The Es and Ease of SoMe

When social media first became popular, young people mostly used it to keep up with their friends. These days, millions of people, young and old—and businesses—have found that social media is useful for many different things: getting in touch with a myriad of people, transferring information, reviewing products and businesses, promoting products and tv/radio shows, talking politics, inviting people to events, sharing pictures with family who are far away, etc. As the uses for social media morph, we adapt and go with the flow, or we risk being left behind in a socially inter-connected world that no one could have dreamed of five years ago.

The value of social media for professional use is that it can take a business from a stale building that sells products to one that is virtually connected to every customer. Personal connections = increased loyalty and sales.

I’m a SoMe junkie and have created strategies and written tweets for a couple of organizations. While I wouldn’t call myself an expert at it, I keep getting asked to help people with their Twitter feeds. Hence, the idea for this guide came to me—nevertheless, while I was a little disconnected on vacation at the beach.

Whether you’re just getting started with social media (SoMe) or if you’ve been at it awhile, but not getting the results you want—this guide will help you build a loyal following.

The E’s of SoMe:

• Education—Share knowledge with your followers. Share stories and interesting tidbits. Whatever makes for interesting conversation (as that is what you’re trying to instigate) is a good place to start. For instance, if you are a floral shop, you may tweet the significance of, or an interesting story about, different flowers throughout the year—maybe coincide it with holidays and commemorations.
• Expertise—If you hold expertise in any field, you should share it. What better way to help others and promote yourself and your business. Sharing interesting knowledge gets people to click on your website. For instance: if you are a gardener who has a Twitter or Facebook account, share a short tip (you only have 140 characters on Twitter) & include a shortened link to your website in your post. If you’ve made the tip interesting enough, your followers will click on it, which takes them to your website to read the rest of the story. Once they are at your website, hopefully, it will be engaging as well, and they’ll stick around for a while, maybe even become a customer.
• Experience—Everybody is looking for guidance in this world. If you have experience in something, by all means, share it. This can include hotel or TV or product reviews. In the Twitter world, it is no telling who may run across your experience once you’ve shared it in cyberspace. If they feel your experience is interesting, they will share it with their followers.
• Entertain—Everyone wants and needs to laugh more. And who better to laugh at than oneself? If you give people a chuckle or two, they will feel more connected to you.
• Engage—Give your followers a reason to click, retweet, favorite (a verb), or reply to what you tweeted. Those are the goals. You may want to ask a question, take a survey, give something away for free, promote a coupon, ask your followers to retweet a promo, etc. Be creative.
• Enliven—Kick it up a notch! Create buzz! One time I was at a conference and I was following a users’ group. They tweeted for us to come by their booth and give them the secret word (which they gave in the tweet) to receive a free pack of coffee and for the chance to win an espresso machine. The place was buzzing with that small promo act! [ and “Yours truly” won the espresso machine!]
• Enlighten—If you’re a Christian, share your faith or Bible verses. I work with a couple of ministries and you never quite know what people are going through, but we know that God’s Word never returns void. You can also enlighten people with thoughtful quotes. Other people who don’t currently follow you may find you and start following you if they are searching for a specific term you use and like what they see or if you’ve touched them in some way.
• Emigrate—You may not feel comfortable using SoMe because you’re used to the old way of doing business. You may not feel like “revealing” yourself through SoMe at first—and I’m not saying that you should reveal private things—but as you migrate from overused business practices, you will gain a following of people who will be more loyal “citizens” than you ever dreamed. People want the “insider’s view”.
• Embody personal image/information—This is especially true if you are a public figure (or hope to be one some day). I love following my favorite music artists, as I learn personal info about them and always know where they are playing and how they feel about the crowds, etc.
• Encourage—I recently heard someone say that “no one can get enough encouragement”. Is that ever true! Encourage your followers.

The Ease of SoMe:

• Mix-it-Up—Please don’t publish the same tweet over and over again. You will lose followers very quickly. Be fresh, new, bold, and exciting all the time. I follow a radio show that basically posted the same tweet each day—that his show was getting ready to start and this is the topic of the day. This was stale and people will either unfollow or glance over what you’re posting. He finally realized he needed to give his followers a reason to tune in. Say the subject first, or announce who’s going to be on the show, or ask a stirring question.
• Write Stimulating Headlines—I think of tweeting as writing headlines, which is a bit of an art. I bet if you tried hard, you could think of a couple of catchy newspaper or magazine headlines you’ve never forgotten. Think of SoMe this way: You only have seconds to get people’s attention enough to get them to click or engage.
• Advanced—Incorporate trending Twitter hash tags occasionally. This could potentially bring new followers, as people read the Twitter trending hash tags.
• Re-post good things your followers have said about you (occasionally).
• Reply to your followers—either corporately or privately. Listen to and answer your followers when they try to contact you via social media. It’s not just a one-way conversation, with you dispersing information all the time. It’s a two-way communication channel, so please use it as such.
• Create Clever Posts. But if you can’t be “clever” on a given day, don’t let that stop you from posting something.
• Every now and then, scour Twitter for what other people have said about you. Some of it may be Tweet-worthy.
• There is no need to re-write your Twitter name in your post. That just takes up space and is redundant as people reading your feed already see your name.
• To complete or not complete—There are two schools of thought on this one: Some think that when you create a tweet that you should stop the thought before it’s complete so that the reader will click your link and continue reading. To me, this is ludicrous and highly annoying. I hardly ever follow those links. I feel that one should complete their thought, even if it causes them to abbreviate and shorten. I have been known to go to a 2^nd tweet using the ellipsis, but I have to be incredibly interested in your topic to click on an incomplete thought.
• Set up a schedule of tweets, using a service to send those that are “after hours” and on weekends. I use HootSuite because it gives me a dashboard where I can see and update all my SoMe feeds at once, either on a computer or smart phone. I can also schedule tweets to post later and it has link-shorteners for when I post a web page.
• Set up a schedule that makes sense. I was tweeting for a ministry that sent a tweet every morning at 9 am for a morning devotional. I was like, “That’s too late to send out a devotional tweet. We should change it to 6 am.” So we did, and it was a good move.
• When you have a campaign in full swing, update your followers and keep them engaged while it’s happening. People like to feel involved.
• There are many schools of thought as to how many tweets are enough for one day. After careful study, we decided that no more than five per day. Otherwise you run the risk of wearing out your followers and they will unfollow you in a heartbeat. On the other hand, if you never update, people may go through their list of who they’re following and say, “They never post anything. I believe I’ll unfollow them.”
• Try tweeting at different times of the day. I have found that people don’t read posts as much throughout the day (probably because they’re at work)—but if you tweet in the morning, “after work”, at night, and on the weekend (especially Sunday evening), you have a much better rate of success.
• Be mysterious from time-to-time. Once on my personal Twitter feed, I acted as if I had become and alien on a perfect planet. I was doing that as a way to say, “What if I lived like I’m supposed to—only focus on beauty, saying all positive things, etc.” My experiment didn’t last long, but I got some interesting questions and feedback.
• Remember that people may be reading your tweets, even if they aren’t responding, retweeting, etc.

Happy Tweeting!

(I originally wrote this post in 2011, but never published it. While the concepts are still true, some of the data may be outdated.)