Marketing Tips: 5 Twitter Mistakes to Avoid

Social Media Objectives

• Expand brand presence
• Engage in dialogue with consumers and vendors
• Promote products and promotions
• Announce new vendors, products, etc.
• Increase awareness of business and sales

1: Auto-DM to message everyone that following you

The problem:  Using software or web apps that send everyone that begins to follow up a direct message.

Most people view this as spam and your click-through ratio on the links you post will be very low and it prevents people from building trust with your brand

The solution:  Don’t auto-send a DM to anyone on Twitter.  Build relationships with people first to find out what their needs are.  

2:  Posting Overkill

The problem:  You feel that the more post you put up the more exposure your brand will get. You are replying to tons of people and sending out lots of cool tweets that your followers find valuable. 

Stay consistent but don't over tweet. Over tweeting takes space and attention away from other Twitterers and can be bothersome to followers.

The Solution: Tweet at least once a day but limit tweets to under 5 times a day.

3:  Not Posting Enough

The problem:  Yes, not posting enough on Twitter is a Twitter sin although you might not know it.  If you aren’t posting multiple times a day, then you aren’t interacting with others and you aren’t driving traffic back to your website.

The solution:  You’re probably really busy and you don’t have time to visit Twitter multiple times a day to tweet.  I feel you.

So again, this is where a tool like Hootsuite comes into play.  Visit Hootsuite once a day and schedule multiple tweets for that day (at least 3).

4: Posting @ wrong times

The problem:  You send your tweets at times when your followers aren’t online.  As a result, your tweets don’t get clicked on and you don’t get re-tweeted.

The solution:  You need to find out when a majority of your followers are online and schedule your tweets for those times.  Luckily, there are a couple of services that can help.

5: You thank everyone & their cousin for following or re-tweeting you

The problem:  Every time you get a new follower, you send them a mention thanking them for the follow.  Every time someone re-tweets you, you thank them for the re-tweet.

The solution:  Thank people for the follows and the re-tweets sparingly.  Also, once you find out when a majority of your followers are online, schedule the thankyou’s in advance to go out during your non-peak times

How To: Use Facebook Analytics For Your Business Page

Most of us are on social media, I currently have my Facebook page open to my personal page as I am sure many of your staffers currently do. We all understand the need to be active on social media, but during working hours we want to make sure the company stays active too.

How to structure your social media team:

First thing is to find information to create a report and have something to look at as you measure the growth of your business page. 

Facebook already gives you a lot of information such as:

• Overview
• Like
• Reach 
• Visits
• Post
• People

Overview: Gives you overall information from the different tabs available.  The image below shows insights from Likes, Post, and Engagement, at a glance. Each of the tabs have their own set of information and breaks down all the statistics.

People: This tab highlights types of people and their location. It give information such as gender, age group, location, and language. 

Post: Your post are key to growing your base. Are you staying relevant, engaging the end user. The Post tab gives you insight on your top post. This will be great for your marketing/social media meetings to generate topics your fans will be interact with. 

Likes: We love to see people like our page but we sometimes get an unlike, both are equally important and need to be examined.  By seeing who is liking and un-liking it will show you who you are attracting and why others may decide to leave.

"Thankfully, Facebook has refreshed the web version of Insights to bring you clear data sets that are presented in easier-to-navigate graphs that are highly dynamic and customizable. New features include:

• Benchmarking
• Easy start and end date slider
• When your fans are online feature
• Best post types feature
• Comparisons vs. general Facebook audience
• Advanced filtering
• Addition of Post Clicks stat"

"The data Facebook currently offers is very easy to read and understand, it is a great tool to measure and analyze your growth.

"When considering what metrics are relevant to your business or your client, think about what you’re using Facebook for and what goals you have in mind for the page.

If you stick to your goals and only report on them, you can ignore the other Facebook metrics and avoid the dreaded ‘analysis paralysis’!

Most brands set up Facebook Pages as a marketing method to bring traffic to a site (or foot traffic through a door) in order to convert" 

How go to your page's insight:

1. Be a manager or administrator of the page. Have the current admin just add your name to the list once you have liked the business page

1. Go to top of the page --> insights

Sources:
www.facebook.com
www.branded3.com
www.gctmarketing.com
http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/

Next week--> How to Create a Spreadsheet To Track Growth. 04/20/14

What Our Customers Dream Of...

What our customers dream of is a beautiful white and perfect christmas. 

Reality sometimes is not as pretty.

Are you communicating enough with your Customer?

Retailers are still not addressing the foreseeable issues and will have to deal with a lot of unhappy customers. From my experience people are more likely accept an unpleasant situation when given enough time to adjust rather than having it be a surprise.  Getting ahead of the problem may aggravate the client but will most likely ensure the client stays loyal to your brand.

-Almost 28% of respondents said that they would not shop again with a retailer that failed to deliver on time.

UPS, FedEx, and many other shipping and mailing services have setup alerts and ways for their customers to be in the know if there are any delays or disruptions. Shouldn’t we all follow the same model and include a message on websites or have a sign up to getting updates on deliveries?

Some other advantages:

• Collect more emails as people will want possible updates 
• Interact with a customer and build a relationship
• Show up your competition by being the problem solver

Why does this matter?

Branding is not only about nice logos and cool colors; it is about customer service and how your brand handles curve balls. Showing initiative and caring about the clients happiness (even when it is bad news) shows that you are serious about your brand and care fo the customer's satisfaction.

“This is about managing customer expectations, and improving retention through clear messaging and delivering on promises. 

Last year, stats show that during December at least 225,000 parcels each day failed to arrive when promised, while 60% of people shopping online last year had problems with delivery of their item.” 

http://econsultancy.com/

Resources:

FedEx

http://emails.fedex.com/m/p/fdx/login.asp?ref=splash&country_code=US

USPS

http://about.usps.com/news/service-alerts/

UPS

http://www.ups.com/content/us/en/about/news/service_updates/20131205_centralgeneric.html