social media

A Twitter Case Study

Posted on September 7, 2012 8 Comments

{Image from here}

The vast majority of people I work with as far as social media and twitter are concerned have small budgets for social media. Often, those types of brands get the most out of social media because it really amps up all of the word of mouth which is what their business is based on in the first place.

But investment in social media is long term. It’s not about sales or traffic. It’s about reputation and brand awareness. And investing the time in that can take a bit of a leap of faith.

When I quite literally fell into the business of consulting I decided to do some research. If I was going to start a business, my biggest competition hands down would be those big social media consultancies who promise huge growth for not much investment. And for small business that can be tempting. Particularly when twitter offers no real promoted accounts for small players, unlike Facebook where you can pretty much set your advertising budget as you want. I had no idea what the outcome would be. Would the research show that my business of providing community growth for brands to be completely worthless, would it show that these ways of promoting twitter are completely without value or would it show me that both should be used in tandem with one another. But if I was going to venture into the business space I thought it was worth knowing.

So i picked someone and paid them a relatively small amount to promote my personal twitter account. I picked a company who I thought would do actual promotion rather than paid followers but I wasn’t holding my breath. And at the end of it I purged all the new followers by blocking each and every one of them individually, because it was for research and the research was over.

Quick Facts

Paid Investment: $200

Twitter growth: +11,000

Engagement

RTs increased by: 250%

Mentions increased by 200%

Click throughs increased by 5%

Klout: stable

Followers

I was able to estimate that approximately 25% of the accounts were genuine and 75% were not.

So where did the increased engagement come from?

From my own followers. Because the experiment had made me seem more popular than I am for a brief period of time. I’m glad that I was upfront with anyone who asked me about it – because that certainly wasn’t my intention.

And the outcome of all of that . . .

Really? The only outcome is that it made me more confident in what I do. I’m glad I did the research but for anyone looking to grow on twitter, your best option is really the old fashioned way. Although, I do think that Twitter should look into some promotion options for small business.

Twitter, I am Falling Out of Love With You

Posted on August 23, 2012 32 Comments

I have always loved Twitter.

When people mocked Twitter’s reductive 140 characters I defended it.

When people called Twitter ‘just status updates’ I pointed out that saying such a thing was a fundamental misunderstanding of what twitter is about.

When people said that they didn’t get it, I pointed out that you can meet the friends that you were always meant to have on Twitter. That you can watch the evolution of an idea as it bounces between people and turns into something else entirely. It’s the organic nature of twitter conversations that make it special. And it’s how it is not dependent upon your existing friendship networks that makes it unique.

But I am falling out of love with Twitter. Fast.

You can’t dictate how other people use social media. It’s theirs. What they do with it is their business.

I’ve stepped away from promoting posts several times a day on Twitter and am doing less brand engagement now. So I’m able to see just precisely how annoying I must have been in the past. Because now all I see is:

Self promote

Branded hashtag (i.e. free advertising)

Self promote

Ask someone else to promote me

Branded hashtag

Self promote

ZOMG this totally cool person just promoted my post

Not a sponsored tweet (because there are so many sponsored tweets that people actually have to label something as not sponsored)

And I just know that you wouldn’t have to look hard at all to go and find exactly that in my stream. And not that long ago either. But now that I’ve stepped back from it, I see it. And it’s boring. And it’s annoying. People used to talk on Twitter, once upon a time.

My hope that this is a stage. A really, really short stage. And that eventually, given time, people will go back to conversations. Or my annoyance will propel me forward to finding other people who are also of the old cranky lady variety.

All my awesome twitter friends are now my facebook friends anyway. And I can instant message and prattle away in groups quite happily all day. You are making this way too easy Twitter. And you can tell things aren’t going well if you are making me actually like facebook.

It obviously works for people to use twitter in this way and you know what annoys me even more than my twitter stream at the moment? All of those didactic posts about how you have to use social media. I have to change how I use it, so it works for me. And right now, it’s not working for me.

I am Greedy With My Community

Posted on December 13, 2011 7 Comments

I’ll be honest. The problem I have with social media is that I’m building a community away from my blog. And I don’t fancy spending hours and hours of time invested in building someone else’s platform. Sure there’s alot of mutual benefits there and you won’t see me abandoning twitter or facebook or even google plus (even though I forget about it regularly) any time soon. But any time I have the option of keeping people on my site I will. Because I’m greedy like that.
For a long while now I’ve been posting all my instagram photos to my Tumblr blog. Because I like having them all in one place where you can easily look through them all. Instagram doesn’t have this functionality as yet so it was an easy fix for me. But as I posted more and more photos (over 800 at last count) it started to annoy me that they landed on Tumblr or on Twitter or Facebook and not on my own site. Sure I can display them on my own site but when you click through it goes to somewhere else.

This is when the idea hit me. This may make me a genius or an idiot depending on how much you like the idea and how much time it actually took me to think of it. Assigning a subdomain to my tumblr blog which gives me the best of both worlds. All the traffic stays on my site but I have the ease of posting that tumblr affords.

You can check it out in all of its glory at iphoneography.goodgoogs.com

It’s pretty, isn’t it? I restrained myself and didn’t buy the $49 theme that I really fell in love with. And the geeky stats love within me is a bit taken with the fact that I can add my google analytics code to it and it forms part of my pageviews. I know, I am that much of a geek.

Recently I’ve been soaking up all the recent information about blogging I’ve received (at events and articles that I’ve stumbled across) and it’s a fine balance. On the one hand Facebook is probably where most of my potential readers are, on the other hand how much time do I invest in something that I have no real control over and essentially could be taken away at any time? Google Plus I consistently forget about but I can’t ignore the fact that the social network owned by the biggest search engine in the world and indexed by that search engine is going to have a pretty big impact.

I don’t know what all of that means (yet) but I still think that my plan to be greedy with my community is a good one.

Cracking the StumbleUpon Code

Posted on November 21, 2011 29 Comments

It’s like the DaVinci Code, only it’s actually a mystery. The enigmatic nature of StumbleUpon tends to create people who use it religiously in the hope of those viral hits or people who abandon it entirely as a waste of time.
The biggest criticism I’ve heard about StumbleUpon is not about it’s inherent randomness but the fact that it’s traffic is not engaged. They flick on by, apparently. Hundreds of hits and no comments. Well, I’ll let you in on a little secret about comments. Some blogs naturally lend themselves to comments. Like Woogsworld. That place is like comment heaven. Because it’s so funny and witty and inclusive and welcoming. And people want to be a part of that. And even if you have nothing to say, you probably want to say something anyway. Disqus helps this along, but it would be the same if Mrs Woog was using the freaking archaic blogger comment system.

But some blogs aren’t comment heaven. And only on certain pillar posts will you realise that there is a far larger community attached to the blog than you previously realised. I feel that way about my blog. I get alot of comments, which I LOVE. But far more people read than comment, and often I hear people say that they feel out of place commenting because they are not a blogger or they just don’t have time. But it doesn’t mean they aren’t engaged. It just means they aren’t always visible.

And some of the features of StumbleUpon do breed engagement. If people accept posts to be emailed to them, then you can directly email people who follow you posts that they think you will find interesting. When people do this right and do it respectfully, it is awesome. I actually look forward to every StumbleUpon email I receive from Jessica Gottlieb because she always shares fascinating stuff. Just like how the StumbelUpon toolbar gives you the option of sharing not just on StumbleUpon but on other social networks as well.

But perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself.

First things first.

Sign Up. Sign up and create an actual profile – don’t scrimp in this area. The key to bigger traffic numbers is bigger followers. No one is going to follow you if you don’t look interesting. You wouldn’t be an egg on twitter so don’t be a sillouhette on StumbleUpon.

Start following people who interest you. And start sharing things that interest you. Not just your stuff. For every 1 post of yours you share you should be sharing 10 things from other people. I don’t always do this, but I should. Because it vastly improves your impact.

If you don’t download the StumbleUpon toolbar, you might as well not bother because the whole thing would be far too clunky to utilise. So do it.

If you want others to use the StumbleUpon toolbar as well, making it easier to thumbs up your posts and share on other networks you can use the StumbleUpon url shortener – su.pr which will also track clickthroughs and additional traffic you’ve been sent.

Certain categories are always going to do well – like things people really want – humour and bargains.

And after all of that, what are you left with? What’s the bottom line?

You are not going to see maximum impact by stumbling yourself, it’s much better if other people do it for you. But posts that I stumble can get an additional zero (yes, sometimes it’s zero) to 500 hits.

The problem with using su.pr as a shortener is that google analytics treats click throughs from su.pr (when you’ve shared on twitter and facebook) the same as organic StumbleUpon traffic so it’s hard for me to actually demonstrate how engaged/not engaged the stumbleupon traffic is. Which is why I’m thinking about ditching the shortener altogether.

In general su.pr and StumbleUpon traffic when lumped together do about 10% worse than the site average. So people stay on the page a little bit less and the bounce rate is a teensy bit higher. But that’s kind of to be expected when I’m sharing a post through facebook and twitter because people read the post and then go on their merry way.

Looking at a post that I got a whole lot of organic StumbleUpon traffic from it tells me a similar story. The stats are pretty average. Which means that StumbleUpon users are sticking around as long as anybody else. If I drill down to time spent on the page on any given day it tells me a very interesting story. It has days where there is zero time which basically means people are just flicking on by not looking at anything, and then there are a few peaks where all of a sudden the average time on the site is 7 minutes, then 10 minutes, then 30 minutes. Which says to me that sure there are a good proportion of people who flick through but every now and then I catch somebody’s surfing eye and they stick around. Which is my goal. To have people stick around long enough so I can lure them into my blogging web.

Is it worth it? Only if you have the time to put into it. And alot of people don’t have the time. But it also has other uses. Do what I do. If you want to be part of a social media network but you think gee I don’t have the time. Multi-task that social media network’s ass off. So if you are going to be on StumbleUpon use it as a bookmarking tool as well. Which you can then use to save all of the tasty bits of the internet you want to share on facebook or twitter. Don’t know what to write about or stuck for inspiration? Head over to StumbleUpon and stumble topics and see what pops up. You never know, given enough time it’s beautiful randomness might even grow on you.

P.S. Totally follow me on StumbleUpon.

Join the Campaign

Posted on February 10, 2010 2 Comments

If you follow me on Twitter, or do the Facebook thing, you’ve probably noticed me babbling on about the Smart Home Family.
It’s a project run in Australia by Energy Australia and Sydney Water to trial a home that is set up with energy efficient technology for a year and blog about it. You can read more about it here. I think it’s a pretty fantastic opportunity. And given that Josh is allergic to change, I was somewhat (pleasantly) surpirsed that he thought we should go for it. He’ll drive an electric car, while I attempt to control all of the appliances via iphone. A blog will allow everyone to share in the highs, lows and general hilarity.

In the interest of taking as creative approach as possible to this endeavour, I’ve started a facebook group – please join it!

And if you have a blog, I would be eternally grateful if you linked to this post.

You may notice me a little bit more absent in Good Goog parts while I work on our application. It’s due in on the 22nd of this month. So I’ll throw everything at it. Doing anything by halves is just not me.

Banality of Cliques

Posted on February 5, 2010 12 Comments

Reading this post at Three Ring Circus today I could relate.

I never made friends easily, in part because we moved around a lot and at school, everyone seemed to have known one another since Kindergarten. It was hard to break into cliques. Especially as a naturally shy person. One time I did push past the shyness to make friends, because I was lonely, and for a time the loneliness outweighed my reticence. A few weeks later I was sat down by the group of friends and told, very matter of factly that they just didn’t want any other friends. The other thing that made making friends difficult was far more powerful. I grew up in a tight knit group, with kids my own age. So, some of my friends I have known since infant-hood, and even though some of us are seperated by oceans or kilometres, there’s still that connection that you can’t really touch. It’s hard to compete with that. It’s difficult to break into that clique as well.

It goes deeper than you might imagine. I remember a conversation with my brother at my engagement party. Someone (outside of our clique) was saying something negative about another person (inside our clique). They weren’t being particularly mean about it, but they were making a negative comment on their character. My brother shrugged it off. He said, ‘I can see how people might see her that way, but I just don’t”. What he didn’t say is that we had decades of context, of seeing that person at their best, their worst and everything in between. It’s not something that you can always explain, you can’t just boil down a childhood of shared experience into a pearl of wisdom that an outsider could understand.

I’ve always been within a clique and excluded from most others. It would be easy to think that this stops with High School, but it doesn’t. The world is full of cliques. It’s natural to cling to groups of sameness, to make us feel needed, wanted, normal and whole. There are cliques in blogging circles, and the longer I spend on Twitter, the more I notice cliques everywhere. Some that I’m included in, some that I’m on the periphery of, and some that I’m excluded from.

In a very small way, this group behaviour reminds me of the study, epitomised in the Banlity of Evil where ethically questionable experiments illustrated how the majority of people will, given an authoritarian figure and the right environment commit morally reprehensible acts in accordance with group norms. I’m not saying cliques are evil (of course) or morally questionable, but that the act of inclusion necessitates exclusion and that is completely ordinary, but also hurtful for those on the outside. My husband felt excluded from my extended family clique when we first started dating. Until he brought it up, I had no idea that I was even doing anything. Because I was just doing what I had always done.

For me, the desire to be included has always been very strong, but apparently I’m not very good at it myself. Most of the women in my mother’s group are good friends, and I love spending time with them, but I don’t call them for a chat, or see them outside of mother’s group. And that is entirely my doing. Because I feel awkward, and because I’m lazy. More often than not I have something akin to phone phobia. I feel anxious when it rings and I don’t particularly like using it either. This does not bode well for friendship making.

And cliques are here to stay. It’s now embedded in the social media revolution. Are you following them? Do they follow you back? If they don’t are you stalking them? Are you just a fan? Or is it an actual connection? How many comments did you get? And what would happen if even one of these online relationships morphed into in real life, would it survive, or would it just fall away?

I will try to forge another path. One where I don’t ask why aren’t I included, but who am I including? Where I find enough generousity of spirit to be proud of my own character.

Better than Napping

Posted on November 19, 2009 4 Comments

What could be better than napping? On a hot day like today – napping on the couch in the only air conditioned room is even better.

Although I was a little concerned that this hanging off the edge of the couch bit was a recipe for disaster. A grumpy waker at the best of times, I can only imagine how things would have gone if she’d fallen off and bumped her head. So with a little coaxing I managed to get her to move to a more secure position

You’ll note that she seems to be allergic to having her head on the actual pillow. And I had real concerns about the comfort level associated with this new position:

Tempting to re-position her again, but feared that would be tempting fate and eventually she settled into a less awkward position

And then she didn’t move for about two hours:

I love those mooshy cheeks.

But seriously, the serenity of a long nap is how I imagine heaven to be. There’s a bumper sticker in there somewhere.

And while she was doing that I was updating Flickr. Because apparently I need more ways to crush time under my stiletto. As if twitter and facebook weren’t enough.

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