Some think it’s about ‘what you ate for breakfast’, about celebrities and full of junk! Well, of course with any community you can seek out and follow people who do tweet about these or are celebrities.

So, how are marketing people using Twitter? I want to share some of the findings from the recent Marketing Profs publication “The State of Social Media Marketing”. This research is based upon a survey of over 5,000 marketing professionals across the world.

Tweet Frequency

There are those marketers who post multiple tweets in an hour or day, but they aren’t the largest group. At the moment, marketers are updating their twitter accounts daily or to a lesser extent weekly.

This is good news for those people who have been concerned about the amount of time required to maintain the web presence. So, clients can be serviced and you get on with running your business without feeling a slave to your twitter stream.

Number of Followers

The jury is out about whether it is better to have a large following or a small one.

Only 10% of the marketers surveyed had over 2,000 followers with the average having 836 followers. Now that means they aren’t participating in this frenzy on having high numbers of followers with the follow-you-follow-me strategy or they want to have a large following but aren’t able to achieve this with their current tweeting activity.

Twitter is about networking, sharing and engaging with people. My view is that when you have thousands it is more difficult to engage when there are thousands of people unless you have a persona, time and respond to all mentions.

Benchmark Data

Account                                     Tweets/day      Followers         Follow

Research – avge                      ?                    836

@karenpurves                          4                 3500            200

So, how do you fit these findings fit with your Twitter experience? Add yours in the comments below.

I’ve been on social networking sites since 2005 and have seen a huge change in the way these are used and the volume of activity.  Although, I keep up with the technology, what about doing it?

Well, just this morning, I left lots of Linkedin groups because I found myself unable to keep up with the volume of information. By taking this into account, I have changed the way I tweet and use groups. I may appear to be more of a lurker now but, just as in face to face meetings, when the quiet ones speak people take notice. Well, in social media this maybe a foolhardy tactic and I will let you know in due course

So, what am I doing on social media?

I am blogging, tweeting, linkedin and  having a light touch on my Facebook fan page.

But, this year I am deepening relationships with people I “met” last year and seeing where this takes us …. After all social networking is about relationships, rather than noise and even in cyberspace that takes time.

How is social networking for you?

The opportunities are endless. You can network at any time of the day or night – face to face and online.

The big question is “Have your Social Networking skills and practices kept pace?”

What are the changes?

• Small Business Networking is now one to many and many to many than just one to one.
• Business Networking and your website are intrinsically linked
• Networking effectiveness is boosted by switching from sales oriented messages to content and permission-based marketing.

To make the most of these, here are five networking tips:

1. Online Social Networking Profiles
   Create or update your online profile for all the networking groups to which you belong. Be consistent with what you write and keep them up to date.
2. Join Social Networking Sites
   Choose the ones that best suit your business. The top social networking sites are Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Generally, Facebook is great if you have a large following already. Linkedin is a business oriented site. Twitter is good for both business to business and business to consumer providing your market is there too! There are smaller ones, industry specific or geographically based. Still choose the ones best for your business.

3. Create Content
   If you are already glazing over with idea of creating articles and content generally, come back!

   With online networking, posts are like attending an event where the emphasis is on sharing information.

   There’s a bonus for this activity, you can use this content in other areas of your marketing. What’s more, you can create lead magnets from these and the comments received!

4. Comment of what’s being said
   Monitor what others are saying and add your thoughts – just as you would in face to face networking. Remember, nothing is deleted on the internet, so keep your comments in line with your business aims and values.

   People buy from people they trust and the easiest way to build this is through consistency.

5. Have 121s
   It doesn’t matter whether you network face to face or online, you want ways to explore potential. A 121 over the phone is a quick and easy way to decide how to move forward even if that is to arrange an appointment.

These are five networking tips you can do today and over time they increase the effectiveness of your marketing. Tell me which of these are doing now?

How to post advice – There’s tweetiquette, the latest post by Lisa Barone offers a concise list that’s practical and full of common sense.

Business Building Advice -  There are marketing consultants saying that you have to build a huge following to be effective on Twitter.

There are those that say you have to be consistent and tweet so many times a day.

Now, really, twitter is done when you have time to do it. If you are permanently on twitter then perhaps you could do with looking at how you manage your time and whether twitter is bringing in the business.

A Personal View

I’ve been using Twitter since July 2008, and that seems an age in social media terms.

I’ve had business from it.

But, the most important thing is that I have connected with people who I may never of otherwise. I’ve connected with people on Twitter who are also friends on other sites. And, because of that, I don’t forward my twitter stream to other sites, the reason being that people want to know about what I tweet about.

And if it was the same as in Facebook, Linkedin or other forums, they wouldn’t bother.

Twitter is just one aspect of your marketing and just how important it is depends upon whether your market is on twitter and that they buy.

Tell me how you experience Twitter because there are as many ways as there are people!

But, is Twitter the driver for all applications?

I say No. For the simple reason that Twitter has its own vocabulary and, even though there are millions of users, not everyone will be familiar with it. You could be reducing your impact by continuing to use it. To quote Lee Iocacca, “Talk to people in their own language. If you do it well, they’ll say, ‘God, he said exactly what I was thinking.  And when they begin to respect you, they’ll follow you to the death.”

And this is really what you want from your social media activity. You want a loyal tribe;  a tribe that consumes your products and services. You certainly don’t want to be expending effort on creating tribes on the different platforms to find that people hide you because of your constant twittering.

If Twitter is a receiver stream, what are the driver streams?

And, these are ever changing and certainly will change in how people rank their usefulness to them.  For all the sites where you are able to create material whether that’s a status update, a blog post, new video or podcast, these are the driver streams. And, it is from these streams that you turn on the link to Twitter but not in reverse!

The upshot is that people will be consuming your material in an ‘original’ form and in a way they understand.

You are then able to decide how much more you want to do on Twitter in terms of original postings.  But then it’s the community aspect to participate in and that doesn’t need to be broadcast around the internet.  As Lee Iococca says, “and, when they begin to respect you, they’ll follow you to death”

Let me know whether this struck a chord with you. Do you have your twitter posts streaming into lots of different sites? How has that worked for you?

Twitter is such a simple concept but, somehow the application can be more complex. One of the reasons may be that there are no rules. It’s open to interrogation and that’s what makes it what it is.

Twitter is still evolving. The Twitter I joined in July 2008 is completely different to October and that is completely different to now…and, it’s continuing to change.

If you want to use Twitter to increase your presence and reach, then I suggest adopting a mix of tweets comprising of:

· Your own content
Whether this is based on your own insights, blogs, white papers articles, you share with others

· Comment upon published content
Share what you find interesting and that you consider will add value to your followers. Give you comments rather than just the title and the link

· RT content received
The ReTweet is your way of complimenting the person that their content is of value. It indicates to them that what they’ve offered is of value. (This is not to be confused with being asked to RT)

· Replying to people (@ )
This is in response to the content of their tweet. This is one of the most powerful ways to foster loyalty amongst your followers

Consider for a moment, how much of each do you do? And what happens to your tweets. This dies depend upon your market and how much you have to say.

Just responding to tweets is easy and great for those who received a reply but can be pretty boring for everyone else unless each tweet is self explanatory.

Two suggestions

1. Grow advocates as followers

2. Grow your reach and tribe through your content and RTs

Advocates tend to be people who know you whether that is as a client, supplier, receiver of information and testimonials

Once you have people who RT your material, then your reach and tribe will grow. And, continue to grow providing you tweet material of value and interest.

The widely held view is that you should have balance between your follows and followers. So, let’s do some sums….

Let’s say an average Twitter user sends 20 messages per day and this is a mix of comments, RTs and original content

And a day is a 10 hours period. (I am not suggesting that you have to do a ten hour day!

So for the purpose of this exercise, an average Twitter user sends two tweets per hour evenly over the day. And, of course, this doesn’t happen in reality!

Let’s see what impact that has on your ability to consume and respond:

Follows	Tweets per hour	Tweets per day
10	20	200
50	100	1,000
200	400	4,000
500	1,000	10,000
1,000	20,000	200,000

Remember, this is in addition to what you are tweeting and responding to in the interest your tweets have generated.

Now, tweeting is also in addition to running your business sure it’s a channel but, to only a very small number is it their whole business.

If you use applications such as Tweetdeck or Outwit, you can set up groups. This effectively zones out tweets from people you are following but aren’t really interesting in.

How does this stack up with transparency?

I say it doesn’t!

This is applying the old marketing ideas and models to the new paradigm.

You can not be a member of more than a few tribes without becoming a lurker and that’s not the same as participating.

Large numbers of follows works in the short term, but we run our businesses for the long term, don’t we?

One of the favourite ways to get followers with this strategy is to find people who are similar to you and follow their followers.

Now this has two problems:

1. They may follow you because you are using the same strategy
   
   
2. They may follow you as well as the person you are poaching them from.

So, you got more followers – but is this the answer?

By poaching them, you will have a hard job getting them to switch their allegiance. Why? Well, in effect you are asking them to admit they were wrong in selecting the original person to follow in the first place.

A fallacy of this strategy is that you are building a tribe – a group of people interested in what you have to say.

If you are saying something of interest, then you will attract people because of that.

If you aren’t, then you’ll have feedback that change is required. By using the follow you follow me approach, you miss the opportunity to learn from your market – and when we deliver what our market wants then the sales just roll in.

Twitter is like new age spirituality was in the 1990s – cherry picking the bits that were nice, fun and easy to do. And, disdain for the activities that required effort, change and reflection. This is what is happening on Twitter.

Seth Godin says that if you have 1,000 followers, you have the beginning of a tribe. So, there’s a rush to get the first 1,000 followers. The predominant strategy is to follow others in the hope they follow you thereby building the so-called tribe.

But, do people follow back because they are genuinely interested in what you are tweeting about or, are they following you out of a sense of duty and reciprocation?

And, then what happens when you don’t follow them back because their tweets aren’t something you want clogging up your stream? And, there’s a tendency to dump you because you don’t follow back.

Then, there’s those people who adopt direct marketing strategies where there has to be lots and lots of people in order to have a good sales on just a 1% conversion. Those of you who’ve marketed offline will know the response from a direct marketing list is just 1-2%

So, if you want to reach your revenue targets, then this list would have to be in the tens of thousands and that means 10,000+ followers on Twitter.

I am not suggesting everyone is doing this but there are quite a few people adopting this rushing to build followers. This may be partly due to twitter showing the number of followers as if it is all important.

If you’re still reading, then what I’m saying must have some resonance.

How can Twitter be a community? A place where people feel comfortable with finding people through other people – after all that’s what networking is all about.

Guess it comes from being comfortable with who you are, what you offer and understand that relationships so take time to develop, despite the fast pace of life today.

Take your time on Twitter. It doesn’t matter if you’ve 2, 20, 200 or 20,000 followers. The only difference is the number of people who have found you, want to learn from what you say and even start a conversation in response to your tweets.

Consider the number of times your messages are forwarded. This is a measure of your standing in your community and your reach will not just your followers but those of everyone who retweets you.

This post was inspired by @sethsimonds unfollowing 45,000 and giving his reasons.

For my follow and unfollow policies, see the twitter landing page.