Twitter Business Fails

Often we talk to people about promoting their business on Twitter and all too often we are told the person running the business twitter is the office junior. The reason?...because they are young, they understand. 

A very powerful tool, twitter can get your business dramatic results if you do it right but put the wrong person in charge, or even worse you fail to understand how it works, and you could be in trouble. Here we show you some major fails, most are hilarious, some amazing but not if they are your brands.

Before a mass sacking find out how to control the twitter account

Be very careful if you create a #hashtag as Susan Boyle's management now know. There are two ways to read #susanalbumparty obviously susan album party is one way!

Twitter hashtag sessions can also go wrong as British Gas found out when they tried a question and answer session #AskBG

Meanwhile you should be careful not to let the twitter be controlled by anyone that might have slightly sexist views on the role of women. The England FA have since apologised.

 Bear in mind that everyone can see the replies to open messages and when people are a tad miffed the replies won't be great...BA!

 If you set a target make sure you reach it...

Or you will look rather silly and have to make something up, won't you Rita

Yep we all believe you Rita!

Sometimes an advertising idea can look kind of threatening like the "buy our cereal or kids will starve" message that wasn't quite thought through by Kelloggs. 

 Sometimes the people in control of your Twitter just forget which is their own account and which is the work one..

Sometimes you should just admit you gave the wrong person control of the Twitter account and your brand looks a tad, well.....not great!

That's nice from Nokia New Zealand, no less and this from one of America's top ticket sellers looking forward to a weekend off I guess.

 So maybe you should think twice about who runs your Twitter account, it could do more damage than you think.

Happy Tweeting

Manage Your Marketing Time

 

Sat here after another full on day trying to get our website in order....yep it was tired, missing bits and nothing was finished off...I feel rather ashamed that it was in such a mess. I am reminded of friends I have in various trades who are the same. Builders whose own extensions aren't finished,  gardeners whose gardens are suffering from serious neglect, window cleaners who can't see out of their own windows and on and on. Sometimes you spend so much time on fulfilling your customers' every needs and then sorting more customers that you completely neglect your own "future" business. I have now allocated time every day to get our own house in order and sort our own marketing out. Shame on me!

I should know better, after all I spend a lot of time putting other people's marketing house in order I really should know better.  No excuses!

Time to read another book on time management, or maybe just put everything I should do into practice. It's so easily done and running any business involves discipline, as you know, so I am making sure time is set aside daily to sort our own marketing out! Right back to it......customers always come first!

Targeting has never been easier!

 

 

 

We work hard to get our customers noticed on line, helping them to get to grips with social media undoubtedly works really well and is a fantastic way to grow any business without spending a fortune. Whatever marketing you do as a business needs to be cost effective but if, for a little time and effort, you can engage with an audience on social media you can get great results and the only investment you will need is your time. By targeting your audience you can effectively select them by gender, age, location, profession.

I remember the pre internet age when you could only dream of reaching people in this way. All you could do then is target people in certain ways. Leaflet drops could be targeted to certain areas (and still can, of course). TV adverts could (and can) be targeted at certain programmes to reach certain people but they would still be a broad spectrum of ages etc. Radio also could be a great source of advertising but again you can't really target beyond the fact that they were listening to a certain programme. Of course newspaper advertising has always been a great way to target areas as well but readership is always hard to judge.

Before social media came along if had gone to a company and said I could reach any specific age group you want with certain professions living in a certain area with an advert, I think you would snap my hand off. That's basically what platforms like Facebook offer you and to someone marketing their business a few years ago would seem totally amazing and to be honest, it is.

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Groups are more fun

 

Facebook Groups can get you places you didn't know you could get to! Yep definitely a place to go if you want to get to people outside of your friends group and outside the small group of page likers that Facebook actually let you get to is a group.

The best thing is it's free! Even better is that if you pick the right groups you can target the people you want to target. Many groups are set up for a reason, be that to sell things in an are or promote business in an area, maybe even to promote an interest to a group of like minded people.

So why not pick a group and start posting? No point falling foul of the posting police, so check out the rules of the group (many are set up by people who like to say say no to this that and the other) but many allow you to promote your business especially if you can do so without actually selling too obviously.

You might want to promote your business to other businesses locally and there are many groups for that or you might think a larger audience might be nice. Just search for groups, check out the rules, join and post away. Suddenly you are reaching far more people than you used to.

Tweet To Who?

 Do you like the title? I thought long and hard about that! Who you tweet to and who sees your tweets have to be the number one factor in knowing your getting somewhere. Luckily Twitter provides all the facts and figures you need at your finger tips so you can see if you are heading the right direction.

If you are going to get some traction you need some good figures and I can looking at one of the accounts we manage that this month has been a good one although we haven't tweeted quite as much, we have achieved some great results:

• Over 83k impressions
• Over 400 profile views
• Gained 16 followers

Wow not bad! We weren't looking for more followers on this account (16 is a bit pants if we were) but we were looking for more profile views and that has shot up by over 160%. This was gained by mainly by improving the impressions on this account by over 60% so not a bad result.

That's only a small insight into the approach you need to take when managing your twitter account. To understand more maybe you might visit one of our social media seminars coming shortly or even talk to us about managing it all for you.

Have a Look at What You Could Have Won

Your business image and reputation has taken you a long time and a lot of effort to build up, so don't ruin it. Don't just dabble because you have to. Like it or lump it the internet is here to stay and you either embrace it or lose out! Every day I come across businesses who have an online presence because they decide they have to but they don't want to chuck any money or time at it so what do they do? They give the most powerful marketing tool they will ever have to the office junior, the yts lad (don't think they call it that now) or even their teenage son or daughter. "Here sort that".
When I talk to them about how they can make more connections or get more work from social media or even a website, the answer is.."tried that, doesn't work".
Would you give the same person responsibility for designing the advert in the paper that you still run every week? Would you give then the job of designing your Yellow Pages advert? (Yes people still use them)
Think about what you could get from using online tools like social media platforms and websites, think about who you can get to.....It's not just kids on Facebook now you know it's silver surfers all the way so when you say...."my customers aren't on there"...no they are someone else's customers now but they could have been yours!