When training in social media at both the introduction level and intermediate level – when I get to the section on Twitter, it’s clear that people are confused, and often fearful, of the relatively harmless, ‘Hashtag’.

I’m often met with questions such as; ‘but where do I get a Hashtag from?’, or, ‘who creates the Hashtag for me?’  or, ‘what if I use a hashtag that’s already been created?’.  So, just as in my recent post where I clearly spelled out how to set up and leverage Hootsuite to manage multiple social media accounts – in this post, I am setting out to demystify what a hashtag is and how anyone can be using and leveraging hashtags on Twitter, effectively – covering:

• What a Hashtag is
• How you go about creating them
• Tips for leveraging them
• How to explore Hashtags already out there

Firstly, what is a Hashtag?

On a keyboard, or phone keypad – we’re all used to seeing a hash sign, #.  On Twitter, the term Hashtag is simply where  a # sign has been placed in front of a word or group of words, (eg: #hignfy, #hislop, #glee, #londonriots, #havingabadday)  to collectively ‘tag’  or ‘group’ tweets that all mention a particular Hashtag.

For example:  The popular BBC1 satire news show, ‘Have I Got News for You’, promotes a Hashtag #hignfy.  Whilst the show is airing, people watching the show can collectively share opinion.

As the example shows below – I have simply gone to my search box on Twitter and typed in #hignfy.  You can see I’ve snipped just a small sample of the conversation that is happening around a program that aired the night before.  Of course, had I done the search as the program was airing, I could have joined the buzz of a more ‘live’ conversation.

The people talking and sharing about #hignfy do not have to be following each other on Twitter – but instead, they can all be discussing the program, asking questions, sharing opinion etc – simply by mentioning the #hignfy in their tweets.

Therefore, if I wanted to find any ‘Have I Got News for You’ program fans – I could search on the #hignfy to see who is talking about it.

It’s highly unlikely that any of them would mention that they are program fans in their Twitter profiles.  Therefore, without hashtags, how else would I ever have known they were fans or be able to connect and reach an audience that I’m interested in connecting with?

What do we take away from this?

Effectively, a hashtag (#) is a way of searching for tweets that have a common topic.   They are effectively, an ‘anchor’ to group conversations that allow you to create communities of people all interested in the same topic. The hashtag makes it easier for them to find and share information related to a particular topic.

For example; when the London riots kicked off in August last year – anyone wanting to know or share anything about what was happening could follow news by searching #londonriots and if sharing news, they could include #londonriots in the tweet.

The hashtag was used by thousands of people – for different purposes; the police and emergency services were using the hashtag to report updates, as were local councils and local authorities. People were searching the hashtag to keep up-to-date with where there were problems and whether it was safe to get home.

Remember, these people were in no other way connected, the common factor was the fact that they all wanted to know about or report on the London riots.  Therefore, the #londonriots became a topic that a diverse set of people were talking about.

Similarly, when I deliver social media training, myself and other trainers training with Business Training Made Simple, all share articles, tips, advice and offers via #smetraining2012 whilst we are training.  At the outset of any course, we advise delegates of the # – and at the end of the course, we go to Twitter search (or Hootsuite) to show them the stream of information we have created during the course, and also show them tweets that already exists on the hashtag,  so they can clearly see all the resources and conversations happening around the hashtag.  So, it becomes a useful tool to share information and resources to a diverse audience.

Hashtags often Trend on Twitter

When you get enough people talking about or mentioning the same # – then it can ‘trend’. (You see ‘trending topics’ – on your Twitter home page on the left hand side).  All that effectively means is that a huge ‘buzz’ is occurring about a topic or hashtag – so much so, that it becomes a topic that is ‘being talked about the most’ – on Twitter.   Given that there are approx 250 million tweets a day, then trending is no simple task.

As you can see from below – right now, London trends include three #.  #IJustLoveItWhen #listofturnons and #yeahIwantthat .  Effectively, a huge amount of people are including those hashtags into their tweets – so much so, that they are trending.

(Note: I never said all # were purposeful – and it just goes to show that a hashtag can be created about anything, and that many are pretty mundane).

Hashtags, Search and Awareness

As shown earlier, I can go to Twitter search and simply put in my # term to find out what’s happening around a topic – or to see if a # exists.

Using the #hignfy example again, you’ll see below that when I enter the terms ‘have I got news for you’ into  the search box,  there are people talking about the program, but they are not using the # to connect with others.  It’s the same program, they’re talking about some of the same issues, but – they are not using the #hignfy (in fact some are using #haveIgotnewsforyou and #bbchignfy).

Therefore, these conversations did not appear when I did my #hignfy search. (Incidentally, #hignfy is the hashtag officially promoted at the beginning of the program by the BBC).

I suppose that cements the point that if you want people to use a hashtag, (so you can create an audience around a topic) you need to promote it effectively.

It’s interesting to see that a number of recent Nike advertisements have featured, not a URL but instead a #. Their huge billboard and cinema ads featured not a www.nike.com url – but instead the hashtag #makeitcount.  If you do a search on Twitter on the #makeitcount, you’ll see the conversations.

Get Wise with Hashtags

It’s a pretty fertile advertising tactic, but it’s a highly interesting one – and one that seems to be becoming more popular. After all, it gives brands and advertisers a mechanism to anchoring a community of diverse people around an online conversation by widely promoting the #.  And if your audience is on Twitter, then it’s a great way to get people participating with your advertising campaign.

Of course, conversely, McDonalds recently promoted the #McDStories.  The objective was to encourage people to share stories (which clearly they were hoping would be positive) around their experience of McDonalds.

Social Media platforms enable everyone and anyone to publish and share their views and opinions – and therefore, with this campaign, McDonalds received not just positive stories but also highly negative stories alongside their #McDStories.  They of course, were promoting the #McDStories – so they themselves were alerting audiences to view these negative stories.

The lesson – be sure you’re using the # smartly. After all – you are creating an anchor for lots of people to share and talk – therefore, ideally, you don’t want to create a ‘bashtag’, where everyone is sharing their gripes about you. .

Where you do get Hashtags?

Anyone can create a hashtag. There isn’t a repository where you go and ‘get one’.  You can simply create one yourself by adding the simple # before typing a keyword or group of words.  However, it’s a good idea to ‘check’ a hashtag out before you start promoting it.  You want to check the hashtag you are about to use, is either unique, or isn’t associated to something totally irrelevant already.

For example, let’s say you are running an event for Vets – you’ve got 300 people coming, and so there’s no way you’re going to be able to have a conversation with each of those delegates. Whilst you can take a few questions from the floor – again, that’s not engaging with every delegate that may have a question.

By promoting a hashtag for your event, and showcasing this at the outset in promotional materials – you can get people connecting and talking; before, during and after the event.

Let’s say I create a brand or hashtag for the event #vetsandpets . I could go to Twitter, insert that hashtag into search and see if it was being used elsewhere.  You can see that there are no tweets for that # – so I’m safe to use it.

 

NB: Be mindful that Twitter tweets are limited to 140 characters – so you don’t want to use a ridiculously long # eg: #vetsandpetsannualevent2012  - rather use #vets&pets

Tapping into Relevant Audiences via Hashtags

To promote my event to a wider targeted audience, I may want to check out other hashtags to see if I can tap into other audiences using #hashtags that are appropriate and relevant to my event.

For example, I initially, typed in #vets – but that was pulling up a lot of tweets about ‘veterans’ – whereas, when I typed in #veterinary – you can see that there are a number of related hashtags that I can explore and perhaps use in my tweets alongside my #vetsandpets event hashtag to grow awareness into a targeted audience.

However, word of warning here – you do not and I repeat do not, want to be hijacking trending or popular hashtags which are totally unrelated for promotional intent.

The term ‘mashtagging’ is defined in the Urban Dictionary as the following:

Mashtag
	n. A social networking status update, Tweet, or post that contains an unnecessarily large number of tags or tagged names often unrelated to the context of the post.

There have been a few incidents where brands have piggy-backed on trending topics, often highly sensitive such as #Cairo and #Egypt – around the time of the uprising in a totally unrelated way and they’ve come off really badly.

You can see from below – a while back (late 2009) HabitatUK’s tweets included well known brand hashtags or trending hashtags to promote their products into wider audiences.

Since when did HabitatUK sell #Apple products?  The onslaught that followed their hijacking attempts was not pretty – and highly damaging to the brand at large, getting them a reputation on this far reaching channel as Twitter spammers.

And as if that wasn’t enough, Twitter can close your account if they think you’re out to spam by using hashtags incorrectly. So beware.  If enough people complain or report you to Twitter, then it could be goodbye Twitter account.

What do we take away from this?

•  Check out whether the hashtag you are looking to promote is already in use. A simple search on Twitter should do it.
•  Look for relevant hashtags around your hashtag and review who is talking around the topic – they may be relevant for you to talk to too.
•  Don’t spam by jumping onto trending or popular hashtags that are totally irrelevant to your promotion or conversation. It’s spam, it’s frowned upon and upon reflection of those that have done it already, it’s caused a considerable amount of negativity towards a brands reputation.
• If you want other relevant audiences to find your conversations – then use a keyword enabled hashtag which they may search on.  If it’s for a bespoke event or campaign, then be sure to promote the hashtag so that users know about its existence.

Finally, I’m often asked whether there is a directory of hashtags.  I have had a look at things such as Hashtagify, Twubs, Hashtag.org – but as yet, I haven’t come across a simple real-time directory where I can view all the hashtags ever created.

Perhaps it’s out there already – and if so, do share – or perhaps Twitter is working on a program which separates out and stores all #hashtag references alphabetically – to create a huge repository to review.

That said,  given how random hashtags are – I’m not sure how useful a directory would be.  For now, my advice is to do some simple real-time research using Twitter search before you create a hashtag.

I hope this post has helped to explain what a hashtag is, how to use them and how not to use them – however, any questions or comments – would love to hear from you.

Happy hashtagging

Michelle

 

@Michelle Carvill is owner and Marketing Director at Carvill Creative – the online visibility experts. A digital marketing and design agency based in Maidenhead, Berkshire.  The agency covers all aspects of online visibility – covering social media marketing and social media training, user focused website planning and conversion focused website design.

 

For marketing and social media advice – view the Carvill Creative Blog

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

During the Social Media Training Introductory course I deliver (to a diverse set of delegates – ranging from PRs, marketing teams, large consumer brands right through to those setting out  on new business ventures), I introduce a way to centrally manage all social media accounts from one dashboard.

Whilst social platform dashboards have been around for as long as many of the social networks, it’s staggering to find out that usually, I’d say, in the region of 90% of the businesses and practitioners I’m training – are not using a social media dashboard.

Therefore, they are literally logging in and out of each separate social media network each time they want to post.

And of course, using the basic www.twitter.com platform, whilst it’s been enhanced significantly over the years to make it far more useful friendly (for those that have been on the platform for years you’ll know what I’m talking about), it still has its limitations.   For example, let’s say I wanted to schedule a tweet for the following day, the following hour , week or month – I can’t do that on Twitter.com. As soon as you set up the tweet – you have to send it.

There are various social media dashboards freely available – some of them totally free to use, and some offer a free starter service with enterprise versions – just a few of the many include: Tweetdeck, SocialOomph, CoTweet – and then of course, more advanced paid for only solutions ala the likes of Radian6 and Sysomos – whereby the dashboard is tailored as a management, listening and reporting platform.

You can find a list of other useful Twitter apps here. However, the focus of this post is to talk you through the practicalities of how to set up what is my personal favourite social media dashboard, www.Hootsuite.com and indeed how you can use the platform to share, schedule,  listen in/research and manage your social conversations.

Step 1 – Setting up your account

Visit www.hootsuite.com – and set up your account. Setting up the account is really very simple, username, email address and pretty much that’s it.

Step 2 – Bringing in your social network accounts

Connect the dashboard with your social networks. On the left hand side of the dashboard you will see a range of ‘icons’ – the cog wheel looking one is your settings tab. Click that and you will see Add Social Networks.  Then it’s simple a case of bringing in the relevant networks.  You can see from below that you can bring in Twitter accounts, Facebook Pages, Profiles, Groups and LinkedIn accounts – so being that they are still the main players, that’s a great start.

 

The free version of Hootsuite enables you to bring in up to 5 social media accounts. If you want to bring in unlimited social accounts, then you can do this – and pay a nominal fee of $5.99 a month (about £3.28). Not bad to make your social media management far more streamlined.

Step 3 – Creating Streams for your Social Network

You have the ability to set up the information you see. For example – let’s say you’ve pulled in a Twitter account. Now we know with the latest version of Twitter.com – you have to click on different tabs to see the @ messages and direct messages and Lists. Whereas, on Hootsuite, you can arrange ‘Streams’ as you want them.

You can see from the image below – I have arranged my @michellecarvill Twitter account as Home Feed, then I’ve created a stream for a hashtag I follow, then @Mentions, then Sent Tweets and so on. And you have up to 10 streams in any one account.

And you can see from the image below – that you have the option to bring in streams around; Home Feed, Mentions, Direct Message (Inbox and Outbox), Sent Tweets, Favourite Tweets, Retweets to me, Retweets by me, My Tweets Retweeted and Scheduled Tweets.  So you can keep your eye on the things that matter to that particular account.

 

Of course, there’s also tabs for Search, Keyword and Lists.  And this is where Hootsuite can become really useful to centralise your ‘social listening’ too.

For example – let’s say, I want to search on the noise going on around a certain hashtag, or some other words. It could be a company name, Carvill Creative – or a person’s name, Michelle Carvill – or indeed a keyword that’s relevant to me ie: social media training.  I can insert the relevant search query – and if I want (see that little compass style circle in the right of the search query box?  Well, if you click on that, it will geolocate showing only ‘local’ search results.  Really useful in cutting out irrelevant noise.

Similarly, I can set up Keywords – which I can’t geolocate – but I can track multiple instances – up to three keywords, by clicking on the Keyword tab. And of course, you can remove and add these keywords as often as you like.

 

You can also add Lists to your stream too.  This can be really useful in monitoring List activity. (For more information on Twitter Lists and how to use them effectively, see this post).

Twitter Lists effectively enable you to segment Twitter users – or indeed put people, such as your competitors into lists, so that you can watch conversations without having to follow them.  You can see below that you simple select your profile, select the relevant list and then create a stream – et voila, the list will then present itself as a stream of data on your Dashboard – and you can then watch what’s going on in that list, alongside your social media management.

 

Step 4 – Using Hootsuite to Schedule your Social Media Activity

You’ll see from the above – that I have a mechanism to share information directly via Hootsuite. I can compose my message – add a URL link, an image and then over to the right hand side – you’ll see the range of accounts I can select to share that ‘message’ from.

For example – if I want to sent the message from my personal Twitter account, a company Twitter account and post it to a LinkedIn profile and a Facebook page (if the message is relevant to hit all three networks) – then I simply create one message and then select to send it to multiple networks simply by clicking them.

Scheduling Activity

Should I not want my messages to go out immediately, then I can schedule any number of messages, for future publishing. I simple hit on the calendar button and then I have the option to fix a future publishing date.

Once activity is scheduled, you can review – and indeed if relevant, approve any pending messages. So any typos or any messages that are irrelevant can easily be amended, rescheduled or removed.

So that’s it. A simple way to centralise all your social media activity – and also be tracking keywords etc – to assist with cutting through irrelevant noise.

 

If you want help getting started with social media and want some training on getting started, or getting the platforms set up – then don’t hesitate to speak to us. We’re helping businesses of all shapes and sizes get to grips with implementing social media activity.

From the practicalities of setting up system – right through to blending social media marketing within your marketing strategy, Carvill Creative has been working with businesses for 10 years to make successful marketing happen.

Happy ‘smart’ social networking…

Managing Multiple Social Media Accounts – How to Set Up your Hootsuite Dashboard

@Michelle Carvill is Founder and Director at Carvill Creative – the online visibility experts. A digital marketing and design agency based in Maidenhead, Berkshire.  The agency covers all aspects of online visibility – covering social media marketing and social media training, user focused website planning and conversion focused website design.

 

For marketing and social media advice – view the Carvill Creative Blog

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ok, so you’ve got your social media accounts set up – and you’ve gone around things the right way, by ensuring that you

1. considered your business objectives when you set them up
2. have been pragmatic, done the research and listening to understand what’s important to your audiences
3. created a content strategy so that you’re ready to create and procure an ongoing pipeline of relevant content
4.   have set up social media listening / keyword tracking so that you can capture and listen in and engage where relevant in a targeted way

Getting your house in order to start off with social media, as you can see from the above, takes a bit of thinking, researching and planning.

However, even making all the right noises with social, you still have to create a great ‘space’ to be able to drive people back to.

Here are 5  key thing to consider that impact your online visibility:

1. Website - What does your website look like? Is it up-to-date, enticing, trust evoking? Is it flexible enough so that if you want to drive people to a specific and targeted landing page for a Twitter offer you can?
2. Blog – Do you have a blog incorporated into your website? Most website designs don’t naturally lend themselves to having the need to constantly update the site. For example – once you’ve got your services, about us, contact info, how it works sections in place – you don’t naturally keep adding pages.  A blog provides you with the perfect vehicle to be able to share relevant and purposeful information consistently. And of course, you ensure that each blog post has ‘Tweet this, share on Facebook etc – share features enabled, to encourage others to share the content.  Good content can really fly.  So be sure to implement the processes to enable your audience to easily pass on what they are reading.  And of course, your blog doesn’t just have to be written content – it can be video too.
3. SEO – Is your website well and truly keyword optimised?  And of course, those keywords don’t only apply to your website – you also need to ensure that you are leveraging them across your social media accounts too. For more about Keywords see this previous blog post here.
4. PPC – Pay Per Click advertising – is another way of gaining online visibility into audiences that you haven’t touched before. Not only can you undertaken PPC advertising on Google – to be found in search results – but you can also undertaken targeted Pay Per Click advertising on Facebook and LinkedIn. The advertising here differs slightly – as rather than bid on keywords so your ads appear when someone types in those specific keywords into a search engine, with social ads, you can target a specific demographic (usually using quite rich and specific information) – so that your ad appears to that target audience when they’re in their social networks.
5. Social Nedia /  Social Networks – And yes, of course, having a presence on social platforms certainly helps your online visibility. Once upon a time, all we had to do was consider our website and how great that looked – now we have a plethora of social media networks to consider too. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, Google+ , FlickR – to name just a few.

Of course, enhances to your online visibility focus around

• Frequency – how often you are ‘live’ on the platforms, how often you blog and share content etc – eg: daily blogging, weekly blogging –versus- an annual newsletter.
• Recency – how recently you last posted. If a Twitter account was last updated in 2009, doesn’t evoke trust and isn’t going to get you much visibility.
• Authenticity – The more authentic and unique the content, the better. People want to hear from you – your opinions, what matters to you, your advice, your viewpoint – and so be sure that you are creating unique content , rather than content that’s ripped from other sites and  isn’t very unique. Add your own viewpoint. But make it yours. Be authentic. It’s those blog posts and videos that really do engage and create advocacy.
• Creativity – Yes, that little word. So simple to say, but so difficult to implement. Get creative, think about how you can engage an audience. This is where video and images and diagrams (quick plug for mine below) come into play. Be creative – can you say it with an image or diagram or video – add that in too. Also be creative with your messaging and how you get audiences to share.

 

I’m sure you’ll agree that Online Visibility is about optimising the many parts of your online presence. Our advice is always to take a ‘joined up’ approach.

I liken not doing so to running a really successful direct mail campaign and the call to action is a telephone number – and when a potential customers calls that number, the sales person they gets through to doesn’t have a clue about the campaign – and takes a message. It’s a huge campaign FAIL.

Just so with doing one part of online visibility – you could run a stonking social media campaign, but if the place you are driving people to is awful and doesn’t engage and deliver on the call to action – then again, it’s a campaign fail.

So – take that joined up approach and ensure you’ve got all your bases effectively covered.

@Michelle Carvill is owner and Marketing Director at Carvill Creative – the online visibility experts. A digital marketing and design agency based in Maidenhead, Berkshire.  The agency covers all aspects of online visibility – covering social media marketing and social media training, user focused website planning and conversion focused website design.

 

For marketing and social media advice – view the Carvill Creative Blog

 

 

 

 

It’s a common story.  A business got enthusiastic about Twitter or Facebook and got someone either in the team or externally to set up the account.  The account has been relatively sleepy – as the business is still figuring out what to use these communication channels for.

Then comes the time when they’re ready to fully embrace social media via Twitter, Facebook, YouTube etc – but what…?, they can’t access the account because the person that set it up has since moved on – and there’s now no way of accessing the set up account details (namely email and password).

Sound familiar?  I hope not. But it’s a business truism that is becoming more and more of a nuisance.

Particularly so when the Twitter handle (@name) or Facebook URL  that’s been secured is either directly the brand name – or brilliantly keyword enabled.

Hence why we advise clients and social media training delegates to follow these simple steps to avoid such a situation:

1)      Create a ‘social’ email address and password convention. Something that is generic to the business.  It doesn’t have to be a person’s personal email address.

2)      Ensure there is a central directory for all login details to your social accounts. It could be aas simple as a spreadsheet which is kept on a central server or in a cloud portal so that more than one person can access it. The account info, whilst it may be managed by one or a few, should be accessible even if those people move on.

3)      It’s good practice to regularly change your password (we suggest every 6-8 weeks) – and so create a password convention which enables you to do this simply – eg: adding a number to the end or letter – and be sure to update the central spreadsheet when passwords change.

4)      Run a test from the central store periodically to check that all the info you’ve got about accessing your accounts is correct. Eg: Try and access your accounts via the info you have stored. If you run into glitches – speak to the relevant people who are in the accounts daily to see if there have been any changes. Be sure to manage that the information you have stored, is up to date and correct.

5)      For LinkedIn, if you have a particular senior team – eg: Partners or Managing Directors, CEOs etc – then it may be worth keeping their login information centrally too.  We came across a situation recently where one of the Partners of a law firm had passed away – and yet their profile was still visible via the Practice.

Take a look at the policy relating to reporting a deceased user via Twitter here – and the other platforms are similar.

Therefore, our advice is ‘get it covered’ – get a central repository of all your account names, passwords and emails etc – and keep it up to date.

@Michelle Carvill is owner and Marketing Director at Carvill Creative – the online visibility experts. A digital marketing and design agency based in Maidenhead, Berkshire.  The agency covers all aspects of online visibility – covering social media marketing and social media training, user focused website planning and conversion focused website design.

 

For marketing and social media advice – view the Carvill Creative Blog

 

It was both a pleasure and a pain to be at the Business 2012 business show earlier this week.

Whether you loved it, hated it – or were too cold for your brain to work to even think straight – I like to look for the positive wherever possible.  

The show itself was much smaller than I anticipated it would be – however, many people that I deal with, both personally and for my client, The Made Simple Group – were there – so it was a great way to touch base and catch up – and in many cases, but a face to a voice.

I also got the opportunity to showcase a 30 minute presentation each day – Harnessing Social Media – promoting different ways businesses could be using social media platforms for business.

The seminar halls in the main showroom held just 50 people – and I was delighted to deliver the course to a packed room, where all seats were taken, people were sitting on the floor – and spilling out of the doorways.

You can see the video of me in action here

And if you want to view the slides – then you can view this video slide show of the presentation.

The venue could have been leveraged so much better – the large seminar halls, which had a larger capacity (200), were largely empty. I read lots of tweets stating that people were delivering presentations to an audience of 3 or 5. Soul destroying.

However, those speakers should take comfort in the fact that it was less so to do with who was speaking but more so to do with the layout of the seminar halls and the lack of accurate information in the Show Guide.

What also surprised me was how ‘salesly and self promoting’ some of the seminars were. I decided to check out a few people delivering social media and marketing seminars – and I have to say – I was really glad I did.  I won’t mention any names, but of the three I attended, the marketing spin was awful. Throughout the seminar the ‘sales pitch’ was teased at – and then of course, came the sales push. Here’s my form – fill it in, time limited etc etc – you get the picture.

I am aware that lead generation is key – and that measuring ROI on such events can be tricky – but for me – it seemed a bit desperate.

I stand proud of the fact that I wasn’t ‘overtly selling’ my services – or the services of Business Training Made Simple – but rather, delivering some genuine shared experience, tips and practical advice as to how people could be harnessing social media in business.

If you haven’t already heard – all Facebook business pages will be upgraded to the Timeline layout on March 30^th.

Now it’s normal procedure for everyone to freak out at changes that Facebook make and we’re sure that this overhaul will not be any different. Mainly because a) no one likes change, especially in the land of Facebook and b) These changes are rather large and will impact the way you use your business page.

The good news is that these changes are by in large for the better and as soon as you get to grips with the alterations you’ll be just as much in love with Facebook as you were before.

The most obvious change is the new layout of the pages – you now have the option to feature a large cover photo that acts like a banner across the top of your page. Ah great – a lovely big space to feature a few calls to actions and all your contact details we hear you say….Well actually, it is a lovely huge space but there are some rather strict rules as to what you can put in this cover photo. They are as follows:

Cover images must be at least 399 pixels wide and may not contain:

• Price or purchase information, such as “40% off” or “Download it at our website”
• Contact information, such as web address, email, mailing address or other information intended for your Page’s About Section
• References to user interface elements, such as Like or Share, or any other Facebook site features
• Calls to action, such as “Get it now” or “Tell your friends”

If you are looking for some inspiration then the following page contains links to some big brands that have already switched to the Timeline and chosen their cover photo https://www.facebook.com/about/pages/

Some other new exciting features include –

Pinning Posts

Pinned posts are posts that admins have chosen to display at the top of their Page. A pinned post always appears in the top left of a Page’s timeline and has a flag in its top-right corner. A post that has been pinned will remain there for 7 days. After that, it’ll return to the date it was posted on the Page’s timeline.

Simply click the pencil icon in the upper-right corner of your Page’s post and then select pin to top in order to ‘pin a post’.

Private Messages

As a business page you used not to be able to send private messages. If you needed to directly contact a fan on Facebook or ask them for an email address everything had to be done publicly on the wall.

This is however, no longer the case. Now you can private message any contact details or private information without posting it to the whole world.

The Downside

So far the only real whinge that seems to be surfacing around the Pages Timeline is that you no longer have the ability to choose a default landing page.

Any apps that you had created for competitions or the like could be switched to feature as your default landing page, meaning that you controlled what visitors saw first. Your timeline wall will now always be the first thing any visitors see and the only real way to direct fans to a specific page will be through the use of ads.

This may sound more drastic than it actually is – Facebook are giving us compensation for this change by allowing us to do things like ‘pin posts’ and highlight status updates. Facebook is still very much a free platform and they do have to monetise somehow, giving their ads a little more power may be frustrating for us but it makes sense.

If you are looking for help with any social media presence then please don’t hesitate to get in touch – Carvill Creative have the expertise to ensure that you are leveraging these platforms successfully.

Enjoy the post… Vikki

 

Carvill Creative – the online visibility experts. A digital marketing agency based in Maidenhead, Berkshire.  Carvill Creative covers all aspects of online visibility – website effectiveness, social media marketing, social media management and social media training, user focused website planning and conversion focused website design.

 

Passionate about Online Visibility – creating an integrated approach across websites, blogs and social media platforms.

Be honest. If you gained some key insights about your products and services, either via some split testing you were doing, online sentiment capture or survey feedback from a significant number of your target audience – just how quickly could you realistically implement a genuine response?

And by response, I don’t mean by paying lip service to the feedback by thanking those that contributed and advising them that their ‘feedback is valued’ and that perhaps in 10 years time you might actually do something about it.

I mean, a genuine response one whereby the audience is advising that “We would rather you did things differently” – and so indeed as an agile organisation, you rework processes, and indeed respond and do things differently.

The response may mean adapting a new system to improve service quality, reviewing your service blueprints. It may mean changing the design or usability features on your website or online commerce platforms, or even product or service feature enhancements.

Ultimately, when you do respond, what it means to your audience, is that you are listening, that you care and that you’re responsive.

The question about how quickly you could respond, isn’t specifically tied directly to the practicalities of implementing the actual fix, but rather, the appetite and desire from the board and culture within the organisation to continuously learn and take on board what matters to their audiences and then ultimately act upon it.

In the social media age, where power is with the people (Citizen Smith would be happy – showing my age here ). And where recommendations from peers, friends, family and even online strangers are valued and steer activity – then speed to response, is key.

Be it a scenario where a complaint is addressed quickly via a social media platform – a speed to response so great, that the complainer is so wowed that they praise your use of social channels to resolve challenges, turning what was a negative customer into an advocate, praising your service recovery tactics (hopefully in the social channels adding amplification to just how wonderful you are).

Or indeed, a scenario where a collective are all disgruntled by a business policy (let’s say a no refunds policy – as this was a true case) that they discuss and collaborate online, enough to assist a brand in reconsidering a business process that’s been in place (and probably upset hundreds of customers) for years.

The key is ‘responding’.  This is nothing new in the world of looking after our customers. It’s an age old mantra. “The customer is always right.” “Deliver exceptional service.” “Listen to the needs of customers.” “We’re a continuous learning organisation.”  Yep – that’s what we’ve been saying for about two decades now.  But really…? Just how many organisations put their actions where their intention is?

And that’s what’s going to play out in social media.  .

Join the conversation with your audience (which is now becoming mainstream) and you are opening yourself up to listening and conversing and ultimately responding.

Very simply, those that listen and respond and wow – will succeed.

Those that bury their heads in the sand and hope it will all go away. Or that simply take too long to deliver solutions around pain points – will falter. After all – those pain point conversations are highly visible – and savvy competitors will be watching and learning. So the Sloths out there need to focus on getting fit for the race.

What say you? Agree or disagree – share your views. Love to hear them.

 

 

Carvill Creative – the online visibility experts. A digital marketing agency based in Maidenhead, Berkshire.  Carvill Creative covers all aspects of online visibility – website effectiveness, social media marketing, social media management and social media training, user focused website planning and conversion focused website design.

 

Passionate about Online Visibility – creating an integrated approach across websites, blogs and social media platforms.

 

 

 

 

 

It’s a fact. We all love a good story.

From being tucked up in our beds as children listening to our parents read us the dark wonders of Hans Christian Anderson and the Brothers Grim through to being gripped on the train by the latest works from Larson, Jo Nesbo, Rose Tremain or Nelson De Mille – the engagement of storytelling is timeless.

Therefore, when considering the creation of content that compels others to share your content, and therefore, amplify your message, what better way to start than to think about the stories you can be creating about experiences around your products and services.

Let’s take a quick look at some storytelling ideas:

Educating others about the range of solutions you provide

You may already have FAQs or user manuals/guides in place – but I suspect reading through them as they currently stand is pretty dry.  So, now I want you to be thinking about how you could create an educational story about your products or services? You could perhaps create a character that is having specific problems, it could be written as a dialogue – or written in agony aunt style – with My Problem – Our Solution. Either way – already, you can see that those suggestions are already a lot warmer and more compelling than a dry list of FAQs that run on for pages.

Sharing real life examples of what’s working for others

Case studies are actually perfect stories. Here you get the opportunity to use real life experiences – from both your perspective, and the client perspective. If the information is sensitive and your client does not want their name exposing, you can just use a generic term eg: Cosmetic Dentist in London – rather than citing their actual company name.

With a case study you can provide detail of what was happening before your involvement, how you managed the project and the outcomes. A start, middle and end – perfect structure for a successful story.  And of course, you can always have a ‘to be continued’ element whereby you keep adding to the story as things progress further.

Sharing expertise and thought leadership

Your opinion and viewpoint can be turned into a story. Let’s say there’s something really topical in the news or trending in social – then you can create a story around your thinking. This enables you to share your personality, your viewpoint and showcase your experience and expertise in a specific area – growing your credibility as a thought leader.

It could be that you interview someone, or have a Q&A session – or undertake a piece of research and build a story around that.  These examples and the above are just a few ways in which you can be considering creating compelling stories to share as part of your communications strategy.

As well as the classic great authors throughout time who have told stories – there are some wonderful digital classics to follow too. Seth Godin is a great story teller.  And his daily blog is always widely shared. For the very reason that he’s sharing compelling and thought provoking and educational stories.

I suppose the key message here is to get creative, don’t hold back on how you can be leveraging storytelling in your marketing and content strategy. After all – you are what you share, so be sure to make that content as compelling as possible.

 

Carvill Creative – the online visibility experts. A digital marketing agency based in Maidenhead, Berkshire.  Carvill Creative covers all aspects of online visibility – website effectiveness, social media marketing, social media management and social media training, user focused website planning and conversion focused website design.

 

Passionate about Online Visibility – creating an integrated approach across websites, blogs and social media platforms.

 

 

In the top right hand side of your Twitter account you can view your followers, following, tweets and Lists.

You may know what the first three mean but just tend to ignore the ‘Lists’ tab But ignore Lists at your peril.

Why would I want to put Tweeters into a list?

Lists are effectively just what they say they are.  Used effectively, they’re  a great way to organise who you are following (and even who you are not following) into groups categorised by you.

You can use your lists to effectively tidy up your feed and group together groups of tweeters and their tweet streams.

Lists allow you to view tweets in separate private feeds and follow targeted, categorised groups of people together.

For example if you were researching ‘cat groomers’ on Twitter and wanted to follow a selection of people that are tweeting and talking about cat grooming – you could find all the cat groomers on Twitter and then group them into a list (note: you don’t have to follow them to put them in your list).

However, having them in one list – allows you to look at that feed which then only features tweets about cat grooming, allowing you to focus your attention on just ‘cat grooming’.

In a separate list you might like to group all your old college or university friends – that way you can simply click on their group and view all of their streamed tweets together. This works especially well if you like to tweet each other a lot– you can block out all other Twitter noise and focus on the conversation going on between the people in your college list.

Another use could be employees – having an employee list means that you can see the conversation going on within your business. Keeps it all neat and tidy and out of the Twitter mainstream noise.

Finding new and relevant people

Another great use for Lists is that they help you to target and find new and useful contacts.

For example, if I’ve been put into a social media training list – then I can search all the other people in that list too – therefore, useful to finding people to connect with that I may not have found otherwise.

How do I create a Twitter list?

It’s quite simple –all you need do is

1. Login to your Twitter
2. Go to the list section, click ‘create new list’.
3. Choose a name for your list, bear in mind SEO when doing this
4. Decide whether you want others to see it then select if you want a public list (open to anyone) or private list (available only to you).
5. Click ‘create list’.
6. Now you can add users and search for people to add to your list – you can do this from your profile page or from any following page. To check the users have been added to the list, just click the person icon and select “Add to list.

Private or Open Lists

When creating your list, as point 4 above, you can decide whether your list is open or private. If open anyone can see that list and it will come up in list directories. (Such as www.Listorious.com – definitely worth searching this great site to check out what lists are already out there).

If Private, then only you see it. This is a great way to monitor your competitors. You could create a competitor list, keep it private and then keep an eye on what they’re all up to without anyone knowing. Sneaky eh!

Are there any limitations to Lists?

As far as we can see, the rules that applied when lists came out in 2009 still apply. Lists can grow to no more than 500 people – and each account can have a max of 20 lists. So plenty of scope there.

Do I want to be on other people’s list?

The simple answer to this question is yes, you do. To be categorised into other peoples’ lists means that you will become more visible to your target audience.

For example, if you are a ‘cat groomer’ – you want to be picked up by someone who’s making lists about cat groomers. You are more likely to get followed by people looking for cat groomers and it’s a verification that you’ve been tagged by others as a ‘cat groomer’ too.

Twitter can become very noisy at times and lists help you to sift through the noise and listen to targeted tweeters who are talking about what you want to hear. By being on someone’s list you are far more likely to be found by the right kind of tweeter.

Found this useful?  Do share the ways you’re using Twitter Lists.

Meanwhile, If you have any other questions about Twitter or Social Media – please get in touch with us on our Facebook wall or email us at vikki@carvillcreative.co.uk.

Carvill Creative – the online visibility experts. A digital marketing agency based in Maidenhead, Berkshire.  Carvill Creative covers all aspects of online visibility – website effectiveness, social media marketing, social media management and social media training, user focused website planning and conversion focused website design.

 

Passionate about Online Visibility – creating an integrated approach across websites, blogs and social media platforms.

 

We’ve  heard and talked about ‘web 2.0’ for a few years now – and the latest tranche of buzzwords appearing on the web now focus around ‘social enterprise 2.0’  or often just ‘Enterprise 2.0’.  

Call it what you will – effectively, the sentiment is about how businesses are embracing ‘social media’ platforms and social interactions with customers, (think intelligent and continuous CRM) to enhance their entire business processes.  From customer experience, through to internal marketing – ‘Enterprise 2.0’ is the description of a truly end-to-end digital customer/brand/business experience.

Reading a recent case study about the impact of Enterprise 2.0 – the CEO of Burberry, Angela Ahrendts, when explaining their customer-centric vision, says it all really:

“The experience would be that a customer would have total access to Burberry, across any device, anywhere. And they would get exactly the same feeling of the brand, feeling of the culture, regardless of when, where, how they were accessing the brand. Everyone now can come into Burberry World the journey and mission that Burberry is on. And for any CEO that is sceptical at all: You have to create a social enterprise today. You have to be totally connected with everyone that touches your brand. If you don’t do that, I don’t know what your business model is in five years.”

That one succinct paragraph seems simple enough. However, if we break down the implications from an organisational perspective – it’s all really rather enormous.  So, let’s do just that…

1.  Total Access  Across Any Device

This means that Burberry needs to provide the same consistent brand experience across a number of outposts. Once upon a time an organisation may have taken the decision to sell via its website and offer online commerce. Now not only can they sell through the website, but via Facebook and potentially other online market places too.

2.  Any Device

Well we know that mobile commerce is on the rise and scheduled to overtake desktop commerce by 2014 (perhaps even sooner) and so organisations have to ensure that the customer experience and purchasing process is seamless on tiny mobile devices too.

3.  Anywhere

If operating in a global market – then organisations have to consider the implications for their outposts and how effective they are in different languages and how they operate and function in other markets. For example, Facebook doesn’t dominate in China and Russia – so embracing local and more targeted platforms is another educational/organisation consideration.

4.  Exactly the same feeling regardless of where, how and when they access

Seems simple enough, brand guidelines should take care of that – right? Wrong. I’ve had firsthand experience of the challenges one Europeanl retailer had when trying to create a concerted message across multiple channels in different European countries. Seemingly simple questions such as;  ‘What can we say?’, ‘Which videos can we share?’, ‘What do we do if someone says something negative about the product/brand/organisation?’ – are just a few that in themselves (and there will be many more) develop into a thick soup of organisational policy, procedure and planning.

Therefore, trying to create the same ‘feeling’ regardless of country, platform and team, and potentially external agencies, is really quite an achievement.

5.  Everyone can come into the Burberry World and experience the journey and mission that Burberry is on.  You have to be totally connected to everyone that touches your brand.

Traditionally, brands and organisations have paid lip service to ‘getting involved with customers’ – the occasional survey, the product focus group, the loyalty schemes, the crm systems.

However, developing a business whereby the brand/organisation is open to consistently undertaking in open and transparent conversations – not one to one, but one to many, is such a game changer.

For most organisations that have managed their messaging exactly as they have wanted to, in total control – this move to ‘joining the conversation on the street’ and getting totally connected to those that touch the brand/business – is one that fills many organisations with absolute dread and fear.

Getting this right takes significant effort. Precision planning, effective execution, agility to act – and a total re-engineering of business model thinking.

 

It will be interesting to see how the next five years pan out. Will Angela Ahrendts be right about the business model of the future? In my humble opinion – I think she will.

What say you?

 

Carvill Creative – the online visibility experts. A digital marketing agency based in Maidenhead, Berkshire.  Carvill Creative covers all aspects of online visibility – website effectiveness, social media marketing, social media management and social media training, user focused website planning and conversion focused website design.

 

Passionate about Online Visibility – creating an integrated approach across websites, blogs and social media platforms.

 

For 2012 we’re also blending some short and sweet video blogs into our mix. Check this latest one focusing on the Importance of Listening – a key component for social media success.

So the greatly anticipated ‘Timeline’ is here folks, get ready to see a barrage of negative status updates from your many Facebook friends complaining about the hefty change.

The Facebook Timeline will be featuring on your profile whether you would like it to or not and the social media gods are giving us 7 days to preview your profile before it goes live – giving you some very much needed time to clean up your profile. 

How the timeline works is like this – The new Facebook profile is divided into two main columns, with a line down the middle representing the passage of time. The passage of time throws up any saved status updates, friendships, photos, events or wall comments – going right back to the birth of your profile. Everything is there and everything can be viewed by your friends until you decide to ‘hide it from your timeline’. We, the Facebook public, are being encouraged to add life events which were not captured by Facebook, in particular those that occurred before users joined the social network.

Whatever you love and whatever story you want to tell, you can add that to your Timeline.

Your profile now also contains a large banner that Facebook are calling your ‘cover photo’ – this is a large image, of your choice, that remains public to everyone on Facebook, including non friends – so choose wisely.

If you’re like many of us at Carvill Creative and have been on Facebook for what seems like forever – I would suggest you put aside a good couple of hours to sift through your Facebook past and ensure you’re happy for it to be regurgitated to your present.

Get ready to click “Hide from Timeline” a fair amount in these hours  You can find this very important button under the “Edit or Remove” pencil icon that appears when you hover your mouse over the top right corner of every Timeline post. You can remove anything on your timeline that you would rather people didn’t see by simply using this button.

Remember, it’s not just  photos that Timeline digs out and highlights— it’s every inappropriate status update you’ve ever posted and every message your so called  university ‘friends’  may have written on your wall at some ungodly hour.

You can also remove or hide posts through your “Activity Log,” which presents everything posted on your profile in a more compact, easy to understand form.

In order to ensure that all your Facebook albums have the privacy settings still intact – visit your albums page and look at the tiny icon on the right hand side of each album. This is where you will have the option to change the privacy on your albums; Facebook explains what each symbol means and should ensure that pictures are only seen by the right people.

If you are concerned about what is appearing publicly on your profile then just opt to, ‘View As …’

On your Facebook Timeline, you should see a little gears icon with an arrow next to it on the far right. Click on it, and then choose the “View As” option. This will let you look at your profile as if you were a stranger or let you pick a specific person to see what is viewable to them on your profile.

If you want to get the timeline now, simply click here ‘ https://www.facebook.com/about/timeline

Or you can wait until you see an announcement at the top of your home page.

 

Carvill Creative – the online visibility experts. A digital marketing agency based in Maidenhead, Berkshire.  Carvill Creative covers all aspects of online visibility – website effectiveness, social media marketing, social media management and social media training, user focused website planning and conversion focused website design.

 

Passionate about Online Visibility – creating an integrated approach across websites, blogs and social media platforms.

 

After reading a brilliant article called ’12 Social Media stats that will rock your world’ – I’ve taken 10 of the most rocking figures and shown you what they could mean for your business.

1.      Over 70% of the internet population are using social networks

• This doesn’t just include Twitter and Facebook and it highlights that social media is now considered mainstream – so don’t ignore it

2.      In Europe 50% of people are a member of just one social network 

• Find out where your customers and clients tend to hang out – is it Facebook? Twitter? Youtube? Or is it all three? Find it and utilise it.     

• Don’t be cliquey in your social networking – incorporate newcomers to the group.  Just because they are new doesn’t mean they’re not good. Remember what Facebook did to MySpace – blew them out of the water!

 4.      Peak usage for Twitter is between 2pm and 6pm

• This is quite a small window so remember these times and ensure that you tweet within them.

 5.      The average Facebook session lasts 37 minutes.

• This is a relatively short time indicating that users have a short attention span when it comes to reading content online. Keep your content – short and interesting.

6.      36% of people have posted about a brand on social networking sites.

• This means that people don’t just talk about their cheese sandwiches and which movie they saw last night on social media. Large proportions are talking about brands – their products, services and customer service. If your customers are talking about your brand then make sure you’re listening.

7.      42% of social media users have actually had a conversation with a brand via social networks.

• This figure indicates that social media users are not afraid to contact brands over social networks. If your brand is on social media do you have the resources in place to ensure that 42% of people are being answered and not ignored?

8.      The average number of Facebook contacts per users is 133 (on Twitter it’s 59)

• While these figures look small remember that ‘people know people’ and that small numbers turns into frighteningly large numbers when the 6 degrees of separation rule demonstrates how friends of friends can balloon your reach. That’s why it’s important to get customer service spot on as bad news travels far and wide.

9.      Only 15% of social media users have been contacted by a company after posting a negative experience.

• This shocking statistic gives you a chance to stand out from the crowd – Listen to your customers and provide a level of customer service that others are failing to offer. 

10.   79% of consumers have passed on a negative experience and 82% will stop doing business with a company because         of a negative experience

• Getting it right clearly matters. Social media can help you turn these potential defectors into your most vocal supporters

There’s no doubt about it – 2012 looks like the year of the Tipping Point for businesses seriously looking to engage with social media in the UK.

I’m not saying that we are anywhere near mainstream adoption, but the ‘it’s just a fad’ response is fast becoming a distant memory for organisations of all sectors, shapes and sizes.

However, how organisations go about adoption is key.

If we view social media platforms as far reaching communication channels, then that poses the question to organisations as to how they can leverage these channels to deliver on business objectives.

Let’s face it – the remit of any marketing strategy is to deliver on the business objectives – to ultimately drive activity to achieve results that make sense for the business.

Therefore, social media isn’t something an organisation does just for the sake of doing social media, (because everyone else is!) but rather to deliver business on objectives – hopefully as part of a well defined marketing strategy.

Business owners, CEOs and marketing directors should be thinking ‘how’ can we plug social media into what we currently do to maximise reach and realise objectives etc. However, probably due to eagerness to get onto the channels, often what we see is businesses diving into social media without any real thinking or planning.

This simple model (adapted from the brilliant book by Olivier Blanchard, Social Media ROI)

Outlines how one should ideally be approaching social media.

So to summarise and get back to the point I started with, plan, listen, analyse before you engage.

 

Carvill Creative – the online visibility experts. A digital marketing agency based in Maidenhead, Berkshire.  Carvill Creative covers all aspects of online visibility – website effectiveness, social media marketing, social media management and social media training, user focused website planning and conversion focused website design.

 

Passionate about Online Visibility – creating an integrated approach across websites, blogs and social media platforms.

The art of retweeting a tweet seems simple enough. On most applications you can simply press the ‘retweet button’ and you’re away…or at least you think you’re away….

However it seems that hundreds of competent tweeters get this simple action very wrong.

In the midst of tweeting excitement, many people tend to forget that they need to tailor the tweet in order to include the entire tweet content plus your ‘RT @handle’.

If you fail to amend your tweet by condensing a few letters or emitting a word or two – you are in great danger of going over your 140 characters and therefore missing out your vital ingredient – your hyperlink.

If you are using Twitter on your android or iphone – it’s less easy to commit this crime. The Twitter app on smartphone really dumbs things down for us and we are given the option to simply retweet the tweet as it is – ‘no RT @handle’ needed. Twitter.com actually allows for us to do this as well.

However if you are a Hootsuite user, for example, things aren’t so simple. You just need to remember to amend the tweet and allow enough character space to write ‘RT @handle’ and then include all the tweet content. It’s also worth noting that most tweets will need some editing as the majority of tweets take up the required character space.

When you hit that retweet button in Hootsuite – it very kindly takes the tweet for you and adds the ‘RT @handle’ in front of your tweet  -  however, that doesn’t mean to say that the whole message will now fit into 140 characters. If you just then hit send – you’ve most probably chopped off the end of your tweet and therefore your link, which is a waste of time for everyone involved!

We hope this small complaint on our part will help to stop people getting over excited with their retweeting and delivering half messages. Please help to spread the word by sharing on this blog  – in the hope to eradicate retweeting errors.

Carvill Creative – the online visibility experts. A digital marketing agency based in Maidenhead, Berkshire.  Carvill Creative covers all aspects of online visibility – website effectiveness, social media marketing, social media management and social media training, user focused website planning and conversion focused website design.

 

Passionate about Online Visibility – creating an integrated approach across websites, blogs and social media platforms.