To Tweet To Wooooo!

 

Making Twitter My Friend

 

My Dislike of Twitter

I HATE TWITTER! That’s what was screaming round my head during the first year of my Social Media degree course. I had chosen to use it as a social media platform because it had the second highest following after Facebook. My research also showed that it was an excellent communication tool through which to grow a following and direct them to my web site – Chrissie Designs Jewellery.

I felt it was a platform I could not ignore, yet one year on I was still disliking using it. With statistics for 2013 showing it to be the fastest growing social media platform in the world I began to wonder what was wrong with me and why did I hate it?

The fact was I just did not ‘get it’. Firstly, being somewhat verbose with my writing, I greatly struggled with a limit of 140 characters. Next I felt overwhelmed by the streams of tweets that flowed to me. It stressed me out as I hated the thought of missing something that might be important. Then of course there were the abbreviations - #ff, #anything, TY, RT – what is all that about I would ask myself! Finally, with hindsight (a wonderful thing) I realise I was using Twitter in a traditional marketing context to just push content out to people.

A Twitter Novice

Falling into the trap of the Twitter novice I pushed out information sometimes in continuous streams that I now find so annoying in others. I had no idea how to tweet, reply, re-tweet or favourite. As for engaging with people I was a face to face girl and could not get my head round how online engagement worked. The truth is I did not want to, as I believed (at that time) that building relationships required and element of face to face communication. My whole approach to tweeting was also random, inconsistent and without focus or strategy.

The problem was I had no idea what I was doing, how it all worked, how to get the best out of the platform and most importantly, how to enjoy using it. After a year of tweeting and re-tweeting (my only level of engagement) I barely had a hundred followers and was totally demotivated by it all. At the time I did not realise that 60% of people give up on Twitter within the first week. I persevered for a year only because I felt I had to for the sake of my degree course.

The Penny Dropped!

Then last month I read ‘The Tao of Twitter’ by Mark Schaefer. When I met the author, at a conference in Cardiff, he warned me that his book could change my life, and it has. I am now a Twitter convert! So what has changed I hear you ask?

The penny has finally dropped, as they say. I now see Twitter as a 24 hour global networking event that I step in and out of every day. I love face to face networking so I decided to see Twitter from the same perspective. In face to face networking situations there are many conversations and communications that I am not privy to. That realisation stopped me worrying about what I may miss on Twitter.

Mirroring the face to face model I now stop and follow string of tweets I find engaging. Some of these spark my interest so I check out the person’s web site and Linked In profile to find out more about them. If they have a blog I also check this out. As with face to face meetings, when my interest is peeked enough I start to engage in conversation via twitter or their blog posts.

New Use of Twitter

Now that I have a new full time job supporting and mentoring graduate businesses, I scan my feed of tweets every hour or two for interesting information relating to business. These I re-tweet for the benefit of my followers. Likewise if I see a tweet from one of my Business Loft clients I either re-tweet it or engage in a dialogue with them. Only once or twice a day do I ‘push’ a message out about my Loft Blog or something going on at The Business Loft. I finally understand that it is all about developing new online friendships and providing information that others find useful, interesting and engaging. Content is King!

Managing this level of activity will soon become too time consuming and so I am about to explore the dashboard TweetDeck. This will help me schedule my tweets, stream my messages and look for relevant messages to re-tweet. Having previously used Houtsuite I am well aware of how useful and time saving dashboards such as this are. I have decided to give TweetDeck a try as it only focusses on Twitter feeds and is owned by Google so is more effective for SEO.

How has it Worked?

So what is the result of this change of heart and more skilful use of Twitter? Firstly, in only 4 weeks, and 350 tweets, my following is 199 and steadily rising. I now have 7 people with over 100,000 genuine followers (two of which have over 200,000 followers) who followed without me initiating the contact. These are the ‘influencers’ who are vital to my developing network of contacts because when they re-tweet my tweets, my following expands.

As for the development of The Loft Blog, since starting my Twitter campaign the opening rate has gone up from 32.8% to 45.9% where the industry average is 17.1%. Twitter is one of the main tools I use to publicise my blog, along with Facebook and email marketing.

The synergy that Mark Schaefer talks about in his book The Tao of Twitter is already at work. Having engaged in my first real twitter conversation about social media, with a young marketing assistant, it turns out that he lives in Liverpool. The uncanny coincidence is that it is a city I rarely visit and yet I have a meeting there next month. Needless to say we have arranged a get together to meet in person.

This is the beginning of an exciting journey, for me, into global networking using the power of Twitter. Check in next year to see just where it has taken me!