Archive for the 'Social Media' Category

Seth Godin is 100% correct when he said that its not the size (quantity) of your followers that matters most but rather the quality of your posts. However, you’ve got to have some followers or you’ll simply be talking to yourself. The key is to make great posts to a network of people who really care about what you have to say.

So how do you build a group of engaged followers?  If your’re building your Twitter network, there simply is no better tool than Refollow.

Once you’ve logged into refollow.com your Twitter account info, you will see a variety of options you can use to manage your followers.  While all are valuable, I would like to point you to the option that lets you identify all of the followers of another Twitter user. Once you have identified these people, simply click on ‘Select All’ and then ‘Follow’.

It is important to note that most people on Twitter will reciprocate when you follow them – also something that refollow makes extremely easy for you to do.

When I was building the Shared Interest Twitter network I identified all of the active followers of the Fairtrade Federation and followed them – I assumed that anyone who had chosen to follow the Fairtrade Federation would also be interested in following Shared Interest, the world’s only 100% fair trade lender.

A great website to use to identify who the top Twitters are in your area is wefollow.com. Simply enter the tag (e.g. fairtrade) and wefollow will show you the top 25 most influential people in that sphere.   As an aside, at the time of this post, Shared Interest was the most influential Twitterer for the Fairtrade tag, but only 5th  in terms of total users, which shows that Seth is right – quality over quantity.

Tip: Only follow active users – those that have tweeted in the past 30 days.  Try as you might, your messages wont resonate with inactive users. You can use the filters on refollow.com to weed out the deadwood.

Social media is not about the tools – Facebook or MySpace or Flickr or Twitter or blogs or YouTube. It’s about having a strategy for identifying and communicating with customers and prospects online. To barrow a concept from Cluetrain Manifesto, ‘Markets are conversations’ and these conversations are taking place online. Businesses simply cant afford not to be participating in these conversations.

Whilst social media tools will come and go, your strategy shouldnt stray much. Moreover, once you’ve defined your strategy, choosing which tools you will use will become much more obvious.

Photography is a powerful way to connect with your customers and prospective customers. When I was the marketing manager at Shared Interest, I was confronted with the following situation:

• We had thousands of photos that had been taken by staff during customer visits
• Management of the image library was tedious due to the lack of search-ability
• Photos were not publicly accessible and sharing them with stakeholders was next to impossible
• Many of the photos offered an incredible window into the work that Shared Interest does (social lender) that would, if publicly accessible, create a tighter bond with current stakeholders and help to acquire new members.

With this in mind I chose Flickr, the online community and photo sharing site to host and manage our photo library.  Not only is Flickr a great way to manage your photos by creating sets, using descriptor tags and and creating titles for your photos, but you can also add text descriptions that give the viewer more insight into the photo and can even contain a specific call to action.  This photo is a great example of a very detailed description – basically a mini case study – with a call to action (link back to company website).

Being an online community, you can also find groups (or start your own) related to your photos.  Once you join a group then you can share some or all of your photos with that group.  Because Shared Interest is the only 100% fair trade lender, I joined and shared our photos with several fair trade related groups.

Using Flickr continues to give Shared Interest much more online visibility, providing easy access to stakeholders and offering a much more efficient way to manage its extensive image library.