The Role of Metrics in Social Media Campaigns
Seeing the number of your social media fans (Facebook), followers (Twitter) or subscribers (YouTube) grow feels good. But is that an accurate
measurement of the effectiveness of your social media campaigns? Definitely, not! That’s why the biggest challenge that most of the small businesses face today is how to accurately measure the ROI of a social media strategy. Unless and until you know the goals (in regard with your larger sales and marketing strategy) and select the right metrics to focus on, it’s impossible to gauge where your social media campaigns are actually headed.
Before you take a plunge into measuring the ROI of your social media efforts, it’s vital to be clear about what you’re looking to achieve. Different social media campaigns have different purposes or goals. When you’re aware of your ultimate goals, you’ll also find it easy to choose the most appropriate social media channels to focus on.
Do you want your social media fans to engage with your brand? Do you want them to share your content? Do you want them to purchase your products? Do you want them to spread the word about your brand? There are many other goals that you may want to fulfill by launching a social media marketing campaign. The more clarity of goals you have, the better metrics you can select to measure the ROI of your campaigns. As a result, this strategic approach also enables you to modify your campaigns as required.
Measuring the ROI
Broadly speaking, there are two ways to measure the ROI of your social media strategy. There are general metrics that you can use to measure the degree of interaction for your social media pages. Second, there are campaign-focused metrics that you can use to find out whether you’re achieving your larger sales and marketing goals. General metrics relate to networking or building a community of followers whereas campaign-focused metrics are about conversion.
General metrics for a social media campaigns may include ‘likes’, ‘fans’ ‘followers’, ‘shares’, ‘comments’, ‘replies’ etc. By focusing on these metrics, you’ll find out whether your fans are followers are interacting. As a result, you’ll be able to learn the significance of your social network community.
Examples of campaign-focused metrics or goal-based metrics would include traffic to your website or blog, rate of subscription, sales of products and online lead generation among others. If your goal is to drive traffic, you can track URL shares and the rate of click-throughs. To dig out further, you can try to find out what visitors actually do or how they respond once they are on your site. This type of analysis can help you to improve the rate of conversion.
What’s the meaning of having 10,000 Twitter followers if your business objective is to generate online leads? That’s exactly why there’s a sea of difference between general metrics and campaign-based metrics. It’s always important to focus on those metrics that align with your large business goals. If you fail to select appropriate metrics to track, you can never get the maximum out of a social media marketing campaign. So, focus on the right metrics!
Network-by-Network Analysis
Apart from measuring the effort on all your social networks on an aggregate basis, you should also remember to get the picture of how you’re doing with each of the networks you’re using. A network-by-network analysis will help you identify which social platforms are most fulfilling your goals. And then you can invest most of your money and time on those networks that bring you the best results.
Have you chosen the right metrics to focus on? Please feel free to share your thoughts and opinions.
Are You Sure Your Customers Are Social?
How much do your customers really use social media? This seems to be a question that’s asked often and answered often. You might ask this question if you’re just starting out in a new industry or maybe you’ve been in your industry a while but just don’t have a clue where to start online. Lack of knowledge, disconnect with data and not knowing who your customers are can cause issues when trying to figure out how social your customers are.
The first step in figuring out how social your customers are is research. Turn your lack of knowledge into expertise just by putting in the research. Conduct social listening exercises across multiple platforms to get started. Here are some suggested social listening exercises to help you gain the social insight you need into your industry.
Site Search
Monitor the large social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest and even MySpace. Use the search functionalities of each of these sites. Search for keywords related to your products or services. Who is talking about your products and services? Are any of these users very influential – you can figure this out by going to their profile and looking at how many friends they have and how active they are.
Additionally, try typing in frequently asked questions into the search bar. Are there users asking those questions? Make note of how regularly messages are sent out and/or responded to. This can help you figure out how social your customers are too.
Competitors
Search for competitors brand pages. You can gain a lot of insight by seeing just how other brands are using social media. How active are their fans? Do fans comment, “like”, “share” and post regularly? Do they foster a sense of community on their pages? Make note of how your competitors are using social media marketing.
Forums
Use a search engine to find discussion boards and forums. How regularly are people posting, answering and sharing? The conversations in forums and on discussion boards can show you how often your customers feel compelled to post about industry related topics.
Blogs & Industry News
Use a search engine to find industry blogs and websites. Does the site allow contributors? How many bloggers write for the site and how active are they on social media? Make note of how regularly posts are updated, commented on and responded to. This can help you see exact how social your customers are.
With each of the listening exercises above you’ll gain great insight into the social activities of your prospects. In addition to the research you put forth through social listening, try looking at studies put together by by Forrester, Marketing Hub, Pingdom, and others. Some of these studies will help you identify how social certain demographic groups are.
Additionally, you can get insider tips from people within your own industry. Search Google for articles about marketing to your industry through social media. Or follow experts like Jay Baer who wrote this great blog post, “4 Detective Tricks to Find Your Customers in Social Media”.
Hopefully after a few of these exercises you’ll start to get a better grip on exactly how social your customers are. Don’t forget to go back and conduct these exercises often – the social activities of your customers change over time.
What sites do you currently use to conduct social listening?
4 Tips to Improve Your Social Media Calendar
Are you using a social media calendar to keep you organized? Many experts suggest utilizing a social media calendar to make your time more efficient and to keep things consistent. Similar to an editorial calendar, a social media calendar lays out a rough sketch of what your week, month and sometimes year will look like as far as messaging and interaction through social channels goes. Lisa Buyer gives a great overview of what a social media calendar is on SearchEngineWatch.com if you’re interested in learning more.
In addition to Lisa’s great suggestions I wanted to share a few tips of my own to help you improve efficiency and consistency. Here are four of them:
Be Consistent and Use Data
When many people are responsible for monitoring and responding via social channels for a brand, consistency can sometimes fall to the way side. Look back at your own brand’s messages from the last month. Is there consistency, relevancy and organization? Even the most well thought out social media plans can get misaligned.
Examine the messages you and your team sent out in the past month and look for consistency. Make changes to your processes and add information to your social media calendar to help with consistency as needed. Pre-populated messages or a bank of messages can at times aid in keeping things consistent. Tweets and posts about holidays, days of remembrance, for special promotions you know about in advance, to re-promote website content or even in response to commonly asked questions are great ideas for a bank of messages. These evergreen social messages can be used and improved to fit the need at the time.
I often look at the past month’s messages at a whole when I’m preparing a month end report and analyzing any of the data available to me: website analytics, Facebook Insights, click through rates via bit.ly, social search numbers from sites like Topsy, etc… Looking at both of these areas will help you to identify gaps in consistency as well as gaps in strategy or messaging style. Overtime you’ll be able to compare this information month over month and year over year to see trends. What messaging style is working and which isn’t? What time of day and time is best? This information can be added to your social media calendar.
Avoid the Social Media Time Suck & Use Tools To Help You
Inevitably social media can be a huge time suck. When you’re looking at data, examining messaging, engaging with customers or prospects…the hours just fly by. That’s why it’s important to keep yourself on track and avoid interruptions when working on specific tasks. Close your e-mail, avoid distractions at the office and stay aware of the time.
Just being aware can help you to be more efficient. Add estimated time for tasks into your social media calendar. Gauge consistency of time with your teams work. When it comes down to asking if there is return on this social media investment, you’ll at the very least have some raw data to work with that shows the effort put forth. Additionally, if you’re managing a team you can instruct changes to processes.
Last but certainly not least, my suggestion to you is: use tools! If you aren’t already using a few tools in your social media arsenal then you should start. I’m a huge fan of Hootsuite and enjoy their pro account platform – to me it’s worth the spend. Monitoring keywords, mentions and scheduling tweets on occasion (yes I admit I do this) are just a few ways the platform can help. Additionally Tweetdeck and Seesmic are platforms commonly suggested.
A tool that can be used to help with your social media calendar is suggested for users who are on social media to promote their blogs. If you have a WordPress website you can add the Editorial Calendar for WordPress plugin. Here a writer discusses how using this type of plugin can help improve efficiencies.
Do you have additional tips to help improve a social media calendar?
How to Find Your Site Mentions on Social Networks
Are you ever curiuos about your standings on social networks? See things like who has been sharing your content, how many shares / votes it has received, and more with the following URLs or Google search queries. Just replace domain.com with your domain!
There are two ways you can see your tweets on Twitter. The first is to perform a real time search on Twitter itself using the following URL (be sure to use the dropdown to see All tweets). Use the Save this search button to save it to your Twitter profile or create a column for this search in HootSuite / Tweetdeck.
https://twitter.com/search?q=%domain.com%22
The second is to use Topsy.com, which will show you the tweet count next to results from your domain. Change the time range to see tweets from the past hour to all time, and click on the tweet count of a particular post will let you see who has tweeted it.
http://topsy.com/s?q=domain.com
Facebook search is a bit trickier – using their search bar, you will only get results when someone has typed your domain.com in the comment of their share, and only within the last 30 days. If you want to see a sampling of who is sharing your posts, try the following on Google.
site:facebook.com inurl:posts “domain.com”
Google+
When you search using Google+, you will get mentions of links from your domain that have been shared as well as anyone who has mentioned your domain in their comments.
https://plus.google.com/s/domain.com/posts
Topsy also has a search that will show the number of times a post has been shared on Google+. Just like the Twitter results, you can change the time range to see tweets from the past hour to all time, and click on the tweet count of a particular post will let you see who has tweeted it.
http://plus.topsy.com/s/domain.com
You can search domain mentions on LinkedIn using the following URL. While it might not be that exciting because a lot of people feed their Twitter into their LinkedIn profile, the nice part is you can use the left side options to see people who tweet your content by location, company, industry, connections, and more. It may actually be a great way to meet new people that you can connect with – just check the box next to 3rd + Everyone under Network!
http://www.linkedin.com/signal/?type=updates&keywords=domain.com
YouTube
If you’ve tagged a lot of your videos with your link, these will come up as well. But I did find that if you search for your domain, you might find some people who have mentioned or referenced it in their videos.
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=”domain.com”
StumbleUpon
There were two ways to find out which pages from your site have been stumbled. The first was the long way which will allow you to use the Stumble button to go through pages from your domain on the StumbleUpon network, one by one. When I last tried this, I got a message that SU was “testing” some new feature and it didn’t work like it was supposed to. Not sure if that is a temporary thing or not.
http://www.stumbleupon.com/to/stumble/stumblethru:domain.com
As a substitute, you can use this Google search instead.
site:www.stumbleupon.com/url/domain.com/
Delicious
This URL will show you the pages from your domain that have been bookmarked by users on Delicious, the number of times each page has been saved, and the tags / descriptions that people have added.
http://delicious.com/search?p=domain.com
Digg
This URL will show you any pages dugg from your domain, including vote counts.
http://digg.com/search?q=site:domain.com
The results may not always be pleasant with this network, but using this URL will help you find any mentions of your domain on Reddit.
http://www.reddit.com/domain/domain.com/
BizSugar
BizSugar is a great network for business news, so if your site has great business content, it may have ended up here. See which pages have been sugared using this URL!
http://www.bizsugar.com/search/domain.com
Pinterest is the latest and greatest social bookmarking site that allows you to create vision boards with images on the web (hint: you should optimize for it). This URL will let you see if any photos from your domain have been pinned by Pinterest users.
http://pinterest.com/source/domain.com/
Do you keep up with your site mentions on social media or bookmarking networks? What other ones do you follow?
How to Manage an Effective Social Media Campaign
Social media marketing can be a daunting task which takes time away from other important responsibilities. This is especially the case for small business owners who don’t have the staffing power to fully maximize the benefits of social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Linked In. Buzz, etc.) with regard to their online marketing strategy. Such benefits include increased brand awareness, networking, customer interaction which can turn leads into sales.
- Formulate a strategy. According to Diana Huff, a leading Internet Marketing expert, there are strategies that small business owners can implement that will help them manage their social media campaigns effectively and save time.
Before interacting on Facebook or Twitter, know why you wish to maintain a presence on each site. Without a strategy you will not be able to market your product or service effectively. The following are some key questions to ask as your create your online strategy:
- What is your company’s marketing objective?
- What results do you wish to achieve?
- How will success be measured?
- Who on your team will be responsible for monitoring your firm’s online presence and interacting with prospects and customers?
- How much time will this employee be able to devote exclusively to social media?
- Which of the platforms are best for your business?
- Start slowly with one platform. Many small business owners mistakenly believe that they must jump into all social media platforms at one time. This is simply not the case. You can start with any of the sites and once comfortable on that site, build a presence on the others. It is also fine to elect not to participate in some sites at all. What is most important is that you develop a consistent presence on those sites you do choose to use. It does not good to develop a page or profile, post a couple of comments and then disappear. It takes time to develop a following but well worth the effort once you recognize the viral effect of online marketing.
- Set a social media schedule. Tim Ferriss, author of the 4 hour Work Week, includes much discussion on how to manage email overload. One of his suggestions is to simply stop checking it 50 times per day. The same advice can be followed with regard to social media. Schedule a set period of time each day when you will post a question for your Facebook fans, post a comment to your LinkedIn group, check your Google feed, or post and article to your company blog. As per Diana Huff, setting aside as little as 30 minutes twice per week should suffice for carrying out each of these tasks. Grouping your social media time in this way lessens the anxiety associated with building a social media presence.
- Use tools to help manage multiple platforms. If you have several employees posting to the sites or if you are an Internet marketer with several accounts, it helps to use such tools as HootSuite or TweekDeck. These tools shorten your URL and eliminate the need to log in and out to multiple platforms
- Outsource if necessary. While there is much discussion on the ethics of ghost-blogging, it is a fact that many small companies are not able to manage their social media campaigns effectively while trying to grow their business. In light of this, hiring ghostwriters is a smart move when trying to balance the competing needs of your firm.
An effective social media campaign is managed in the same way as any marketing effort: with a strategy in place based on your business model and objectives.
Facebook Share vs. Facebook Like Button
Sure, the Facebook Share button is no longer officially available from Facebook. But that doesn’t stop sites from finding the code and using it. The question is – why are people (like myself) still using it and how does it affect your actual “like” count?
Customizing Shares with the Facebook Share Button
The main reason I still use the Facebook Share button on my blog over the Facebook Like button is for the way it works. When you click on the Facebook Share button, you will get the chance to do the following.
- Change the privacy of your shared post to Public, Friends, Custom, or only to be shown to specific lists.
- Post the share on your own timeline, on a friend’s timeline, in a group, on your page, or in a private message.
- Add a comment on why you are sharing the post.
- Change the thumbnail to one you like the best.
- Click on the title and description of the link and edit it to suit your needs.
When you click on the Facebook Like button, however, you only get the chance to add a comment.
It will then automatically show up on your Timeline as a public post with the thumbnail Facebook chooses and the default title and description.
The tradeoff with using the Facebook Share button over the Like button is that the people who don’t care how the post appears on their profile might be miffed at the fact they need to take the extra steps to customizing the post before it goes on their profile. You can satisfy everyone’s needs by placing both buttons on your website, but then you have less room to add other social sharing buttons. Since I have mine in a neat row at the top of posts, I would have to trade off my LinkedIn, Google+, or Buffer button.
Counting Shares vs. Likes
The next question about the Facebook Share button is what the difference is when counting shares vs. likes. I had the same question, so I used the links.getStats console for Facebook developers which you can only use if you have developed an app on Facebook. I only use the Share button on my blog posts, so I got the stats for one of my most popular Facebook posts on the new Timeline profile.
It shows the total count of Facebook shares as 467, Likes as 294, and comments as 276. Whenever I plug my post’s URL into the Like button code box, I get a total of 1,037 likes.
This means that whenever someone shares, likes or comments on your post on Facebook that it all will be totaled up as likes toward your post!
Getting the Code
Before adding the Facebook Share button, I will give you this disclaimer – although it is working now, it might not be for long since Facebook has redirected the page for their Share button to the Like button. If you choose to use it until it stops functioning, you can do so by placing the following code into your website’s template.
<a name="fb_share" type="button_count" href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php">Share</a><script src="http://static.ak.fbcdn.net/connect.php/js/FB.Share" type="text/javascript">
If you want the code for the Facebook Like button instead, you can get it via the configuration tool on the Like button plugins page.
Do you use the Facebook Share or Facebook Like button? Which one do you prefer using when going to someone else’s site? Please share your thoughts in the comments!
4 Ways to Use LinkedIn to Promote Your Website
Just about anyone who’s anyone in the world of business is on LinkedIn. The site has grown exponentially to become the largest social networking site for professionals. Its widespread popularity can be largely attributed to the variety of ways in which users can connect with others and market themselves as well as their businesses.
There is a long list of ways that you can use LinkedIn to promote your website and at the same time help you build the authority of your site. You can’t go wrong with the basics, however. The following list will outline the most effective ways in which you can use LinkedIn for these dual purposes.
Personal & Professional Profile
When creating your personal profile, be sure to customize the three spaces provided for links to your website, blog and personal site. Don’t just leave the default text that reads “Blog.” Instead, plug a relevant keyword to describe your website instead! “Inbound Marketing Blog” is a much better choice than simply “Blog”. A few other tips for your profile from this post about optimizing your social profiles:
- Make sure you use your name as the filename for your profile image – LinkedIn sets it as the alt tag.
- Job titles are H3s, so be sure to optimize them as much as you can.
- Add targeted keywords to your headline, summary, specialties and skills sections as well.
Secondly, set up your company profile. Fill out all the available fields for your company, including your URL, in order to use LinkedIn to promote your website.
Use LinkedIn Answers
Build your credibility and authority by answering LinkedIn questions that relate to your industry. This one is simple: search for questions within your field of knowledge and share your expertise. The result? An instant increase in your brand credibility, which leads to more clicks through to your website and an opportunity to drop a link when appropriate.
Don’t Forget Your Status Messages
Update your status messages occasionally. While it’s important not to overuse this feature, you should do your best to avoid under using it as well! Posting occasional updates about your latest projects is a great way to increase your site visitors and spark interest for your company and website.
Ask For Recommendations
If you have some strong relationships through your contacts on LinkedIn, getting a professional recommendation can be another great way to boost your business and promote your website. Recommendations work in much the same way as testimonials, with the added bonus of visibility across the site! During this process take the time to also ask those individuals to link to your site from theirs, or ask to use recommendations on your own website as testimonials.
While there are several more ways to use LinkedIn to promote your website, this list offers a great start. Just one of the many factors involved in building your websites influence, using LinkedIn can help whether you’re a B2B or B2C company. Check out the other ways to build authority in the Infographic located below!
How do you use LinkedIn to build your sites authority and promote your website?
Ramping Up During the Holidays – Marketing on Foursquare
There are so many marketing options available for brands that it’s especially hard during the holidays to decide where your efforts should go. After reading a blog post on B2B marketing on Foursquare I thought about options for any brands that might be looking to use Foursquare this holiday season. With a bit of creativity there are many things you try out this holiday season.
Offer a Special
Increased foot traffic in malls or shopping plazas can mean more people near your business. By offering a special on Foursquare you stand a chance of having someone within range of your business visit your location, check in, share their location with friends, and of course possibly purchasing something to get the discount.
It’s surprising to see that so many businesses offer specials to their customers through varies medias but don’t put that same exact special on Foursquare. During this time of year especially, specials and discounts can get more traffic into your doors. It doesn’t take much to set up on Foursquare and to let your staff know about the special.
Make One-On-One Connections
If someone is checking into your business shouldn’t you say thank you? Having someone on staff monitor check-ins at your location during the holidays can help give an added personal feel to the experience at your business for a customer. Try welcoming them while at the store, offering assistance, or asking how their experience was.
Don’t Forget the Mayor
Have a few regular customers battling it out to become mayor of your establishment? Continue the battle across multiple platforms and create a contest over the holidays on Foursquare, Twitter and Facebook. This can help spark others to get in on the game, coming back to your establishment often. Have a leader board posted at your location and keep tally. Aren’t in the mood for a game? Simply offer a discount to the mayor and thank them for their patronage – few businesses do it.
Holiday Markets
Craft and art fairs, bizarres, and holiday markets are all great places to sell your wares during the holidays. Monitoring the users who check into the event and directing them to your booth is easy to do through the use of Foursquare and other social media platforms. But why stop there? Try connecting with people before they go to the event by setting up a search on Twitter, or connecting with them afterwards too. Use this opportunity to help build your client base to take you through the new year.
Offer After-Holiday Discounts
By setting up a Twitter search of all the mentions of your brand name or store on Twitter, you can be notified when someone checks into your store or mentions your brand (even if they aren’t using Foursquare). Not only should you thank them for checking in but offer them a discount code (via DM) for the next time they stop in. You have the possibility of turning that one time sale or one time visit into more. Don’t forget – it’s not just about Black Friday deals. Customers are likely to appreciate a non-black Friday deal too, so get them to come back into your store after the holiday rush.
B2B
Discussed in the post I mentioned previously, B2B marketing can be done using Foursquare quite easily. Most of the suggestions offered will require businesses to allow their employees to use social media. Limiting employee social media usage is a trend that has been decreasing over recent years. A recent “Robert Half Technology” study shows social media permitted in the workplace for business purposes becoming more common. If you happen to be in a B2B market and allow your employees to use social media try out this suggestion to use Foursquare to market your brand.
Events - Foursquare can help you promote holiday and company events, and pre-buzz through other social channels can help as well. Igniting conversation about your brands activities, involvement in the community, or camaraderie can sometimes boost sales. If you are hosting a holiday party set up an event and have your staff tweet, Facebook, and check-in on Foursquare. Encourage them to take pictures too.
These are just a few of the ways you can use Foursquare this holiday season. Have more to add? Feel free – in the comments below!
*Update*
Andy at SmartBlogs.com wrote a great post about how to use Foursquare for word-of-mouth campaigns. Check it out!
Yo Sushi – Don’t Yo Care About Yo Customers?
Business and Social Media – How Not to Manage Your Campaign
Up until recently, Yo Sushi was one of my favourite restaurants. Yes, I know, there’s better Sushi out there, but I live in Nottingham and as it goes, we’re pretty limited in choice when it comes to Japanese fare.
Unfortunately, as the dedicated Yo Sushi lover I am, I made the mistake of being roped in by Yo’s ‘Super Sumo Sunday’ all-you-can-eat deal.
I’ve always been a sucker for all-you-can-eat restaurants yet this time; I was well and truly suckered.
Yo Sushi charges £18.50 a head for their ‘Super Sumo Sunday’ deal. Sounds pretty reasonable at first, when you consider how quickly the cost of those little coloured plates adds up.
Yet this deal comes with rules. You have to finish everything on your plate (fair enough, I hate waste too), you have two hours in which to ‘enjoy the deal’ and most importantly – you can’t make orders.
So, you are stuck with what’s on the belt. And on this occasion; it wasn’t much.
Seriously, if I ever see edamame beans or fish stick rolls again it will be too soon.
Granted, you were allowed to make ‘requests’ for food to appear on the belt but seeing as I was made to feel like a naughty child for doing so, I instead waited patiently for something new and interesting to roll round.
And guess what – it didn’t. Those two hours can pass surprisingly quickly when you’re splitting your time between staring at the belt; just in-case you might miss something good, and checking the clock to see how long you have left to actually grab and eat something good.
And these tense two hours came in at just over £40 for two, with a drink each, for an evening meal on a Sunday.
Now – I’ll get to the point.
Following Yo Sushi boasting about the continuation of Super Sumo Sunday’s on their Facebook page, I took the opportunity to air my views.
I posted a not entirely impolite summary of my experience and waited patiently for their response.
And waited, and waited.
Yo Sushi kindly took the time to respond to another ‘fan’ who had posted excitedly about the opening of a new branch. They even addressed her by name. Yet I went ignored.
Yet shortly after, I wasn’t the only person expressing my dissatisfaction. Others had joined in too, so I posted again.
Finally, I got a response. And I must say; I wasn’t pleased.
Apparently they ‘appreciate my thoughts and feedback’; yet they don’t acknowledge me as a person and they don’t mention my complaint.
In fact, this is one of the most corporate, impersonal and simply insincere attempts at social media I’ve seen yet.
Anyone who knows anything about social media knows that when you place your company in the ‘social sphere’ you are setting yourself up for both good and bad publicity.
And thus, you have to handle this publicity properly.
Speak to the dishevelled customer as an individual. Demonstrate that you care about their complaint and want to ensure the company resolves the issue for the future.
Up until this point, I had always quite admired Yo’s social efforts. Yet this is the first time I have seen them tested. And they failed – badly.
I won’t lie – I did have a slight hope that my complaint might lead to the offer of a free meal. I had of course wasted over £40 on some of the cheapest food they have available.
Yet what I wanted most was a response that made it clear Yo Sushi genuinely took my complaint on board and would take steps to ensure their Super Sumo Sunday deals were more satisfactory in future.
But I got neither.
Instead, they have not only ensured that myself and my friends will never take Yo Sushi up on the offer of this ‘deal’ again, but they have left me with a sour taste in my mouth and an uneasy feeling towards Yo Sushi in general.
Businesses take note; Yo Sushi’s handling of this matter has lost them a regular customer.
Remember that this is the digital age, and people won’t just be talking about you down the local pub with friends.
It’s a tough world out there and when you want to succeed in business, it’s not purely about profit – it’s about pleasing your customers too.
And I’m sorry to say, but right now, Yo Sushi is not pleasing this one.
Yo Sushi –Yo clearly don’t care about yo customers.
Has Force-feeding Your Twitter Account Made You Irrelevant?
It seems that nearly everyday I see more and more of the Twitter accounts I follow becoming basically one force-fed tweet after another. There are numerous programs available that allow users to link to various RSS feeds, schedule tweets and more recently a program to basically allow you to gather a tribe of your friends together to agree to auto-post all of their blogs to your personal twitter account in exchange for their agreement to allow you to do the same.
To see these posts come through my Twitter stream from people I respected in the social media community is to be honest, a bit disheartening. While I know that these services give users the ability to moderate posts before they go out, it’s evident that moderation is the last thing on anyone’s mind. It’s all about the automation, just spit ‘em out…1…2…3 and keep going. They have no clue as to what is going through their Twitter account, and that’s not as important to them as the knowledge that their latest blog posts is being spammed out on their friends’ accounts.
The most obvious twitter spam I have noticed from these feeds has been the act of tweeting out a summary of someone’s tweets for that day that have been reformulated into a blog post. These posts are definitely not something anyone would purposely retweet, more for the blog owner to keep a history of their daily tweets, but these type posts are getting retweeted on a daily basis due to the trust these friends have placed in each other to only post quality content within their group. And moreover due to the lack of moderated content that users allow to trickle through their twitter streams.
Basically all of these force-feeding services promise you the world. You’ll have more time for engagement, you’ll easily be present online 24 hours a day, you reap the SEO benefits of numerous tweets of each and every blog post you write, and this will solve all of your problems with finding the time to participate in numerous social media platforms with the added benefits of their cross-posting platform! Sounds wonderful doesn’t it? Well maybe it is wonderful for automating content, but when I know for a fact that a trusted friend is tweeting posts that they have not even read (nor even seen the title of)…for me…well, I am less likely to care what they posted or even take the time to read their feeds.
Using automated content to fill your social media accounts day in and day out basically dehumanizes you and creates a more robotic feed. Force-feeding social media accounts with numerous automatic tweets does nothing but make you irrelevant and land you in the list of spammers that get unfollowed every day by people using services like TheTwitCleaner. Depending on your level of interaction, you’ll either land in the “Bots” category or if you’re lucky, maybe the “Nothing But Links” category; but even then, when the dreaded message shows above your carefully chosen Twitter avatar stating that you are 90% feed driven, chances are that your social media value has dropped tremendously to everyone. So any anticipated SEO benefits are greatly outweighed by your diminishing list of formerly interested followers.
So how can you turn it around? How can you get back to the non-spamming unique and interesting individual you used to be on Twitter? Get started by following these three simple steps:
Curate Quality Content
Your twitter account should be a reflection of YOU! You should never feel the need to retweet every post a friend writes. You should never tweet every article from every news site you like. You should never tweet anything that doesn’t reflect your high quality standards. Only tweet about articles you read that are interesting to you, articles that define who you are, what you like and dislike, or that inform the community about something you feel is important enough to be shared.
Limit Automation
While it’s acceptable to schedule a few tweets occasionally, never ever allow your Twitter account to become basically an RSS feed of numerous blogs. If we want a news site’s feed, we know how to follow them. What most people want to see in your Twitter stream is the best content you read that day, and some personality…not every single article from every single news site or blog available.
Create Quality Content
Some users blog, others take photos, others post opinions or outrage about a current event…everyone can create something to add to their Twitter stream that lets people know they are real. Something that engages your followers and creates a unique user experience and not to mention a community of people that share your common interests. More importantly, you create a community of people that see you, once again….. as relevant.
PS. In the immortal words of the band Styx:
“Domo Arigato, Mr. Roboto,
(Please thank you)
The problem’s plain to see,
Too much technology,
Machines to save our lives,
Machines de-humanize,
The time has come at last, (Secret secret, I’ve got a secret)
To throw away this mask, (Secret secret, I’ve got a secret)
Now everyone can see, (Secret secret, I’ve got a secret)
My true identity”