The power of gratitude is well known in social media circles. It’s a way for big brands to show followers that they care on a one-to-one level; it allows smaller brands to build their core of loyalists that are necessary to any word-of-mouth marketing effort; it builds personal brands; it makes everyone involved feel good.
What’s less clear is how you’re supposed to actually go out and show people your appreciation. Some methods are well worn: Follow Friday is such an institution on Twitter it’s barely worth doing anymore.
Here are a few less common ways to show your fans that you care and take your social media bonds to another level. (read more…)
I’ll be hosting a Twitter chat via the SmartBrief on Social Media Twitter account (@SBoSM) at 2 p.m. Eastern today (Sept. 2). Add the hashtag #sbsocialclub to your tweets to join in.
Join me, a couple of other SmartBrief editors and your fellow SBoSM readers, as we spend an hour chatting about social media news and trends and answer reader questions. There’s no set format and any topic is fair game, as long as it’s related to social media.
Come share your successes and get help with your toughest social media problems. See you there! (read more…)
David Hollender is chief Internet strategist for Mind Sky, an online-communication consultant for associations, nonprofits and social enterprises.
During a recent online chat, I was struck by how awkwardly Twitter manages conversations. Though pervasive and easy to use, Twitter does not excel in keeping thoughts, insight, suggestions and occasional tangents of participants in context.
After setting up a search column in TweetDeck with a hashtag, I read and watched the proceedings, following a flurry of questions, thoughts and replies that filled my screen. I could not always tell which ones belonged together and which followed one another. The conversational gymnastics of our Twitter discourse was vibrant, interesting and fun — but messy, reminiscent of a raucous dinner table with everyone talking at once. Neither the engineer’s part of my brain nor the inventors of Twitter could have anticipated a use case such as this for a tool designed to post brief updates for family and friends. (read more…)
More than a third of all tweets are sent by people visiting Twitter’s default Web client. Which is too bad, because Twitter, as a website, is by far the least effective way to use Twitter as a network.
But even though just about any third-party client will provide you with a better way to use Twitter, picking the client that’s right for you can be daunting. Should you install a client or use one that runs in your browser? Which features are really necessary? Should you pay for any of these services?
I typically prefer browser-based clients because I think its easier to move between browser windows than separate programs, but I wouldn’t turn my nose up at an installed client with a really great feature set just for that. The best client for you is the one that fits your workflow — if you really need to be able to schedule tweets to be effective and a client doesn’t give you that option, then it’s the wrong service for you, even if everyone else loves it. (read more…)
Twitter is widely known but little-used in the U.S., according to the lead story in today’s SmartBrief on Social Media. A study by Edison Research found that 87% of Americans have heard of the network, but just 7% use it. By contrast, Facebook has an 88% awareness rate and a 41% user rate.
Now compare that with a study of social marketers’ network preferences, which found that 88% of social marketers used Twitter — more than any other network. When the question was put to social marketers with years of experience, the number jumped to 96%.
One of the biggest axioms in social marketing is that you have to “go fishing where the fish are” — you need to embrace the networks your audience already uses instead of trying to lure them to your platform of choice. So why aren’t social marketers taking their own advice?
It might be a case of reality not matching up to our expectations, as Jason Falls notes. (read more…)
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