The next 'Wonderful Women: Minding Our Own Business' is scheduled for 23rd January. Join our facebook event to see the details.

Wonderful Women: Meeting number 3

Here is the Alternatively Lovely blog post on our meeting yesterday but I wanted to add some more detail here.

Some notes I scribbled down from our guest speaker:

  • Twitter is true networking as it was designed as an open network, as opposed to the closed network of facebook. They can therefore be used in slightly different ways.
  • Rather than a business asking what is the potential return of investing time into social online networking, they should be asked to imagine what might happen if you get left behind.
  • You need to think of the long game, and accept that it does take work, but is worth it. Twitter in particular offers such a unique way to target your market.
  • Consider what you want to happen from your tweets, do you want people to visit your website? Make a purchase?
  • Hootsuite was highly recommended.
  • Twitter makes the world transparent, and allows you to listen in, or take part with the whole world. Imagine a giant thought bubble over the globe.
  • You have to leap in with force and shout! Twitter requires a commitment but should have great long term gains. See your effort as legacy items for the future.
  • We talked about other networks we may want to join: LinkedIn, Youtube etc.
A few of the wonderful women weren't too sure about hash tags. Here is my attemt at explaining what they are:
You may see tweets that looks like this:
          ''Katie Sucks. She needs to go. #xfactor''
          ''The meeting was full of cake! #wwmoob''

The hash key acts as a way to link tweets together by a theme. In Twitter you can click on a hash tag and it will act as a link, and show you all other tweets that share the same hash tag. I have used the hash tag #wwmoob to try and connect the wonderful women's tweets together.

You may also see hash tags such as:
          ''I forget my keys and am stuck outside. #needtoremembermybrain''
This style of hash tags act as a comical/sarcastic aside, and aren't really designed to be clicked, although you could give it a go and see who else needs to remember their brain!

The hash tags are created literally by typing them in, enabling anyone to create or use them. Twitter merely recognises the # key as a search method.

You can click on a hash tag in a tweet, or you can search twitter in the search box. Give it a go, search for #wwmoob to see the couple of tweets I have made using the hash tag.

In Hootsuite you can create a stream to search for a keyword. Why not set up a stream that shows only tweets with our hash tag #wwmoob ?

    5 comments:

    1. Really interesting....wish I'd been there! When you say long-term gains what were they exactly? Do you mean just in brand awareness etc?

      Also (sorry for millions of q's) but did you discuss how many tweets a day is recommended? I was told some of the big brands do about 20 a day! Obvs that's impossible for a smaller brand, but did your speaker say anything about that?

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    2. I think the long term gains were partly brand awareness, having a concrete group of customers to market to specifically and personally, and I suppose a slight unknown. Twitter just seems like the start, and if/when it becomes even more important in our lives, we don't want to be left behind.

      We didn't talk about a specific number of tweets, but I suppose it is worth considering that a tweet may only be on someone's stream for a second (if they follow hundreds of people), or if they only check twitter once a day, they will probably miss your tweet. Hootsuite does allow you to schedule tweets, so it may be worth playing around with a regular tweet, to try and reach people regardless of when the log on?

      To me, 20 tweets doesn't seem that much!

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    3. Cheers ReeRee, yeah, I understand why they need to do so many. In a working day 20 is about 3 an hour'ish - which I would find really hard - but then half the problem for me is that I'm just not a natural tweeter! I do think its harder if you're doing it as a brand and not as a person because you can't just tweet what you've done - but then you also cant just tweet about your products all the time either. And it needs to be at least a bit interesting - I've unfollowed some peole when all they do is constantly promote their stuff. Did you talk about content much?

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    4. We did talk about the difficulty regarding personality and company twitter accounts. He did suggest having a personal account as well, and using Hootsuite to manage both with ease. All the big companies have all their staff tweeting, as themselves but advertised as their staff members. I suppose being like being able to connect to an actual person.

      Content wise, we did discuss it round about......just the need to have interesting content. Content that people may retweet. Content people want to follow. Trying to connect to communities I suppose so that they may tweet you too. You could look at Jacques cider, as they use facebook a lot as their brand, but actually use it to connect by sounding like a person.

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    5. Thanks ReeRee - great info. am going to check out Hootsuite Tout suite (sorry!) x

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