Robert Douville

Building a Presence on Twitter

     The digital world is rapidly increasing and is a forum for business marketing that can’t be ignored. Twitter is an essential platform for any social media campaign and is valued by communities for its immediacy and intimacy. You’re engaging consumers in a conversation and developing real relationships. Here are some basic tips on how to run a successful Twitter account:

• Once you’ve created your account, use Twitter Search to see what people are saying about your brand and competition. Social listening is a great way to see what you’re getting yourself into. Once the account begins to scale and search results become excessive, it may be time to switch to a tool like Radian6 or Visible Technology to mass monitor.

• Engage your followers by asking questions and responding. This doubles as a consumer research and polling tool.

• Tweet interesting content that is relevant to your brand and followers, they will expect more than just daily updates on the benefits of your brand.

• If a follower asks a question, respond directly and in a timely manner. Twitter is excellent for customer service. Customers that don’t receive a response are less likely to engage with the brand in the future.

• The use of a hashtag connects your tweets to a larger conversation that goes beyond your own network. A hashtag can also be used to organize a group or provide a forum for discussion on a specific topic.

• Following the right people, such as community influencers, will help lead to a stronger base of followers. Tweet Adder is a tool that will automatically follow people based on keyword and location targeting. The act of following someone often leads to a reciprocal follow. 

• Establish yourself as a thought leader within your community and then leverage your followers to drive traffic to your blog or website.

• A call to action is okay! Ask your followers to retweet/donate/subscribe.

     The fundamental difference between Facebook and Twitter is Engagement vs. Timing. EdgeRank, a Facebook algorithm, assigns your Facebook presence a grade of relevance based on user’s past interactions with your posts. EdgeRank uses that grade to determine whether your content should appear in a user’s Timeline. Therefore, each Facebook post must incentivize engagement, or you lose EdgeRank and nobody will see your content. Twitter has no filter. However, the lifespan of a tweet is short and the signal to noise ratio is high. Thus, brands on Twitter prioritize the mass production of relevant content during peak hours. Retweets and other engagement is valuable, but not critical. 

Fundamental Facebook Strategies

     Approaching 800 million users, Facebook is a wise and increasingly common choice for businesses that wish to access the Internet’s wealth of consumers. “Engagement” is the operative word for producing a successful Social Media Marketing campaign. Here are some basic tips on how to get started with a Facebook brand page:

- Asking questions is a great way to drive engagement especially when your fan knows the answer. Everyone likes feeling smart; make sure your fan can easily answer the question.

• Multiple-choice
• Fill in the blank
• “Yes or No” answers
• Polling (Everybody wins with polling!)

- Pictures are worth a thousand status updates. Photos and videos are proven to increase engagement by 200%.

- Time is precious and Facebook users aren’t interested in lengthy status updates. If it’s not going to be an engaging photo or entertaining video, please keep it short and sweet. Studies indicate that a Facebook post of 80 characters or less will see an increase in engagement by nearly 30%.

- Do your homework. Facebook analytics program, Facebook Insights gives you full access to fan engagement statistics.

• Businesses that post after business hours often see an increase in engagement by 20%. Research is essential.

- Share interesting information that is tailored to your intended audience. In addition, a post unrelated to your brand demonstrates an attempt to develop a relationship with your fans vs. simply attempting to increase business.

- Asking for comments, shares, or likes may sounds redundant, but top Social Media strategists say it is an invaluable call to action that generates a high level of engagement.

- In the end, the number one reason a person likes a business on Facebook is to gain access to deals. Keywords like “$10 off” and “coupon” see engagement rise by as much as 55%.