We stumbled on this Twitter schedule that the US Army follows with, well, military precision.
In our #GetMeSocial workshops we always say that Social Media is another mouth to feed, and a greedy one at that. This timetable helps prompt and guide their content, making sure during the week the various themes of their work are covered.
I also like the way they’ve added stats at the bottom, showing how successful that day was – a great way to monitor your progress.
As Twitter developed, he started finding other Pugs to follow. Then conversations taking place. Now he uses it to share fun photos of himself, note particularly good places to walk, plus ask questions about Pugs. He was offered banana, and didn’t know whether it was healthy for him. He asked his followers, and within 20 mins had five or six answers that yes, banana is good for him.
Anyway, the RSPCA are launching their Get Puppy Smart campaign about what to think about when getting a puppy, based around a lovely animation. They wanted to spread the word, so they searched Twitter for influential dogs, and Leon came to their attention. So he is now sharing this link with his followers, who are in turn retweeting.
A great example of how Social Media can be used to reach niche audiences, who are passionate about what you’re trying to promote, and can do (part of!) your marketing work for you!
Yesterday, we got another email asking us to quote from a company we have never had contact with. When I asked how they heard of us, they said:
I found you via google search
I believe your services and portfolio are just right for my project’s requirements.
They found us through googling “subtitling video production” – I know this because I can see what search engine terms brought people to our blog. They then browsed the site, and liked what they saw. We’re now discussing budgets, and they probably have’t even looked at our static site, only the blog! And keep in mind we spend absolutely nothing on google ad words, we’ve just been blogging and twittering regularly for years and gradually built up our content to start working in our favour in search engines.
Last week, I wanted to see an osteopath for a sports injury I had recently. There’s one literally next door to my office. I googled and could not find him, even though I searched for the exact street he was on. Other practitioners had spent so much on ad words etc, that he didn’t even appear on the first page. When I saw him, he said he only has a very simple website, and does no SEO/social media. So no one can find him even if they’re looking and know his address!
If you’re a small business and looking for practical help to get your Social Media strategy kick started, check out our GetMeSocial service.
I’ve been putting the finishing touches to some touches to some new marketing materials today, including some testimonials. Sometimes it gets hard writing about your business. How you’re great. How you do a good job. How you’re a nice company to work with who also deliver good results.
So it was nice to see a thread of conversation on Twitter, which started from someone complimenting Carrie from Simpl, one of our clients on the video we created for them. Then Shane from Gallomanor and Justin from FutureGov chipped in. Gave me a completely unprompted boost to get the marketing finished!
This kind of unprompted, public testimonial is one of the great things about Twitter. If you want help building up your Social Media presence, check out GetMeSocial.
If you want to read the conversation, start at the bottom and work your way up.
Today we did a great voice over session with the multi-talented actress/comedienne/writer Ruth Bratt. We were recording for Commetric, a new client who wanted a serious, authoritative tone to the voice over. This is not what I associate with Ruth, who’s a funny, bright, vivacious woman. But suddenly in the recording booth, she turned her voice into something so completely different to her natural way of being, an octave deeper, slower and mature tone, sat in the other engineering room I could hardly believe it was her voice! Brilliant job.
It was a really interesting event, some great speakers. One interesting comment came from Jess Search, Chief Executive, Channel 4 Documentary Film Foundation, who said a recent MORI poll showed that while people valued documentary content almost as highly as fiction content, they were willing to spend only a fraction of their money to watch it. Another from Lynne Brindley, Chief Executive of British Library, who said that children have vast access to information, but they lack the ability to judge the quality of that data.
The highlight for us, however, was being snapped by Stephen Fry, who posted the shot through his Twitter. You can see us bottom right with the camera.
Yesterday we were in Brussels streaming the Public Service 2.0 conference, where a wide range of speakers came to talk about their web 2.0 projects, all of which were based around government topics. The conference was organsied by FutureGov.
We streamed the conference live through our ConferenceXtra service, a collaboration with Gallomanor. People could watch the conference live and join in the conversation through a chat room. We had people from as far afield as London, Italy and America!
As most of the people were avid twitterers, we managed to hit Twitter’s scoreboard of most tweeted topics!
Twitter is growing at an exponential rate and as I’ve been twittering for nearly 2 years, people keep asking me what it’s all about. Well, Twitter takes a good while to get your head around… Someone described it as just your facebook status, which is true, but there’s more to it than that. To “get” Twitter, you have to follow the right kinds of people.
Leon the Pug,who set up his account after the heartless folk at facebook deleted his profile there, uses his to share photos and news of walks with other dogs and dog lovers.My Twitter has a lot of people interested in news, film and social media, so I get links about new cool websites, clips, business tips and the like. It’s like a constant quick feed of snippets, most of which are actually relevant to your interests, but also have that lateral thinking vibe.
Once you’ve joined, if you don’t have any friends already Twittering, start by clicking on random profiles till you find one that interests you. Then see who they follow, because likely they’ll be interesting too. Then see who they’re following…. they’ll have some cool people too…
One person who’s interesting is@jemimakiss(journalist who does lots of technology stories) then there are famous people like@stephenfry, and you’ll also find BBC etc do news feeds. It’s quite addictive.
Two things to note: you can reply to people’s Twitters by hitting the arrow by their posting, or by just putting “@username” before. Be sure to check your “@replies”, where people have done the same to you. And a # in front of a word makes it a keyword. This is so people can trace who’s talking about what. So #pug means that people can see that pug is a buzz topic if lots of people are talking about them. You can also direct message, by clicking on the link on someone’s profile, so no one else can see what you’ve written.
Oh, there’s also a way of adding your Twitter to your facebook, so that your twitter status automatically updates your facebook status. Saves posting things twice. And you can still manually update facebook if you want it to have a different status.Just search for the twitter application.
Another application which is fantastic and has opened up twitter for me iswww.twhirl.orgwhich offers a simple application to keeps your feed popping up all day!
I started twittering ages ago on behalf of my dog, founder of Napoleon Creative. It basically said what he was up to, and I put it on my facebook page.
However the more I got into twitter, the more interesting it became to me, but I had quite a divided collection of people. I was following some people interested in new technology/social networking. Leon, however, was attracted a whole series of dog owners! Both threads were great, but I’ve now decided to separate the two.
