TribalCafe | Social Media Training | Social Media Tools | How To | Marketing | WordPress | Oxfordshire

How To Schedule Tweets To Boost Your Impact and Save Time

Gary Fox — Wed, 22 May 2013 21:41:24 +0000

To be effective on Twitter you need to setup a good workflow and learn how to schedule your Tweets to get the best impact with your audience. Scheduling your Tweets will save you time and help you be more productive with your social media. It is all too easy on social media to get distracted, lose valuable time and not achieve your objectives.

If you use these process for your Tweets then it will help you stay focused and get more targeted with your social media.

1Research your sources

For each topic in your market that you want to write about you should know who the original thinkers are and the thought leaders. Original thinkers are often academics or people in research/think tank environments.

Thought leaders are people, (sometimes that are also original thinkers). who tend to be on the ball with market trends and use original thinkers. Often they write books and are heavy weight influencers in a market sector. Other sources may be magazines (content curators) – you will know the right mix for your sector. One thing to bear in mind is how much time you want to spend scanning and reading these sources – too much and you will be overloaded.

By researching these people and getting to know the key topics, trends and building a list of these you start to build a great source of content for your tweets.

How To Schedule Your Tweets

2Organise Your Feeds

Most of the sources you will find and use will have an RSS feed. An RSS feed provides a neat way for you to get updates when new blogs or articles are post on a blog, without having to go back to the blog to read the article. You can use the RSS feed to organise the content feeds from these sources.

I used to use Google Reader but since Google announced it was terminating this I have moved to Feedly. In Feedly you can create topic folders and then add in your feeds. The great part is that Feedly then makes it easy to share content into Buffer. But before we do that we need to find out what is the best time to Tweet for your following/audience.

Feedly has an app for Apple and for Android.

You may not know this

You can use RSS feeds from Pinterest – here is how:
View a USER RSS feed simply by going to the user’s Pinterest URL, and adding /feed.rss to the end of the end of the url.
Like this example: (my username is ‘tribalcafeuk’)

http://pinterest.com/tribalcafeuk/feed.rss

View a specific BOARD feed by going to the board URL, replace the final / with .rss
Like this example: (one of my board name is ‘social media infographics’ at url = http://pinterest.com/tribalcafeuk/social-media-infographics/)

http://pinterest.com/tribalcafeuk/social-media-infographics/rss

How cool is that

3
There are a few different tools you can use to find out about what time is the best to schedule your Tweets. Each one may give you different results based on the algorithm that they use. The best way to work is to pick one and then use it and by tracking your results you will soon be able to understand how accurate they are as weel as the best time for your audience.

Dan Zarella research shows that the best time is later in the day, presumably when people have left work (mentally if not in reality) and in the eraly evening. However everybody is different with their audience.

Some tools to try to find out the best time to Tweet

Make a not of key times and key days.

4Customise Buffer Timings

If you sign into Buffer and under schedule tab you will see the default timings for your account. You can customise these timings for the total week on the free plan and by day using the paid plan.

Using the data from Step 3 set the timings in Buffer.

5Schedule Your Tweets From Feedly

You will notice that in Feedly if you click on a post item you get a menu of share options below. Now as you read the posts and choose the ones that you want to share you can easily click on the Buffer button and schedule these via Buffer.

Another tip is to link your url shortener to Bitly – you can then check on which content got the most clicks which is very useful

The only thing to do now is to make sure you mix it up by adding in your own personality and Tweets between these scheduled ones. Of course the thank you and mentions also fit inbetween.

6Schedule Your Tweets From Feedly
Now closing the loop always mention is to understand what really is the best time for you to tweet and to assess what content is giving you the best results e.g. what sources. This is where you need to review Bitly and your Buffer Analytics.

This process achieves two goals:

it is an efficient workflow and so will save you time
it will help you deliver good quality content at the best time to your audience and therefore boost your impact

Therese are just a few tips and ways on how to schedule Tweets – there are a host of other ways to do this e.g. within Hootsuite.

What tools do you use to save time on social media?

The State of Digital Content Infographic

Gary Fox — Mon, 20 May 2013 19:07:18 +0000

As the popularity of smartphones and tablets continues it is no surprise that people are increasingly consuming digital content on these devices and sharing it with their friends.

Uberflip researched key usage data from February 2010 through February 2013, using Google Analytics and Uberflip Metrics, and then used the data to produce the following infographic.

Over one-fifth of global traffic now comes from digital content consumption at the expense of our declining interest in turning on the Desktop (desktop traffic continues to decline steadily). This trend is reflected in email open rates on mobile phones – see infographic.

In 2010 video content accounted for only 6% of users incorporating video into their digital content. But with a rise of over 3.7X it is a good reflection of video as a key component of content marketing by brands. A figure supported by comScores 2013 U.S. Digital Future in Focus’ report.

As more sites have now added share buttons and integrated social media it has become easier to share content socially than ever before. In February 2010, people preferred to share content via email but now sharing content via email has decreased from 93.3% in 2010 to 53.3% in February 2013. What changed? the popularity of Facebook, which grew from 3.4% users sharing content via the social platform in 2010 to 27.4% in 2013.

With people also multi-screening now it is inevitable that we will see further growth of videos and pictures will continue to rise. The state of digital content will increasingly be videos and pictures but also I believe we will start to see more interactivity as well.

Can Your CEO Answer These 10 Social Business Questions

Gary Fox — Sun, 19 May 2013 19:55:52 +0000

Social Business is still young, moving rapidly and is still on the curve of inflated expectations. There are still organisations looking for answers as to how the role of being social within their business will help them grow. Many are realizing that social is not some magic bullet to solve their business problems, produce leads or suddenly transform the empty idea box into a stream of innovative ideas.

Both a McKinsey survey and an IBM survey report on the growing focus of CEO’s on the need to develop a social business. The truth is that social business is hard work. You can’t simply bolt on some technology or tool and expect everything else (that often wasn’t right in the first place) to suddenly change. Social is fundamentally about people and their willingness to participate with your brand in their life. That is equally true of your employees as it is of your customers.

We know that adding value is important, whether you call this Inbound Marketing, Influence Marketing or Content Marketing they are all just aspects of the overall marketing strategy (a later post). But even these are just hype terms. The core focus for any business is purely to be a people business and focus on the customer – customer centric. Social is how you facilitate conversations, collaboration and build your brand community. Data and insights are then how you know if you are achieving your goal and provide the insights for your customer focus.

As a social business your are now competing not only for customers but for talent.

There is no difference between the people inside your building and those you call customers. Both will transact with you, but how many really are passionate about your business. As with customers employees want more than the experience of turning up for work and doing the job. Survey after survey reveals that motivations are highest when people are listened to, work in collaborative engagements and have clear goals and regular feedback.

The fundamental part of social business is not a single pipeline, a like or tweet, it is about reevaluating what value you can deliver to your customers or employees and how. This may be about helpful content or solving problems, but equally it may be about giving people new tools e.g. Nike running app or Skiing app. For employees it may be breaking down the hierarchies and establishing new ways for people to take initiatives whilst still being accountable e.g. Zappos.

Social, mobile and cloud technologies enable social on a scale that was not imaginable 10 years ago. These new web technologies easily integrate, scale and provide solutions that makes adoption affordable, deployment easy and can be adapted to fit your business requirements. These new tool kits provide the backbone to being a social business but it is leadership and management that need to provide the context for them – the why, how, what, who and when.

This social tool kit presents each business with new opportunities for customer and employee engagement; new ways to do business.

It is the many to many not just the one – many that provides the innovation. Watch this short video about AirBnB.

So what is my point in this blog? Every CEO should now recognise that social is far deeper that the simply chasing the number of likes on a Facebook page, the number of followers on Twitter. These are not the objectives that will match to your business goals and are unlikely to give you any long term success. The social business questions that need to be answered are not about how you use social but why and what value does it offer. A simple question for example I ask is why would anyone want to see a post on their Facebook page from your company?

Of course marketing is important but there are far more ways that social impacts a business:

Customer Service – Nielsen’s Social Media Report 2012 highlights that 47% of users employ social media to get customer service. One in three prefer it.
Sales – e.g. see infographic
CRM – HARLEY DAVIDSON (HD TALKING): Harley owners created website and social community totally funded by users and user-generated content. Here, Harley owners trades photos, jokes, where to find hard to find parts, advice on Harley models and ownership plus there are at least 7 mechanics on-call at all times. HDtalking.com now has 40,000+ members and cost to Harley is negligible.
HR – social recruitment

There are entrepreneurs who clearly see this and are creating start-ups like BnB that cut through how we traditionally think of doing things. For each of their successes another business will fail. Change is inevitable and you can either be a part of it or ignore it at your peril.

Ten Questions To Ask Your CEO

If you review most businesses goals they normally fall into these main categories:

improve sales and grow the top line
improve profits on goods / services sold
make efficiency savings
improve customer experience/satisfaction – lower customer churn
innovate

As an example for sales – Asos Case Study.

1How is social aligned with your business goals?

This is probably the most important question and is focused on how social fits to the outcomes as mentioned above e.g. sales, profit…How can social be used to deliver these?

2What are the 3 core social initiatives?

Obviously larger organisations can deal with greater number of initiatives. Don’t fight on too many fronts. I always believe in focus and too often have seen end of year reviews where the 10 core initiatives didn’t succeed! Prioritizing initiatives is critical to success. Understanding what can be short term gains and what fits to long term goals helps align resources, objectives and expectations! Where a business will see real returns depends on the strengths and weaknesses of its market position.

3What are the key objectives and metrics for success?

Goals need to be translated into SMART objectives and clear and measurable metrics used.

4How will you use social to innovate?
In times of change your business needs to understand how social changes the business model: here is a look at one of the many ways P&G are crowdsourcing innovation.

5How are your investing in social?

The days of pulling in a graduate as social media manager should be over; I have helped clients clean up some of those messes. It is not free, it is more important that merely assigning a junior member to the role and it does warrant investment. Social is not free – just like advertising, print, exhibitions and the rest of the marketing mix aren’t. Budgets if they aren’t growing need to shift from traditional media to social but aligned to business outcomes.

6How are you managing your brand sentiment?

It is one thing to measure brand sentiment and another to manage it. By this I mean that you effectively respond to complaints online, deal with issues and have an effective plan in place to manage any crisis. Social is now and integral part of customers service.

7Who is accountable for social?
As social technologies are evolving fast and converging to present more integrated workflows it is important that someone is responsible for staying on top of your projects and helping propagate social through the business. As data analytics, technology and marketing converge for instance the days of a pure marketing manager are gone. Being technically fluent is important.

8How is social being used with your employees?

As a bare minimum here there needs to be a social media policy in place. More importantly it is time to breakdown the silos and recognise that new models that offer opportunities for employees to reduce duplication of efforts, be more effective in learning (social learning) and collaborate.

9How does social fit to your talent management strategy?

The difference between a good company and a great company, ref: Jim Collins, can be down to talent management.

10How does you being social add value to your customers?

This is often the hardest question. It moves the focus purely to the customer and the value it delivers. As I have mentioned the superficial answer is we offer promotions! the deeper answer should focus on how a businesses social investment is adding value to its customers lives and hopefully more broadly in the ecosystem that fits to corporate responsibility.

These are not a definitive list of questions they are a guide a look at the type of lenses that a CEO and the C-Suite need to focus on to develop their social capabilities. It is a revolution that is happening but businesses need to evolve and become more adept and agile in how they respond to these dynamics.

20 Tips On How To Use Content Marketing Creatively

Gary Fox — Wed, 15 May 2013 22:30:28 +0000

If you want to get more followers then you need to learn how to use content marketing in a flexible way. It is moving fast and as more businesses (and competitors jump on board) standing out from the crowd will become harder – there will be duplicate content everywhere, duplicate advice, similar guides, eBooks and blog posts.

It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.

-Herman Melville

Of course originality is hard. But you, your business, your service, your communications are the unique part – you are incredible otherwise you wouldn’t have a business or customers. Increasingly it is about understanding the DNA of your business – what makes you different, why customers buy from you and then building upon these foundations. Customers are looking for great experiences, not just great products.

There are lots of creative ways you can use content marketing to engage with your audience, build meaningful brand experiences, which in turn create more shares, extend your reach and get more followers and more business leads.

20 Tips On How To Use Content Marketing

Visual content is driving the shares and fueling the conversations across social media. As a business you can use visual content to promote your products, tell stories as well as build a richer more open view of your business.

1Produce A Video Of You and Your Business

Show the personalities and culture of your business using video.

2Use Twitter Testimonials

Using your customers content can help you demonstrate your passion towards your customer experiences see the revolving customer tweets at a small orange

3Produce a Cartoon About Customer Problems

As a business you need to move away from what you may have traditionally used and begin to experiment with types of content e.g.l create a simple comic with Toonlet.

The Content Tweeps

by tribalcafe

4Curate A Daily Based On A Topic in Your Marketplace

There are a number of content curation tools you can use to build but the best self publishing one is Paper.li. Use this to curate content around a topic in your industry and as a means to find out what content is being shared.

5Blog On A Trending Topic

You might have head of “newsjacking” which was a phrase and subsequent book by David Meerman Scott. The tendency is for people to connect often tie a trending news into a title and make some connections. Whilst this is OK it often doesn’t work there are lots of other people doing the same e.g. the flood of Olympic posts last year. Another way of doing this is to simply use a trending issue in topic in your market but take a angle on it – e.g. lessons that can be learnt.

6Produce An Infographic
You don’t always need to use your own data for infographics. By doing some research on a topic you may pull together some interesting statistics that help your audience understand a trend or support a case e.g. businesses need to get mobile. Infographics look like you need to have graphic skills to produce but the truth is there are plenty of platforms that can help you produce a great infographic for your business Easel.ly

infographics from easel.ly on Vimeo.

7Produce Your Own Animated GIF

I have written before about how animated GIF’s have become the content currency of the youth and how some brands have adopted Vine to create short animated GIFs. However, there are few companies using it at the moment. Here is how Urban Outfitters showcased a live band in their store using Vine.

7Produce An Animated Video

I am a huge fan of scribbling explanations. The combination of watching a creative person visual draw a concept and a voice explain the concept is a perfect way to get over a brand or product messages in a fun way. RSA animate has been at the frontier of producing amazing animations often dealing with complex concepts. Any business can use these though to put over in a fun and entertaining way information to help customers and increase how long they stay on your website and take further action. Animations can simply the often complex service or product propositions you may have.

If your animation is product or service related link it on Google Places and also on your Linkedin company services/products.

7Use Visual Note Taking

In a very similar way to animations, visual note taking provides a fantastic medium top share concepts and information. If you want to co-create ideas that are often complex this type of medium can be used to ask questions, position relationship and generally engage an audience. You could even invite clients to share their sketches.

On the best examples of how this is how Ogilvy, a leading strategic marketing agency, share their note taking at Ogilvy Notes – amazing.

8Use Slides

Some of the highest views for single piece of content comes from Slideshare. Take time to produce an informative and visual stunning set of slides and you will be amazed at what you can achieve. Slideshare as a platform provides for the pro option provides lead capture options as well. Tweet out to your followers and feature on your Linkedin profile.

10Use Webinars

Produce a webinar and link to a registration process to enable you to help build your email list and follow up with your audience. Two suitable platforms are GoToWebinar and AnyMeeting. Use your social media and a hashtag before and after the event to build your audience and develop interest.

11Use MeMe

Condescending Wonka
Memes have become a familiar share on Facebook and allow a great way to personalise communications. You could easily get each of your team to produce their own meme and add to their profile on your website.

Here is two meme tools you can try meme generator and Quick Meme.

12Produce Educational Resources

Piccsy is an image aggregator that used their investors pitch deck and turned it into an interactive parallax landing page. It’s beautiful, engaging, and the results, well they speak for themselves: 50,000 pageviews, plenty of hard to attainpress coverage and 15 inbound investor requests.

13Aspire To Be Human
With the need to manage resource levels there has to be some level of autoation in the marketing process. However, if you look at the best examples of how brands are telling stories and creating experiences they still maintain the human element. Inspire to be human not a robot – image courtesy of sweetpeachtea.

13Don’t Do Random Acts Of Marketing

One of my favourite bloggers, Pam Marketing Nut, calls it random acts of marketing when you simply do things without first aligning them to your goals, objectives and measures for success. It is easy to be a busy fool and not have focus. Social media and content marketing can easily gollop up time.

Produce an editorial calendar and use these types of media to blend your content. Some are easy on time relative to others so they can be used to help expand your content repertoire.

14Understand Your Channels

People have differently and have different reactions to the same content in different channels. Posting a meme on Facebook page might get a good response but not on Linkedin. Each network serves a unique purpose for the user, as illustrated below.

15Build The Community
The critical part is to use social media to connect fans with each other and help them develop their own stories, solve problems together. Social media facilitates the many to many conversations not just the pipes that we think of as channels. You only have to see the way that Adobe forums work to understand how powerful this can be.

16Don’t Measure Followers – It’s Interaction

Social media is not a numbers game purely based on popularity. Reach does matter but influence matters more and followers don’t directly equate to influence. To get social media to work for you you need to offer clear value to your customers and in turn they must trust you. Understanding how you content can reach different touchpoints and demonstrate different elements of your brand, your community and your customers is vital. Being present and facilitating conversations strategically will build your brand. Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, humanizes his brand via social media by using content to openly portray the humans behind the brand. Zappos has extended its brand promise, customer service capabilities and used valuable feedback to innovate.

17It’s Not About 1 Person
Involve your people in creatively coming up with using content. This not only opens up more opportunities but also provides a slection committee that can vet out bad ideas. Start with customer problems and then use these to creatively come up with new ideas for those problems.

18Take Out The Jargon and Make It Easy

Corporate Executive Board, surveyed over 7,000 consumers and more than 200 marketers across consumer brands and industries. Their research highlighted the disconnect between customers and marketers. The key insight that came out of the research was that marketers need to make decision making easier. As an example:

Trust – providing recommendations by consumer advisors, ratings and reviews.
Learn – provide clear and streamlined product information targeted to each decision stage.
Assess options easily – make choosing simpler e.g. buying guides.

With this in mind you can see how infographics, ebooks and animated tools can achieve this.

19Respond To People
Almost a year ago SocialBakers created a measure called socially devoted. Socially devboted looked at well brands responded, or didn’t to their social audience. This has now been tracked the infographic can be seen here. Socially listening to people and then responding to them is a key measure for any brand and how they will be seen by their potential as well as existing customers.

20Have Fun
A long time ago I met a person who started a 4 day a wekk business called TodayWasFun. I have never forgotten their philosphy on how they wanted to live their life as well as develop their business. Having fun is perhaps the best part of being involved with your customers. If you share your passions with them and likewise they share their thoughts, insights, jokes and moments with you then it makes the world seem a good place to be at then end of the working day.

How To Run A Contest On Facebook

Gary Fox — Mon, 13 May 2013 15:13:34 +0000

Do you want to gain more followers on Facebook, the why not learn how to run a contest on Facebook?

Studies show that fans on Facebook like a brand for a reason:

A study by Get Ambassador shows that up to 70% of people fan a brand for offers
A survey by Get Satisfaction highlighting that 43% are looking for offers
A Survey by IAB shows that up to 77% of people have saved money as a result of liking a brand on Facebook

How To Run A Contest On Facebook

Running a contest can be a great way to get new likes on your Business Page and it although it can cost money it can deliver long term results that simply posting can’t.

The best and easiest way to run a contest is to use the apps that are available through a number of platforms. These provide easy step by step processes to implementing a contest and they provide good guidance so you don’t break Facebook rules.

Running a contest helps develop a fun and interactive way to develop your Facebook community. Using a like-gate for your contest app also enables you to make sure people like your Page before they enter. It’s also a great way to get people to sign up to your email list and that is where you can really start to develop a lead generation programme. The infographic below from ShortStack gives some great tips on how to be successful when running a contest.

50 Tips On How To Get More Twitter Followers

Gary Fox — Fri, 10 May 2013 20:05:19 +0000

Do you want to get more Twitter followers?

There is a good reason you should focus on your Twitter strategy, reports show that for businesses Twitter provides a rich source of business leads outperforming Facebook and LinkedIn 9-to-1, with 82% of social media leads coming from Twitter – source: Optify.

I produced a set of slides about a year ago about how Twitter could be used by businesses and this post is an update on that and some further tips on how to get more Twitter followers. Twitter now stands at over 200M active users and is now 7 years old, Twitter released a video on YouTube celebrating their birthday showing their growth and the 170Bn Tweets sent to date. If fact there are more than 400M tweets sent each day.

Twitter has spawned a whole host of useful tools to that help you with your marketing. By being creative and knowing how to use these tools you can not only rapidly grow your followers but also improve your sales and lead generation. If you want to get more followers you need to get more exposure to your content, your Twitter account and your marketing touchpoints.

50 Tips On How To Get More Twitter Followers

1Use Your Twitter Header

You have a chance using your Twitter profile to make sure people understand what you are marketing and why they should listen. Ideally you want to get over in the profile words exactly who you not just in business terms but also what your about. Use keywords about your business and add in a personal touch.

Use the visual aspect of the Twitter profile to highlight what you do – this is valuable space so make sure you make the most of it and put across clear messages.

2Link Up Your Website

Link up your website to Twitter so people can easily click through to your Twitter account

3Link Up Your Social Networks

Link your social media accounts to Twitter. Facebook (about section or tab showing recent Tweets) and other social networks e.g. Linkedin. Make it easy for people to connect with you and more people will follow you.

4Add Link To Emails

Add a link to your Twitter account to your email signature with a call to action follow me. Email is still the most important business communication tool. We send regular emails to clients and potential new customers so why not make sure they can follow you on Twitter as well with a click from your email.

5Post Great Content Regularly
Post good quality content that fits to your brand – this will help you get noticed and people are more likely to Retweet great content to their followers and mention you.
Reference other good articles on the Web, comment on others’ tweets and talk talk about others, not just yourself.

6Use The Tweet This Link In Blogs (occasionally)
You might have seen in blogs a “Tweet This” next to a quote or some statistics e.g.
There are now over 400M Tweets per day via @tribaltalk [tweet this].

Use the code below and edit it in your text editor in WordPress (not the visual editor) and insert this code and then adapt it to how you want to use it.

COPY-YOU-WANT-TO-TWEET [tweet this].

Alternatively use Click To Tweet

7Use Hashtags

A hashtag is often used on Twitter to help people search on key subjects. It is simply a # in front of a keyword or phrase, without spaces.

For example, #marketing and #twittertips are both hashtags.

You will soon find out how to get more Twitter followers by using the hashtags that your target audience follow and use regularly. To see the top 20 hashtags click this link to an infographic on Pinterest. Key action: focus on 5-6 hashtags that also fit to your content categories and track which ones get the best response.

8Search For Tranding Hashtags/Popular Ones
Use Hashtags.org to look for hashtags that are trending and fit to your target audience. Use these to build in links to relevant content and get more click through rates and exposure.

TagDef – Tagdef helps you discover what hashtags mean, as well as providing useful information on what is trending. You can also add you own hashtag and definition here.

Other useful tools:

What The Trend - this is a great tool to help you identify trends on Twitter.

Twubs by following hashtags you can discover conversations that you can join and people you can follow/or they will follow you.

9Get Local With Trends
Trendsmap is a very cool tool that plots Hashtags on a map so you can easily identify what is trending near you.

10Ask People

Despite what you might think people respond really well to being ask to Retweet. Dan Zarella used a massive data set of more than 2.7 million Tweets provided from Buffer. The most popular way phrase to use is please help – how simple is that.

11Follow People
If you don’t follow other people chances are you are missing out on developing your following. I know this sounds simple but setting targets and goals for Twitter is important. Follow people who are your target audience and start to build a relationship with them.

12Hook Up Twitter with Linkedin
Linkedin allows you to connect your Twitter account so that your Tweets will appear as posts on Linkedin. It also helps people connect back to you from Linkedin.

To do this go to your settings and then click on profile you should see a screen similar to the image below. Click on Manage Your Twitter Settings and then connect your Twitter account, then select the Twitter account you to use for posts.

13Time Your Tweets for Maximum Effect
The Science Of Twitter by Dan Zarella points to Tweeting at weekends and later in the day to get more retweets and hence more exposure to new potential followers.

However, this can vary a bit and so as you might guess there are tools that can help you optimise when you post. One such tool is Buffer which will post at the best times and intervals. You can also use:

When To Tweet
Tweriod

14Use a Good Twitter Management Tool
There are dozens of Twitter management tools out there but by far the most popular is Hootsuite. Using a good management tool enables you to easily respond to people, schedule tweets and get reports on your performance.

Other ones worth considering: Pluggio, Crowdbooster and Sprout Social.

15Don’t Just Talk About Yourself
If you have ever been to a party and met someone who only talks themself and how fabulous they are you will know it is mind numbingly boring. The best hosts and people mix it up, taking interest in you as well as mentioning their own life and experiences. Twitter is no different. If you listen the experts the suggested range between others people and your own content varies from 80:20 (4:1 based on the 80-20 rule) to Chris Brogan who uses 15:1.

16Retweet Others Who Follow You
We are all in this together and you should try and browse through your feed and pick out the Tweets to Retweet. This helps build your followers and genuinely shows that you are interested in their content as well. Although this can be difficult as follows mount it is still an important exercise to do.

17Join a Twitter Hashtag Chat or Start Your Own

A Twitter chat is a open Twitter conversation around one unique hashtag that other people get involved with. You often find that Twitter chats relate to markets and / or sectors e.g. #Edchat for education. Generally they have a time associated with them so you can easily schedule when to join in and be active. Tip: check out the previous chats by using Hashtag.org or search on the hashtag through Twitter.

Here is a list of Twitter Chats which might help you find one for your market or interest.

Twitter Chats for Social Media
#Mmchat - Marketing Monday Chat
#Blogchat - Blog Chat

#Smbiz - This chat focuses equally on small business and social media marketing. It is held on Tuesdays at 8 p.m. EST under the #Smbiz hashtag. You can find recaps of each chat on their website.

#SMChat - This chat takes place on Wednesdays at 1 p.m. EST under the hashtag #SMChat.

#SocialMedia - One of the best chats on social media through a Twitter hashtag #SocialMedia – is a weekly chat that takes place every Tuesday at 12 p.m. EST. Anybody can ask questions and join in.

18Put Your Links In The Right Place
If you are sharing your content or content from other sources then the goal is to get click through and mentions. The optimum place to put a link is not at the end but the after the first 25% of the Tweet.

19Use The Right Url Shortener
In a nutshell you should use Bitly. This probably because it has become a trusted and known url shortener.

20Use Twitter Directories
The other side of searching for people is making it easy for people to find you. There are Twitter directories which do both – help people find you and help you find your target audience. They provide simple classifications to help people narrow down their search for relevant Tweeters.

Twitaholic is a Twitter directory that sorts all users by the amount of followers they have.

Loaded Web is a Twitter directory for local people/Tweeters.

Local Tweeps is another local Twitter directory for the US, Canada, and the UK.

21Understand Your Network
MentionMap is a cool network exploring tool that you can use to explore your network. Other tools that help you discover insights through visualization include: The Archivist and 5K Twitter Browser.

22Influence The Influencers
If can form relationships with influencers then it can help you rapidly get more Twitter followers. Be respectful and don’t spam people and also think of how you can likewise help them. Use your blog to mention articles by them or feature a list of key influencers you follow and why – then let them know you included them. Retweet the influencers posts and try to pose thoughtful questions that relate to a post of blog – ideally spend some time looking for a stand out question.

Use Crowdbooster to identify your influencers in your network. One word of caution though be realistic and take it in stages. If you have a 1000 followers reach out to those that have 10k followers; going for people with over 100k might be hard to get a response – however you never know and that is what is amazing about social media.

23Tweet Photos

We live in a world of imagery and marketing is rapidly moving to visual thanks to better mobile and internet bandwidths. Tweet out pictures to help build engagement. These could be useful mindmaps, pictures of an event, something that you see as awesome e.g. a location and of course great people you meet.
Some useful tools:
TwitPic - TwitPic lets you share photos on Twitter
Twitxr - Automatically publish them on social networks and photosharing sites
Tweetphoto - Photo sharing made simple

24Tweet Quotes
The occasional relevant quote can be interesting and a great way to inspire people. Try to go for quotes that really mean something to you so if people respond you can be genuine about what it means to you. Too many quotes become mundane so use scarcity here rather than blitz.

25Keep Your Account Ratio Clean
One of the inevitable facts of life is that you will need to automate some part of your social media. If you do you also run the risk of collecting followers that don’t follow back and potentially if you have automated your follow back undesirable types e.g. porn or others.

To manage your followers and non followers you need to use a good tool – here are two I recommend to people:
Just unfollow
Manage Flitter

26Use A Twitter Marketing Tool

TweetAdder is a fantastic and powerful Twitter marketing tool that can help you follow people that are your target audience.

I have used TweetAdder to build thousands of relevant connections and I recommend it to people, businesses and non-profits.

27Build Interesting Twitter Lists
We all have heroes and iconic figures that we admire. You many notice great thought leaders or people you find funny. Whatever the case produce lists in Twitter and leave them open so other people can discover and build their lists. A good list helps you have a quick source to great content for Retweeting as well.

28Know Your Twitter Etiquette
There are some courtesies to be mindful of when using Twitter and some obvious easy blunders to avoid as well.
Here is a list of useful Twitter etiquette by Jeff Bullas (great blogger)
Here are a few blunders to avoid

29Don’t Spam With Direct Messages
This might be counter intuitive but the whole auto-responder piece has killed off direct messages. My inbox is not checked very often due to the amount of irrelevant messages that flood in. Please do not use this as a feature and perhaps we can look forward to it being useful again.

30Be Funny Or Die Trying!

Some people are naturally funny, others try and there is a big space in the middle where sometimes you get it right and sometimes wrong. You will know your audience and what is right and appropriate. Adding in some humor is good for the soul – couldn’t resist it!

31Use Follow Friday

Use #FF otherwise known as Follow Friday to mention influencers who in turn will pass on and mention you to their followers. It is also worth doing this as a shout out to those followers who have mentioned you or other people great content you have come across during the week.
Most people you suggest for follow Friday will return the favor and hence help build your following. Simply by recommending others on #FollowFriday, you gain new followers from those people that reciprocate.

32Get Feedback – Use Polls

You can use Twtpoll to get quick and easy surveys back from your followers and if you ask for it be to retweeted it can spread further and get more Twitter followers.

Twtpoll Intro from 63 Squares on Vimeo.

33Harness Your Content
Tweet old post is a very cool WordPress plugin that will Tweet out old blog posts and you can assign a hashtag as well. Blogs have a short life but by using this new people can discover your older blogs and engage with you. This helps you to get more Twitter followers who might otherwise have missed the post.

34Get The Right Ratio
Keep a check on your ratio as it does affect how people follow you. Use tools to unfollow people that don’t follow you back. I leave it up to you as to whether you follow back or not. Some people prefer it others don’t.

35Tweet During Peak Times
One of the busiest days for Tweeting is Friday (yes it is all those weekend plans buzzing around). With more people Tweeting more people are also listening. Choose a good time to post in your quality content. Don’t be afraid to change the heading and try different titles for the same content – you can learn a lot from this.

36Pay With a Tweet
If you have some high quality content then you can use Pay With a Tweet. You are asking someone to either buy your product or Tweet it out instead. This is a great way to promote your Twitter account and get a lot of exposure. The trick is to have a product that is perceived as high value.

37Use a Social Locker With Great Content
Another interesting use similar to Pay With a Tweet is to ask people to Tweet out a page (landfing page typically) in exchange for getting a download e.g. an eBook. Take a look our free content marketing eBook and Tweet it out if you want to see the social locker at work

38Run A Contest

Run a contest on Twitter – people love prizes and if it is relevant for your audience you will be amazed at the results.
Ways you can run a contest – follow to enter, add a caption to a photo, best 140 character response to a question. Make sure you follow the official rules laid out by Twitter.

Don’t forget to be transparent about the contest rules and how you select the winner. Oh and don’t forget to announce and celebrate the winner.

39Change Your Header and Background
Many people keep their backgrounds the same no matter what. I think it is good to change it and show off different pictures of your products and people. It often gets a good reaction from new followers and people.

40Install a Follow Button With Your Author Profile
A simple thing to do on your website is to include a follow button and also show how many people are following you.

To do this go to Twitter and follow the instructions.

41Ask A Question
You can make statements all you like but interaction is where you get more involved with people and create true engagement. It takes time and you have to have to respond but this is the beauty of Twitter. Pose a question and go for it e.g. what times should you start sipping wine on a Friday!

42Integrate Your Offline
If you are going to events in your industry see if there is a common hashtag being used for that event that you can use to develop relationships. If there isn’t one then it could be your chance to create one and lead the conversation for that event. Don’t forget though to simply have your Twitter account printed on any leaflets, business cards and other material you give to potential new customers and people you meet.

43Release A Report

If you generate a report or commission one you can use the statistics to fuel a whole host of Tweets which will intrigue people to find out more. Use this as a method to get more Twitter followers and create engagement around the report topic.

44Take A Different View
Sometimes it is easy to go with the flow. If you look at blog posts that often do well though and provoke lots of comments, they often have taken a unique or different angle to the normal.

45Guest Post

46Create Killer Headlines

If you want to get high number of click throughs on your Tweets, get more Twitter followers you need to spend time coming up with headlines that are going to grab peoples attention. Copyblogger came up with some awesome formulas to help you as a starting point.

47Advertise Your Vacancies
If your business is doing well use your Twitter account to advertise your vacancies. If people think they might stand a chance of applying for a job they will keep an eye out on your Twitter feed.

48Drop In Ideas
We all like to pick up on new ideas and contribute our own thoughts, that is hone of the drivers for how we collectively use social media to create new solutions e.g. crowdsourcing. If you have seed ideas and want to expand them Twitter can be a great platform to develop ideas and connect with others who find it interesting.

49Create A Story
We all like stories, we are hardwired to listen to them and if told well people will follow them. Using the tools I have mentioned you can create a story about your business or you, using photos, Tweets, video and build it out. Create excitement and anticipation and you will have a winning formula.

Check out these examples: Neil Gaiman, Real Life Breakup.

50Blog A Summary Of Your Top Tweets
Occasionally you could make a blog from the Tweets of the week and top answers from people. If you are using WordPress there is a cool plugin called Twitter Blackbird Pie. By grabbing the url of a Tweet you can easily embed the Tweet in your blog. See this post on TechCrunch for more detail.

Pull It All Together
Perhaps the most important part is to pull it all together from strategy through to implementation and develop a plan that is going to work for you. Get that right and you will be on the road to become a Twitter rock star and really grow your business.

How Facebook Can Hurt People

Gary Fox — Tue, 07 May 2013 14:52:07 +0000

Social media is an amazing tool that can help people connect, inspire, share moments in their life as well as make new discoveries. But like all tools it has a another side to its use.

Businesses that do not guide people about by using social media policies run risks. Equally the majority of parents underestimate the use of the internet amongst teenagers. Whilst parents are concerned about the situation (69% of parents of online teens are concerned about how their child manages his or her reputation online – SourcePew Internet), many do not know the extent of the interactions teenagers have online.

On average, teens spend about five hours a day online, while parents think their kids spend two hours a day online – source McAfee Digital Divide
67% of teenagers say they know how to hide what they do online from parents

Social media is a risk as much as it is a tool for socialization nowadays. Facebook is particularly high amongst sites which have been noted for alarming misuse by users. This includes harassment, cyber bullying, sexual preying, compromising of important company information and overall waste of time. Teens and employees have come under the most fire when it comes to being targeted for certain kinds of information shared over the social media giant. Statistics say that teens have been involved in or targeted by mis-users more than we would think. Also, employees take advantage of lax social media monitoring policies.

This is perhaps why teenagers themselves are in fact moving away from the platform. I don’t think they are magically migrating away to another new platform, although Tumblr is proving popular.

It is that they simply can use so many other ways to connect with their friends. Instant messaging has overtaken SMS (text) messaging growing and apps like Whatsapp.

Mobistealth, have produced a great infographic that highlights the problems that both businesses and parents face with Facebook in particular.

Parents need to support their children, understand the issues and equip themselves with the right tools as well as make sure that they understand the extent of the problems. Simply trying to stop children using these platforms is not the answer. Facebook itself does have a section on reporting abuse but often the damage is already done. Many parents allow their children on to Facebook below the mandatory age of 13, often without guidance, exasperating the problem and risks.

What do you think?

21 Quick Tips On How to Write A Blog For Your Business

Gary Fox — Sun, 05 May 2013 20:03:51 +0000

Do you want to improve how you write a blog for business?

Here are 21 tips on how to write a blog for your business blog in a step by step way. Below the how to write a blog for business graphic is a few tips on each step to help you get more clicks, more traffic and build your brand community.

21 Tips On How To Write a Blog For Your Business

My father always used to lecture me of getting the foundations right, getting the research or work done so you know what your doing. As a teenager whilst that was good advice I often ignored it and learnt the hard way (luckily no serious damage was done only some minor accidents e.g. a tree house that fell down with friends and me in it). His approach did make sense despite my impulse to just jump in and do it.

If you want to learn how to write a blog then you need to understand your customers and write content that they are going to find useful and engaging. Do your homework and you will get more traffic, more click and more leads. However, it does take time to get it right and for your content to be on target with your customers. You need to prepared to make mistakes and learn from them. Here are 21 tips to help you write a blog for your business and get better results.

1Targeting Your Customers

When you are learning how to write a blog you can easily spread yourself too thin and you will not get the results you are looking for – staying focused is critical.

Key action – write down who you key target customer is just one e.g. if BtoB: size of business, number of people, turnover, their sectors, greaography…
narrow down your marketing to niche market/market segments – think long tail here
Use marketing personas to build out who you are targeting and give them a personality.
Use any data you have to support your marketing persona e.g. age, demographic data.
Check with others in the business e.g. sales, customer service – that the persona(s) are right.

2Find Them Online

Understand where your customers spend time online and you will be able to listen to them and connect in the right places.

Key action – Write a list of the channels/forums/communities they use e.g. key Linkedin groups
Look at the demographics e.g. Pew Interest, but then dive deeper…
Play detective – here is a great article by Jay Baer

3Social Media Listening

Set a budget for the tools – whilst some are free, the better ones do cost but are worth the investment.

Key action – choose 1-2 tools and get to know them really well. Budget for them.
Here are a few social media listening tools
For a deeper dive into social media listening and monitoring – here is a comparison of the main tools

4Understand Their Problems

When you are trying to master how to write a blog always put your self in the shoes of your customers. Listen to their problems – what information are they searching for, what service problems do they have, is their misunderstanding about a product or service, do they have wishlists…

Key action – Write a list of the most common problems, gaps in information and issues
Prioritise your list

5Identify How You Can Help Them

This is where you need to be realistic and match what you and your business are good at to their problems.

Key Action – With the list of problems highlight the ones you are confident that you can write about and fit to your business.
Draft a list of ideas around each problem – this will be used later

6Review The Competition

Take into account what your competition are blogging about, what topics tehy are focusing on

Key actions

Identify their key topics e.g. categories on their blog page
See what posts have been popular and assess why
Identify how you can be different / better than them
Don’t be a copy cat

7Identify How You Can Help Them

What do you stand for and why should people follow your – what is the core message that will attract and be relevant to your audience.

Key Actions

Develop an easy strap line that helps people understand what your about
Build your message into your blogs and communications

8Set Your Goals, Objectives and Metrics

This is the critical part. If you are going to invest in blogging set your self some clear goals for the results. What do you want to achieve (be realistic) and what business benefit will it deliver e.g. 5 leads per week.
Key Actions

Use SMART objectives (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timed)
Be sure you can measure them
Produce a spreadsheet and plan out your targets by week/month and then your results

9Develop Your Strategy and Tactics

Plan in the strategy that is going to work for you – how your blog content fits to your overall marketing plan and communications mix.

Key actions

What are the key resources and actions needed to achieve your goals?
What are the daily/weekly tasks you are going to schedule?

10Build Your Blog

A good blog needs a good home. Invest in a WordPress blog that is going to fit to your brand and be easy for people to engage with.
Key actions

Make sure you choose a responsive theme – the rise of the mobile consumer is here see these stats
Build in the styles and design features that can help your blog stand out
Blogs are increasing becoming more visual so add in the styling that will help you produce a good visual layout – think more magazine than blog

11Build Out Marketing Functionality

Your blog needs to be able to turn traffic into buying customers and to do that you need to have the right marketing functionality. Looking good is not enough.
Key actions

Build in your key conversion points and methods to convert customers
Add in tracking e.g. goals so you can measure performance

12Link Your Social and Email

Key actions:

Hook up your blog with your social networks so that people can easily share your content.
Also build in your email subscriptions to build your email list.

13Develop Your Editorial Calendar

This is probably on of the most important steps. An editorial calendar will help stay focused and give you a good schedule to work to. It is even more important if you have more than 1 person in your business blogging.
Key actions

Be realistic and don’t forget to add in the other content that you are producing
Balance out your categories to make it more varied and interesting for your audience

14Research Your Keywords and Phrases

Key actions

Do you keyword research and focus on the long tail keywords and phrases for your niche
Optimise your on page SEO as well for each post e.g. use Yoasts WordPress SEO plugin

15Develop Your Killer Headlines

Your titles make the difference between a click and no-click a share and just a read. Spend time coming up with awessome titles.
Key actions

Key Actions

Think like a magazine editor here
Download our content marketing guide and use our list of formulas for killer headlines

16Write Your Blog and Format

Write your blogs and rewrite them. Find your own personal voice and practice – it takes to to develop a writing style that is right for you. Write as if you are talking to your marketing persona and helping them.
Key actions

Don’t be afraid – everyone goes through times of uncertainty and doubt when writing. It can be hard but bit by bit you will improve
Remember there is only one you and that is unique and special use it to to your advantage and intertwine the personal and business
End each post with a call to action or ask for people’s opinions

17Publish To Your Social Networks

You have to promote your blog and ensure it is found.
Key actions

Publish to your main social networks and invite comments and feedback

18Respond To Comments

Comments are the gold of blogging and so actively invite comments and always respond promptly to them

Use a good commenting system such as Disqus
Respond and be helpful, never rude. Remove any spam to keep you blog clean

19Track Your Performance

With each blog post you move one step closer to achieving your goals. Track your metrics and review regularly.

20Rinse and Repeat – Improve

Some blog posts will do well whilst others may not achieve the results you had hoped for. Learn from your spikes and dips and continually refine your editorial calendar to improve titles, content and how you reach and attract your audience. Importantly make sure you are turning your blog into tangible business results.

21Don’t Forget To Enjoy It and Be Creative

This may seem obvious but have fun, enjoy it and if you are passionate about helping people and equally enthusiastic about your business your blog will do well. Experiment by adding in different media and help to make your business human. Your customers will appreciate being part of your tribe.

What’s do you think is important to blogging?

Develop Thought Leadership To Build Your Brand Community

Gary Fox — Thu, 02 May 2013 18:57:56 +0000

Do you want to be a thought leader in your sector? Why I hear you ask and is it worth it?

Well no matter how you look at it the people or businesses that lead with regular advice, useful information and provide helpful tips lead get more traffic and more business. At the top of the tree though are those that set themselves apart from the competition and provide thought leadership e.g. Seth Godin.

There is a lot of duplicate content on the internet. This is to be expected. Most people have learnt from others sharing information, whether at school or less formally on the internet. Others have practiced their skills and learnt from experience; they have picked up the tools and used them. Whether you have developed your skills one way or another or simply a blend of the two doesn’t matter. The important part is not just what you learn and but how you improve on that; how you take what everybody else sees and knows to make it your own.

There are quite a few different views on thought leadership which I won’t labor you with but I have listed out really good articles on this below:

Wikipedia – which tells you that thought leadership was coined in 1994 by Joel Kurtzman who used it as a theme for interviews-nice way to appeal to an the prospective interviewees.

Michael Brenner article on Forbes – giving his view on thought leadership. A great article however I don’t think it comes from everyone.

Mitch Joel (a thought leadership) – gives his view and a very good one on Thought Leadership – self deprecating but hits the mark with thought leaderships now becoming celebrities and as a result attracting traffic and clients.

The point of thought leadership is to cultivate it. It is a title that you do not claim yourself rather have it given to you by your audience because you have earned it. The key to it is that unless you try you will never get there, so you need to start somewhere and recognize your speciality (or cultivate those that have it in your organisation). Normally thought leaders are also, but not always the innovators, the ones that take a different view.

Now this all sounds grand but how do you actually apply it to yourself and your business, your content and your audience.

Starting The Journey

One of the core principles of marketing is to be different to your competitors. If you take your content and your communications do you really want to just put out the same messages as everyone else (a me too product or service) or do you want to carve out an audience and create your own tribe. I refer here to Seth Godins book on developing a communiity based on knowing your difference and harnessing this to build a community around you like that. As Seth talks about in his book, Tribes: We Need You To Lead Us, some people will not want to be in your tribe, they will not get you and what you stand for, but that is OK. Your difference becomes your strength.

If you have time here is his Ted Talk On Tribes

If you have a passion for your business, a clear and unique identity and know who you are targeting then you will attract those that want to be in your tribe. Businesses that clearly define their audience and their purpose perform better than those that simply fudge it. If you have read any of the books by Jim Collins, such as Good to Great, he talks about defining what makes brands great. One element is understanding your difference and being good at it.

Key Points

Write down 5 things that make your business different (that really are different)
Look at your brand and content and check to see if that is clearly expressed
Some key differentiators can be:

How well you understand your customers – insights, research and collaborating with them
The knowledge and specialist skills in your business
The passion of your culture e.g. Zappos
The information you share and ideas your co-create with your customers

Unique and Original

There is only one you. You have thoughts and opinions that make you unique. I have been amazed at how some people really under value their expertise, yet are clearly way ahead in terms of their thinking and provide real value to their clients. If you are not a thought leader though it doesn’t mean you can never be one. Being a thought leader isn’t an overnight turnaround, it takes time and involves developing and marketing your ideas through your content and communication channels. Here are some ways you can develop your a plan to position your business/yourself as a thought leader:

provide insights and generally be highly creative in spotting and solving customer problems – some of the best bloggers/thought leaders do both.
Take a view on a popular trend and create a unique angle on it – make it your own. Back it up with a logical argument and/or data
Work with your employees and customers to co-create new ideas and foster innovation – not the idea box though! Connect with people put some resources and money behind it, plan it and make it a part of what you do.
Curate content but make sure you add your stamp of identity on it, your personality and thoughts
Sponsor research in your market or conduct regular research yourself

A Social Business

A social business has a team of people collaborating and working together who align the overall business objectives. Increasingly we are seeing the power of the collective produce amazing and innovative results e.g. KickStarter. Internally in your business you can innovate. This translates into collaborative frameworks, open architecture and social business tools e.g. Yammer, Jive…Externally social initiatives reflect the inner brand culture and marketing is a team effort (not all members need to be dedicated to marketing). Thought Leadership then becomes a team effort and results in ideas that can marketed (e.g. content marketing) and used with clients.

If you a small business then you can equally use your customers to help develop new ideas e.g. competitions, prizes. If you look at P&G or Dell for instance they regularly are crowdsourcing ideas that have not only sdaved them heaps of money from research and development but also helped them stay competitive.

Final Thoughts On Thought Leadership

There is no denying that developing a thought leadership position is worthy in todays socially connected world it delivers:

Authority - positioning you as an expert
Social Proof – demonstrations of expertise, evidence through reviews and other social commentary
Scarcity - can position you as the person to talk about and therefore a rare commodity (with a similar profitable price tag)
Influence - the above points relate to Influence as detailed by the expert Robert Caldini
Influence counts – it is what persuades people to like/follow and buy and for that reason it provides commercial value

If your have good ideas you can often be shy about sharing them, worried about people criticising them or simply not getting it. I came across this blog by John Saddington at Tentblogger (an awesome and much admired blogger). He lists out ideas that he has had and they are good ones, that he simply hasn’t got time to develop but may spur others onto greater things.

I think this form of sharing ideas and leading with them helps build throught leadership. I am not advocating giving away a potential patent or breaking confidentiality or losing your IP. This is more about leading with ideas, often experimental and involving others in your community to gain feedback and build on them. Working in a bubble rarely works for people, it is often through discussions and being moulded by others that ideas take shape.

Have a look at this RSA animate about ideas.

Social Media and The Three Little Pigs

Gary Fox — Wed, 01 May 2013 13:58:29 +0000

Is social media missing the story?

The Story So Far

We have all grown up with the famous story of the three little pigs (although I like the alternative 3 little wolfs variation as well). The moral of the story is obvious people who work hard and smart get ahead. In the story they get the right materials together to form a solid house.

If your house is your brand then the materials are the mix of marketing communications you use and how you mix them together. But materials alone won’t create a solid brand (house), what you need to do is use the glue that holds them together and that is the narrative, the stories you build into your business – not just about you but your community, the tribe that you develop and foster around your brand.

Take a look at this story and listen to how it captures you.

In marketing you wouldn’t build a brand solely using social media – it is just not good advice. Social media is just one part of the marketing mix, the materials that we need for a solid brand.

Likewise the idea of solely being digital is not right for every business, it is important to recognise and use offline marketing (if it fits to your target customers). Again as a stand alone focus it will deliver results but be limited. Like the 3 little pigs using the right materials are vital to a solid marketing strategy. Blending the offline and online is powerful and you can see it in every industry where people harness the power of events to facilitate offline community to compliment the online.

If you look at iconic brands such as Harley Davidson this is exactly what they do. They build their brand using a marketing mix that not only creates a great house but they also tell the stories of how it was built, who built it and they facilitate the tribe – see this great Prezi presentation on Harley Davidson for more information.

Another iconic storyteller is Pixar, they make the most amazing stories. But how do they do this and what can brands learn from this. Andrew Stanton in this Ted Talk discusses storytelling and the master rule that any storyteller needs is to make the audience care. Stanton delivers and awesome presentation on the power of the story. People will follow you for great content, but touch their hearts and you ignite the passions.

Social media is often portrayed as based on self-interest. People on social sites are looking for resources, materials and information (content marketing) but they are also there to make connections that move them forward, make them feel part of something. This is where you move from pure content marketing to delivering a brand. I often see this part forgotten about when I read through blogs on content marketing.

Content defines the value to your customer - why people will either ignore it or share it. But there is another part to content that goes beyond the useful, informative and helpful – it is the story. As we have increasingly turned to online as are a source of information we have created spaces. These spaces can either be filled by the stories we share, the human elements and frailities that openly declared break the walls of silence and allow us to learn. These are the digital campfires around which people gather and share stories.

If you build your brand make sure to leave spaces for the stories and your tribe to build the camp fire so they can tell you their stories.

Mixing the Bricks and Mortar and Working Together

So if we return to the three little pigs story – our brand should consist of mixing our marketing communications to produce a solid house and the people we invite to help us are our customers; because if they help you (and more importantly want to) your brand will be made from solid foundations and you may well develop a community that is as passionate as brands like Harley Davidson.

Listen to and tell their stories to fuel the conversation, provide the momentum to being social and humanize your brand. The brand becomes the facilitator and helps to solve the problems of the community which in turn it will grows.

Putting the Story back into Marketing

So what is the role of social media? Again this is big subject but here are a few reasons why it is an important part of any business now:

people trust people (Source Nielsen) and therefore we look for what are friends or others say about brands/products and services
brand communities can provide an ongoing development of a relationship with brand as opposed to a start stop approach
brands can understand (and quickly) what their customers are saying – a dynamic feedback loop to develop and fuel how products and services evolve and improve
researching customers (you can understand their online/offline behaviours and refine your marketing. This should build in how you deliver value to them.
using tools to cluster behaviours and segment your community you can use the data to gain deeper insights into your customers needs
the story becomes part of the brand and gets told and retold, they become the memories that provide connections between people and that is worth a lot

This is by no means an exhaustive list, it just meant to illustrate the opportunities and relevance of being developing your own tribe. In todays world we want the human connection as well. We can never underestimate the power of the human story, the connection we feel with it and the emotions that they evoke. Look at some of the highest ranked video’s on YouTube and you will understand what I mean. When done well, social media builds as the brands facilitate the story of others as well as solving problems, communicating relevant messages and adding value it can also tell the stories of its people.

Will you make your social media story count?