Gary is one of the most famous marketeers who managed to capitalize his Social Media effort in a big way. After growing his family business from a small shop to a €60M winelibrary.com he is now consulting companies among the Fortune 500 about how to use Social Media to engage with their customers. Here is one of his latest keynote (warning for the language).  The last 15 minutes, including the Q&A is the most valuable:

Posted under Marketing, Social Networks

More and more people start using twitter as a marketing tool and yet too many fail to understand how it works.

In a nutshell Twitter is a microblogging site with a very distinct limitation: all messages are limited to 140 characters very much like an SMS message.

If you see Twitter as a (micro) blog you start understanding a few key things:

• your followers are more likely to see your tweets (similarly to the subscribers to your blog) although everybody else can
• when you write a tweet it simply goes out and appears on your followers’ feeds
• because your followers are (very probably) following other people they will see your Tweet just if they are looking at their followers around the time you write your tweet.
• Any of your followers can go back and check what you tweeted about in the past but that is really if they are looking for something.

Why growing your followers?

Given the short life span of any tweet you would like to make sure that many people find your tweets interesting and do something about it, e.g.:

• follow up a link that you included
• re-tweet it to their followers
• post it to other social media

How to Grow Your Twitter Followers

Start by following other people.  In general if you follow people on twitter there is a high probability they will follow you back: this is not guaranteed if you are following celebrities, companies and other famous brands.

A rule of thunb to determine that is whether is likely that a person will follow you back is about checking the ratio between following/followers:

• People with a similar number of following/followers are likely to follow you back, probably using an automatic follow back system (see below for details)
• People with a much greater number of followers than people they are following tend to be those celebrities, companies and famous brand I described above: avoid them unless you are really interested in what they tweet about.
• People with much smaller number of followers than they are following are the kind of people desperate for followers, again not very useful to follow.

Remember to be nice and thank all people that follow you, this is to start a possible conversation with these people.  Now I know what you are thinking: if you start following 20-50 new people at a time (I would not increase people I am following by more that that to avoid being mistaken for one of the third group above) and they all follow you back how many thank you messages doyou need to send? quite a lot! so here is the trick, much of it can be automated

Automating the process

• Create an account on http://www.socialoomph.com/ and authenticate it with your twitter account(s).  This will allow you to create an auto responder (thank message) and set up an autofollower (follow all people that follow you).
• Create an account of Twellow, the yellow pages for twitter, setting up a decently complete profile and registering you in categories that apply.
• Start following people using the twellow browsing tool that allow to both seach people by category (e.g. Executive Coaching) and geographically (e.g. in Cambridgeshire)
• sit back and relax, your followers will start coming

Although there are people that do the above and then leave it I still believe a twitter account should, like a blog, carry fresh content so keep tweeting and help other people by re-tweeting what they tweet about. If you establish good relationships with your twitter friends (e.g. people that you follow and they follow you back) you are likely to enjoy your experience much more.

If you like this post the best thing you could do, once you automated your twitter followers, is to re-tweet it and perhaps even leave a comment.  Good Tweeting.

Posted under Social Networks

More and more people are using twitter as a marketing tool and yet too many fail to understand how it works.  In a nutshell Twitter is a microblogging site with a very distinct limitation: all messages are limited to 140 character very much like an SMS message.

If you have a blog, very much like any other website (imagine a newspaper site) you don’t write to a particular person (Email and other messaging services can help for that) but to your audience.  If your blog is popular you will have many readers, if you are at the beginning probably just a few, unless you are famous person (e.g. celebrity) or a successful blogger at your third or higher number launch.  If you keep writing good content (what Chris Garret, one of my favourite bloggers, calls Killer Flagship Content) then you will build up a broad audience.  Your audience in Twitter is made by your followers.

Who are your followers?

Anybody interested in you and your tweets that decide to follow you. At the beginning you are likely to have no followers but as you start following other people many of them will start following you back and so on.  The more followers you have and more and more people will start following you.  When I encounter an individual with a Twitter account and many hundred or thousands of followers I feel more inclined to follow him or her than if he/she is a beginner with a few followers.

What do you do with Twitter?

You Tweet. You send out these messages and your followers have the opportunity of reading them, simple.  Considering that 140 char is not really lots of information many people have developed a way of writing words in a VERY succinct way or simply adding the URL of a site/blog/page they want to promote.

What do you tweet about?

Everything you like. Many neophytes of twitter tend to be confused about how to use their newly created account.  My style is to promote some of the business activities I am involved in and re-tweet similar content from other people I am following.  I personally find nearly disturbing those that mix business activities with random personal messages about their family life or what they just had for lunch… A Twitter account is free so it makes sense perhaps to have more than one and channel different content to different accounts and keeping each of them coherent to the main topic.  In my case the main business account maxgaet is only for my entrepreneurial activities while carismauk is used to promote my martial arts activities and saluswellness is tweeting about my other business venture.

Why re-tweeting?

To promote a tweet from a person you are following to your followers. People that ask this question usually don’t get the basic mechanism behind Twitter.  You can read what is written by people you are following: if you like what you see then re-tweet it so also your followers will get the same tweet.  If many people start re-tweeting a particular message you have what is called the viral effect and the original tweet, re-tweeted many times, become a very popular topic.

Twitter is a great marketing tool and is has been proven to be a great contributor to traffic generation.  If you found this post interesting perhaps the best thing you can do is tweet about it

Posted under Marketing, Social Networks

My experience with Twitter started in the wrong way: I created an account and followed a few celebrities, big names like CNN and some well known bloggers and… nothing happened so I left the account unattended for nearly a year assuming Twitter was not for me…

Then I read a number of articles and blog posts about what a powerful tool Twitter is and, intrigued, I decided to give it another go, looking for the right way to use this apparently amazing tool.  I am now I happy user of Twitter and it is brining me a good percentage of the total traffic for my blogs: this is all due to understanding my misconception: out there are many people looking forward to connecting with you.  These are those people that tend to have the number of people they are following very similar to the number of their followers.

People that are somehow important or famous in their own field naturally attract many followers: if you follow them it is likely they won’t follow you back.  One of (if not) the top UK twitterer is Stephen Fry with (as I am writing this) 1,247,743 followers and following 54210.  As famous people are on Twitter to market and communicate about themselves or their business and they are already  famous they don’t need to follow many people to have followers.

On the other hand if you are kind of normal person it is unlikely that at the beginning many people will naturally follow you: this is true as long as your number of follower is very small.  In my experience this all changed when I started, systematically, following people in my field and fields I was interested in.  These twitterers had a fairly high number of followers, in the thousands, tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands, and they were following a similar number of people.  This started a great mechanism that added many followers to my main account @maxgaet that I use for business and personal blog: I am on the verge of 600 followers and growing at 15-20 per day.

To test this theory I just described I created, about a month ago, another account @carismauk that I use for my martial arts blogging: in a very short time, starting completely from scratch, I passed today 130 followers that is a good place to be.

So my basic misconception was that somebody with many followers will not follow somebody with very few: that is absolutely not true and if you follow them it is likely they will follow you back, attracting others and helping you to grow your followers.  Be nice to your followers and thank individually with a direct message every new follower and you’ll see your membership growing!

Posted under Social Networks

First post for the year can just reflect how I feel this morning: a happy new year starts, a nice and quiet celebration last night and a profound transformation in the way I felt New Years Wishes are sent from person to person.  Social networks are very much shaping the way many of us interact with a broad audience both for business and leisure but never before I noticed this until these festive days.

Just 15 years ago post cards were sent before Xmas and New Year and then we would exchange wishes in person with people we were spending our NYE party.  About 10 years ago the popularity of mobile phones made possible connecting (if and when lines were free) with people that were not necessarily close to us.  Personally, until last year, this was the way I exchanged messages with friends and relatives.

Of course Emails was there along the way but they require being in front of the computer when you are partying, that is not necessarily very practical: various PDAs and more recently the iPhone made this a lot more accessible.

Somehow for me all this has changed quite dramatically this year: I have used Skype to have online toasts with relatives in both Italy and Hungary (as it worked well on Xmas eve and Xmas day) and, again, most wishes I received and sent, were via various social networking sites, like Facebook and Twitter.

I am curious to see how this will influence this new decade that just started:  Happy New Year 2010 to everyone!

Posted under Social Networks, blogging