’t simply see how people are creating their posts. As such, if I suspect someone has created a dummy profile connected to a feed, I need to research them further. Is every post a story with a link? Do they ever respond to anyone? Does anyone retweet them? If the answer is yes, no and no, then they’re gone.

But I should be able to do that at a glance. If the post source didn’t keep people honest, it at least gave me a tool to get rid of spammers. If that’s gone, the people who do this will flourish – and Twitter will become more and more noise without conversations.

Twitter, please, put this feature back into the redesign. Believe me, those of us who are sensitive to this kind of misuse and do something about it are only helping you.

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Posted in Social Media, Social Networking, Twitter

Tagged auto posting, Twitter

Twitter Auto-posting Services hurt your brand

Posted on September 26, 2010 | Leave a comment

After two years of Tweeting, I’m still seeing a lot of services designed to post to Twitter for you – Hootsuite, dlvr.it, Ping.FM, and worst of all, the Twitter API to serve an RSS feed. If you are using these services and you follow me, you are BEGGING ME not to follow you back.

I don’t have a problem with these services used as part of your overall approach to Twitter. I don’t ignore someone just because I see, “via dlvr.it” at the end of a post. But I do if every post is.

The reason is obvious: Let’s say you do this, and you follow me, and I follow you back. I will occasionally see these automated posts of yours, but you’re never going to read anything I share. This works for you, because you don’t care what I’m posting. You only want me reading what you’re sharing. You want a one-way delivery of information.

But why in the hell would I ever want that? I’m on Twitter to have chats with a lot of people. I’m there to be social.

You’re there to broadcast. And I have no use for you.

Social networking is a blessing and a curse to businesses – there’s a lot of people using it, but unfortunately, you’re also asked to actually talk to those cretins whose money you want. Can you see where most of us would find that vaguely insulting?

The only reason for me to follow you is because you’re following me – so I can brag about the number of people following my magical tweets. That probably does work for people who think a follow count is important. (Hint: It isn’t. Not even a little bit.)

If that’s how you get people to follow your business Twitter account, what do you think is the quality of those follows? They have no interest in what you’re RSS feed is tweeting for you, they’re just glad to have one more follower. They won’t click on your idiotic links, they won’t come to your site, they won’t buy anything.

By trying to get more customers through social media, you’re really just spinning your wheels.

If you are hiring an agency to do your social media for you, and they’re doing it this way, you’re being ripped off. They will claim they’ve increased brand visibility on Twitter by X% month by month. They will say that because, frankly, it’s the only deliverable they can quantify. The real result of a campaign run this way is that the mass of people tweeting know your brand doesn’t care enough about them to do social well. That, and you’ll have a Twitter account followed by all the other businesses and consultants who do nothing but self-promote. They won’t click on your links any sooner than you’ll click on theirs.

I do some version of this same post every six months or so. Mostly because I cannot believe no one has yet figured out that auto-posting 100% of the time doesn’t work. I’m not the only one decrying this, either – do your research. Read some case studies. If you really care about making your brand known on social, you cannot be lazy about it and expect it to work.

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Posted in Advertising, Interactive Marketing, Marketing, Social Media, Social Networking, Twitter

The New Twitter and the Future of Blogging

Posted on September 17, 2010 | Leave a comment

As you might already know, Twitter announced this week that they’ll be redesigning their user experience dramatically. They will partner with several other sites to allow users to publish content in tweets. These sites are: Dailybooth, DeviantArt, Etsy, Flickr, Justin.TV, Kickstarter, Kiva, Photozou, Plixi, USTREAM, Vimeo, Yfrog, and YouTube

But a comment a co-worker of mine made was, I thought, very interesting: What effect will this have on Tumblr?

Tumblr is a blogging platform that many people love for it’s ability to easily share media in almost exactly the same way, the difference being it can also host the pictures, videos or even audio recordings shared. The one thing Tumblr has always had going against it is a lack of users. This may be because comments can only be made by one’s connections.

Twitter, however, is already widely used and has many people trolling other people’s content. You might find a Tumblr page if you know the address, or if the author has done the right kind of SEO to get it found. Not that there aren’t great and popular Tumblr blogs – it’s just that there isn’t a dedicated group of users like there is with Twitter.

Twitter vs Tumblr

If I’m going to be honest, though, Tumblr – and more generally, blogging – is BETTER than Twitter. And I’ll tell you why:

A friend of mine has a blog on Tumblr documenting his 180 days using only his iPad for personal use, covering each day on the blog until he can buy a new Mac. Like Twitter is attempting to do now, Tumblr allows him to share media on the page, not links to other sites that hold it.

But as a blogging platform, it also allows him to write. If he has something to share at length, he can. Twitter, by it’s definition, doesn’t allow that. I think this is a growing problem with social media being so widespread, that the simplest, most effortless kind of communication is what will always fair best. Blogs, on the other hand, which started it all, fade in popularity because they require something of both the reader and the author: A willingness to enjoy lots of words.

This thought occured to me first, ironically, on Twitter. I was talking with an old friend from my LiveJournal days, @Giania:

@CiaoEnrico: I remember not only writing 1000 word posts about my life, I read other people’s 1000 word posts. I miss that!

@Giania: Yeah me too. I feel like everything’s faster & less clear these days. I have a love/hate relationship with the shift

Twitter’s great for quick exchanges like this, granted. But some of us like sharing a lot more than this – and friends are willing to read it, trust me. When you only have a dozen or so friends, all of them writing about what’s going on in their lives, you care and want to be involved. You keep up with them, offer advice, get into arguments, console… there may not be as many connections as there are on Facebook or Twitter, but the connections you do have are of higher quality.

Maybe the problem is that so many of us who come to Social Media don’t know how good it can be, only that it’s a great way to be potentially famous. So many people cynically value responses, comments and views for their ability to make what they’ve posted get seen by more people – not because of the real reason for comments and responses – socializing with other people.

In short, I like what Twitter is doing for publishing. I’m not crazy about what they’ve done to truncate conversations.

Until people decide they have more to say than 140 characters at a time will allow, “short” is simply where it is.

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Posted in Blogging, Social Media, Twitter

Tagged new twitter, tumblr

Another way to look at Twitter Followers

Posted on August 30, 2010 | 1 Comment

There’s always been a lot of fluff behind the number of Twitter Followers a profile has. If you’ve been on there for a day, you know how it goes: If you have 20, you aren’t that popular, if you have 1000, you’re at least more popular than most of the people you know, and if you have 30,000 you can think of yourself as a minor superstar.

As a personal feel-good, that’s fine, but as a metric of success it’s shoddy. Businesses tend to measure the success or failure of their Twitter accounts by things like follow counts because they can’t accurately measure how it has increased their conversion rate. This has never been easy to see, since social media generally catches people when they aren’t ready to buy something – they’re there to play. It’s like advertising to people at the park: If they see the ad they may buy the product later, if they think of it, but for now they’re just there to walk the dog or push the kids on swings.

It’s hard to know how many people read tweets, then follow through and buy something. But a follow count is easy to measure. If that jumps up fast, your company and product must be popular, and this must be working, right?

Maybe not – maybe a sharp increase in followers is really a sign that everything else you’re doing, you’re doing right. Look at the stats for Old Spice’s Twitter account, via TwitterCounter.com:

Boy THEY sure got popular in a hurry, didn’t they? They must have really done a lot of following of other people, and posting #FollowFriday shout outs, even paid some company to put their profile on ads saying, “you should follow OldSpice,” right?

That, or they made a TV Commercial that no one can stop talking about.

OldSpice’s twitter follows show the success they’re having elsewhere. It also gives them another venue to catch people who are interested in them because of the commercial. Maybe someone who’s entertained by the commercial doesn’t instantly go out and buy Old Spice. So interested people follow them on Twitter, where they continue to receive messaging from the campaign, and eventually, maybe, give their product a try.

In this case, Twitter isn’t the first or the last stop in the conversion funnel – it just keeps people in it.

So if you want Twitter to work for you, the moral here is to have a larger campaign that kicks off the interest. Unless what you’re posting is so miraculously brilliant you bring in followers who’ve never heard of you before, Twitter is best used in conjunction with a larger campaign.

It’s why social media IS NOT more important than media buys. Television, print, radio, etc. have the widest audience, and are the best means for getting people moving towards your product.

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Posted in Social Media, Social Networking, television advertising, Twitter, Viral Content

Tagged old spice commercial, social media marketing, television advertising

A Better Way to #FollowFriday

Posted on August 17, 2010 | 2 Comments

FollowFriday is one of the earliest Twitter trends, and one of the most successful ones. If you aren’t aware of what it is, essentially it’s a way for users to give shout outs to certain followers of theirs. The idea is that, if you look for the #FF or #FollowFriday hashtag, on Friday of course, you’ll find a bevy of Twitterers who are worth knowing, and that you will then give them a follow.

The thing is, I haven’t observed a lot of people going around following people because they get mentioned in an #FF. A few people have mentioned me in #FollowFriday posts over the years, and I’ve never seen a huge spike in new followers as a result. It’s certainly a nice gesture, and makes me blush a little. If the purpose is to spread the follows around, though, it doesn’t appear to be working.

So last Friday, I tried something a little different. Instead of putting together a clump of names with “#FollowFriday” in front of it, I made several posts – one for each individual I felt should be looked at, and more importantly, why. This is a better way of doing things for a couple of reasons.

First, the people you mention understand what they do or did that you like so much – and afterwards become better friends. Rather than sending you a quick, “Thanks for the #FF,” they’ll be more likely to respond to a post of yours, or engage you in a back-and-forth conversation. They’ll do this because you’ve shown them you’re actually listening.

Another reason to do this is it makes someone following them more likely. You’ve listed reasons these people are exceptional, so anyone actually searching this hashtag gets a better understanding of who you’ve offered up.

Finally, honestly, #FollowFriday is a concept that is no longer useful. Since Twitter created Lists, finding people that other people like are very easy to find. Not that anyone really gets a lot of followers from being on lists either. I’m on 179 of them as of this writing, and I doubt a lot of people are following me because they found me on internet-nerds. (Thought I do think that’s a bitchin’ list to be included on. Thanks, @Loreli!)

But if you want to follow the people your Twitter friends like, the lists do that already. People don’t care who everyone else is following though, apparently anyway, so the whole exercise is really just a way of thanking friends for being real friends.

And if that’s the case, I say let them know why, one by one, in posts all their own.

One suggestion, though: If you’re going to individually #FollowFriday people, space them out through the day – maybe one every hour or so. When I gave big ups to my friends all at once, all these posts clogged up my other friends’ Twitter pages. Not fun.

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Posted in Social Networking, Twitter

Social Media isn’t about “celebrity”

Posted on April 25, 2010 | 1 Comment

To me, social media is one of two things:

The ability for anyone to be a publisher of content.
A two-way street of sharing information between anyone.

The people who go with option #1 seem to come to Twitter and Facebook and blogging and everything else to become stars. And thanks to the ease of publishing with social, anyone can be. If you’ve got thousands of people following you to hear what you’re up to, and you are only interested in hearing from 20 or so, you must be a big deal.

Thing is, these people don’t do a lot of “interacting.” If someone is using social to make themselves feel popular, it just doesn’t seem like they’re seeing the big picture.

That’s what option #2 is: Using social to learn, and add to others’ knowledge. Here people don’t do what they can to filter out people so they can have more Twits following them then they follow back because that’s what the big shots do. Instead, these people will unfollow you for being uninteresting. On the other hand, if you have something to add, they’ll always respond to something worth hearing about.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot tonight, as I sifted through my all-important (to me) FriendFeed profile. Early on in my social media usage, I found that I used specific sites in specific ways – Facebook just for family and close friends, Twitter for everyone, this blog for shooting my mouth off (in an inescapably one-way way,) and FriendFeed for engaging in real information exchange.

So when I go through my subscriptions there, I kick off the people unwilling to listen to me or anyone else. But if there’s someone who’s so incredibly awesome they can’t possibly follow everyone (me included) back, I keep them on. If the quality of someone’s posts is just that good, they earn the right to have that kind of rockstar follower/following ratio.

The people who maneuver and connive to look like celebrities show their hand – they don’t have content that’s quality enough to gain a following, so they do everything else to make it look like they have a voice worth listening to.

In short, stop trying to game social to make yourself feel like you’re important, and just concentrate on the quality and creativity of what you have to say.

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Posted in Facebook, Social Media, Social Networking, Twitter, Viral Content

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