Note: This entry kind of grew to gargantuan size, as there is just so much to talk about when it comes to Twitter as a social networking tool.
It is mostly intended for folks who are new to social networking, and Twitter, or who have had a tough time finding their voice, and building a presence, although there might be something there for old Twitterists as well.
Oh, teh twitterz…My old friend. I start this entry with ‘The Twitter Song’ by ihatemornings (Ben Walker), as a reminder of where we’ve come from, and where we’ve gone … And a lot of the stuff that Ben polks fun at in his music video is still on point.
Twitter can be fun, entertaining, perplexing, infuriating, and all of that at the same time…It’s pretty much replaced most commercial news outlets as my primary source of news and information, as well as a tool for marketing myself, my web portal and video productions, as well as groups and products that I support, and, most importantly, a way of staying connected to all of the friends and colleagues that I’ve made in the web space.
Twitter’s tag line has always been ‘join the conversation’, but that conversation is changing…Twitter has grown up over the past few years, and the way folks are using Twitter are changing as a result of the product maturity, and experience that has come out of the communal experience of the last few years.
Joining the conversation, and getting your voice heard can be a challenge, and building a professional presence can be daunting for a lot of folks, unless you’ve got someone who’s figured all of this crap out giving you some pointers…Which is what I’m going to do.
I’ve been helping some friends lately with advice on how to use social media to help get their documentary funded. A ‘social media plan’ if you will…and my friend tells me he’s gotten some benefit from the ideas I was throwing out, so I figured I’d share…
Now, I don’t sell myself as one of those ‘Social Media Strategists’ that seem to turn up daily on my Twitter followers tab, along with the usual assortment of porn bots, promising to help get me thousands of followers and make lots of money using Twitter…I never follow these folks, and they go away real fast.
No, I am just interested in sharing what I’ve learned, and am learning, because it’s still an evolving process, with friends, and all you folks, for free…Because I don’t think using social media approaches anything near the complexity of quantum mechanics, or anything you can’t learn yourself without having to hire someone who is going to charge you good coin for what basically amounts to common-sense ideas.
Also, the folks that I look to as mentors, and who I’ve learned all the basics from, offered their basic game books for free…So look at it as giving back.
Following and Followers
First piece of advice: Don’t worry about who is following you. Figure out what your interests, passions, and/or personal brand is, and follow people who have the same, or related interests with you.
Throw tweets at them…Remember, this is a conversation.
Engage with people with whom you share interests. Ask direct questions…The worst thing you can do at first is throw open-ended tweets out and expect folks who aren’t following you to respond. Ask someone something specific, comment on a tweet from a celebrity, or subject matter guru, with a joke…Or share some information with them that would be of interest from THEIR perspective.
One thing you can do is quote other folks tweets with your own comments in front of them. That creates a new tweet in your stream, that all of your followers will see, and the other person will see in their @connect tab. This is often a great conversation starter.
You will find that even some very big celebs, with huge followings, will sometimes respond to you…Not all, especially the ones who have assistants tweeting for them (which I think is kind of bogus, and most of the celebs and weblebs (social media celebrities) who I know personally, only tweet for themselves…)
Don’t be discouraged if your first tweet or two doesn’t get you into a conversation…Keep at it.
Again, who you follow is more important than who is following you, so don’t get caught up in a numbers game. It can take a long time to build up a following unless you’ve got a built-in brand factor, like a Lady Gaga or Aston Kutcher…You won’t go from zero to a bazillion-gagillion followers in a day.
Don’t get bummed if folks you would like to have as followers (and those are usually the folks with the big social media profiles, so everyone wants to be followed by them) don’t follow you back, even if they have a good tweeting relationship with you…It’s the communication that’s important, and while some celebs will follow everyone who follows them, many folks (including myself) try to keep their following count low, so they can keep the ‘signal-to-noise’ ratio low on their personal stream.
I’m following about 700 folks, which is too many, and it gets really tough to focus, and pick up on key messages, if you’re following too many people.
Also, some folks also use things like Tweetdeck, and Twitterific, so that they can set up filters and groups…You may be getting a lot more air time than you think (but don’t count on it.)
Again, focus on who you are following, and the content that you create…Add value to the information stream and the followers will come in time.
It is good to know your followers, at least in general terms (It gets hard to keep up with after a while), especially if they turn out to have information streams that are similar to yours, and you want to follow them. One good tool to use for checking out who is following/not following you, who un-follows you, and such, is who.unfollowed.me.
Who.unfollowed.me is actually a complete set of tools for tracking your followers. There is a free, or ‘lite’ version, which I use currently, that gives you a lot of functionality to see who your followers are, and when they leave you.
By using who.unfollowed.me, and checking it frequently, you can see if you’re tweets are attracting, or chasing off, the kind of followers that you consider are key to your personal brand…Or if you’ve just got a lot of churn going on in your followers because of bots…A problem Twitter has yet to effectively deal with.
Again, don’t get too hung up on who un-follows you at a micro level…Some folks might just want to connect with you in other ways, like Facebook or Google+, or sometimes you might just not meet their information processing bandwidth requirements (too many tweets, not enough tweets.) Look for trends of who is following and un-following you, and don’t get hung up on individuals.
For judging the overall effectiveness of your social media efforts across platforms (Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, WordPress, etc.), there is Klout.com, and peerindex.com, two analytics sites that are very useful, and will be the topic of future write-ups.
RTs and Getting Your Stuff Out There
A few years ago, this was pretty simple…You tweet about your stuff, I retweet you, and you reciprocate. Got a hot project? Just tweet a celeb, and ask for a re-tweet. No problem, right?
Well, that was then, and now is different. Things have gotten a lot more complicated than BITD (and by that I mean 2008. 
)
A lot of folks will not tweet or re-tweet anything other than things that either:
1) Are part of their product line or brand
2) They have a vested interest in
3) Are videos, products, or stories from trusted friends and partners
4) They get paid to do product placement in their tweets
or
5) They just don’t give a crap about anything but self-promotion and are just shouting their own virtues, non-stop, at the top of their lungs, into cyberspace
Twitter has grown up, as I mentioned before…Companies, big and small, have Twitter policies. Many companies will look at tweets by employees about company business as if the employee is acting as a press resource…You tweet about the guy who TP’d the corporate bathroom, and you’re making an unauthorized press release about company business. That can be embarrassing to the company, and might just get you fired.
Some companies, even some small production companies doing web content, have policies in place about not tweeting about other company’s videos or products unless it is part of their overall strategic marketing plan…You’ve got a buddy working for WeeWeeSmall Productions, who you think should be re-tweeting your latest vid, and get irked when he doesn’t? Well, he might not be able to do that and keep his employers happy.
It’s become increasingly difficult to cut through all of the noise of Twitter, and other social media platforms, and get a brand presence established (which is one of the reasons I’m trying to give content creators an edge, with respect to geek-affinity content, by offering content aggregation on GeektasticNebula.com in an effort to create a unified brand from many smaller ones.) That can be a factor for some folks who feel that using their social media presence to promote other brands and products is at cross-purposes with their own goals…So they don’t. It’s tough, but this is business, and although I don’t necessarily agree with that type of approach, everyone approaches their social media strategy, and rules for engagement, in their own, or their company’s, way.
Then there’s the problem of, “Hey, if I tweet for you, then I’ve gotta’ tweet for this other guy, and his two friends, and …”, and the next thing you know, you’re in the middle of all kinds of interpersonal dynamics issues over person X feeling disrespected because you didn’t retweet their stuff, but did for person Y.
It can be a friggin’ mess…
And that only escalates with the profile of the person being asked to do the tweeting…I’ve got a few friends that are pretty big players in the space, and they are constantly being bombarded with requests to tweet stuff for them…At some point they’ve just got to say no, both to keep peace, and because it gets to be too much of a time suck, and, face it, we’ve all got our own work to do…
One friend told me, a few years ago, that they were asked to get some big Hollywood producer they knew to tweet about something or other, and the response was, “Uh, no…I can’t do that.”
Because that would be one way of losing that producer’s ear, as bandwidth, and face-time, are valuable commodities for busy people.
I no sooner heard that story than someone approached me with a “You know…if you could get so-and-so to tweet about my stuff, I could really do something great…”. Yeah, you and everybody else.
I don’t, as a rule, ask folks to tweet, or re-tweet for me…If they want to it’s appreciated, but you’ve got to respect people’s time, and keep expectations real. If someone likes your stuff enough, and isn’t otherwise constrained by any of the other factors, you’ll get your message out. I have great Twitter conversations with folks, all the time, who don’t re-tweet my stuff…And it’s all good, because we’re interacting, and that’s what is important.
Again, the message here is that Tweeting and Re-Tweeting can be a lot more complicated, for the reasons I’ve mentioned, than seems obvious. Don’t get frustrated by failure to get RT’d…Just keep doing your thing.
Non-RT Responses from High-Profile Tweeters
There are also a lot of instances where the absolute last thing you want is for someone with a few million followers to RT your post…Especially if you’re a blogger with a site on a non-industrial-strength host, and you’re tweeting a blog link (Doug raises hand and points at himself.)
I use a pretty good hosting company, that offers unlimited bandwidth for a reasonable rate…One that is sustainable for the level of interest this blog receives, but is also affordable for someone who doesn’t derive the kind of ad revenue necessary (yet, but hopeful…) to sustain the cost of a dedicated server. I can take a good burst of hits in the thousands…But that’s about it.
In short, while I can take a pretty good amount of traffic in every-day use, one re-tweet from a celebrity like Stephen Fry, with his 3.8 million followers, and my host’s non-dedicated server would die a quick and painful death from the resulting traffic. Taking down all the sites on the server I’m sharing the space with, and having some poor guy in a basement somewhere going nuts trying to get everything back online.
The usual result is that the hosting company kicks you off of their service, because their ‘unlimited bandwidth’ deal isn’t really a free lunch, and you wind up scrambling for a new web host while loosing traffic, which is a huge PITA.
I’ve seen this a lot, and have one friend who I refer to, kiddingly, as Kali 2.0, as she has been known to lay waste to entire web sites with a mere touch of the re-tweet button (Yes, I’m talking about Felicia Day…How long into the post did you think it was going to be before her name came up? Seriously. :p )
Kidding aside, celebrities like Stephen Fry and Felicia Day have learned, the hard way, that a well-intentioned RT can cause unbridled havoc. Which is why you might see other things, like having your tweet favorited, or post bookmarked, or a comment liked on Facebook, a video favorited on YouTube, etc … Which will be a great show of support, show you that your efforts are being recognized, and drive traffic your way without making any data centers, or IT-tech people’s heads, explode.
It’s a good thing, and should be appreciated when it happens…
Paid Product Tweeters/Promoters
Case, #4 is the one that I, and many folks that I know, don’t really like…The paid product placement tweeter.
There are folks out there who make side money, or in some cases, more than just side money, by freelancing their Twitter feeds.
An advertiser pays them, and they will start tweeting about the product/brand in question as if they were just really into whatever the product is, and you would think, based on whatever drives you to follow that Tweeter, that they are giving you info based on their own preferences…Using their social capital with you to get you to buy into what they are being paid to tweet about.
I think it kinda’ sucks. No, actually, it outright sucks…It’s a breach of trust, when you think about it.
There is nothing wrong with paid product placement…As a model it’s been around a long time, and as a financing model for web video it has proven effective (I’m thinking specifically of shows like Ileana Douglas’ ‘Easy to Assemble‘ which is set in an Ikea store, and sponsored by Ikea), and there is nothing wrong with it … As long as it’s out in the open, and you’re aware of it. Same with branded Twitter identities, such as production companies and shows, that Tweet their sponsors products…Nothing wrong with it at all.
What I’m talking about is the Tweeters/Bloggers who surreptitiously slip product placement into their twitter stream when I’m following them because I trust their taste in <FILL IN THE BLANK>. They are misusing their position as a thought leader, and, to me, this is wholesale BS.
It’s also a part of why YouTube has a paid product placement policy in place for shows that are monetizing content through AdSense.
Twitter really should have a policy about this, but I don’t see it as being enforceable…Especially for a company that still hasn’t figured out how to deal with the porn-and-spam-bot problem that is a huge, rampant, pain in the butt.
Often, it’s hard to tell when someone is doing it, unless they are just an obvious Twitter sell-sword, in which case you might recognize products that are off-brand suddenly popping up in their stream on a regular basis…Often times folks will be a lot more subtle.
If you develop a relationship with a tweeter based on a common affinity and they all of a sudden start treating you like you have the social media equivalent of leprosy, while suddenly espousing something in their tweets with an almost-identical brand affinity to your own, something might be up…Like a pay day.
Just for the record…I tweet, and re-tweet, a lot of stuff … Things that I like, and feel that add value to the folks who are interested in what I like … People with whom I share a particular affinity space that’s part of my personal brand identity. If it’s from me and, for better or worse, it’s there because it’s something that I find value in, and nobody is paying me for (and that’s the way it will stay…)
The Pure, and Shameless, Self-Promoter
Finally, there are some folks out their who are just shouting their own message into cyberspace, and don’t give a crap…I don’t know why you’d want to follow someone like that, unless they are just that damn compelling that being a voyeur into their lives is appealing, but these types can benefit your own social media activities, in some cases, as I’ll explain in the next section.
“Well, that was kind of depressing as hell, Doug, what do I do to get my stuff recognized?”
Easy…Add value.
Don’t count on anyone else to promote your video, product, book, neat idea, whatever…Build your own social media profile by being part of the conversation, and adding value to it.
Maybe folks won’t tweet, or re-tweet about your message, but they almost always are willing to tweet, re-tweet, or join in a conversation about their own.
Be a fan…Be a supporter.
Find stuff that falls into your passion, or affinity, zone that others are doing, and support them. Build relationships, and join in conversations.
Write blog articles that review other web shows, or events, or products. Tweet about that, and that the creators of those other events and/or products will drive traffic to your site, because it is great for their marketing plan. That’s how you will develop a voice…as well as brand authority, which is important.
In doing so, you may not be getting direct support for your brand, but by developing your profile through tweets, retweets, and conversations about things related to your own brand, you will build a following, and that will enable to you get your message out there, on your own, without having to rely on the value of someone else’s social media identity to do it.
It works…in time. But there’s another part of this as well…
Don’t rely on Twitter as your only social media platform
There is only so much you can communicate in 140 characters and, as I mentioned before, the signal-to-noise ratio on Twitter is pretty high, and not likely to get any lower. Also consider that there are now ‘promoted tweets’ (and tweeters), and that Twitter is really just starting to get going with its own monetization strategy which will likely drive up the noise level for those who don’t have advertising dollars to spend.
No, you need to go to other places.
Facebook is important. Google+ is important, and becoming more important…Especially with the synergies between Google+, YouTube, and AdSense, Google is looking to maximize both the user experience, and their return on investment.
If you’re not spending a significant amount of time leveraging these other platforms, as well as Tumblr, Flickr, and LinkedIn, you are missing opportunities.
Yes, it’s a lot of work, and Google+ is not nearly as easy to integrate with the other platforms … and I don’t think Google thinks its in their best interest to be. They want to provide as much of a one-stop shopping experience as possible, and maximize revenues.
I’ll talk more about these other platforms, as well as analytics and social media profile tools, in a future entry.
Would love comments, and questions, and any feedback on if you folks feel that blog entries like this are helpful …
Remember, it’s a conversation, so speak up!
