Twitter

Twitter is still an enigma to many of us and seems to be a much more difficult transition from the comfort of a blog than some of the other social platforms, most notably Facebook with its very slow moving interface.

What is twitter for?

So twitter seems to have started out with a relatively cult following and had gathered some pretty bad press about the mundanity of updates from attention starved teens and this only gave insight into their eating habits and how they feel about the latest My Chemical Romance track. However that is no longer the case. Don’t get me wrong there is still a large amount of personal affirmation on Twitter but this need for approval and self worth is exactly what makes it a perfect place for relationships to flourish.

Twitter is used for extremely fast moving communication and sharing. It is all about the conversation, just having automated posts broadcasting your lastest product or deal is not going to get you anywhere and the frustration will cause you to drop the platform all together.

So what do I do?

Like I have said it is all about the conversation, without it you are going to lack any real value. That leaves one option, get involved in the community that you want to be part of.

There are a number of ways to get involved, here are a few.

• Set up searches
• Follow people who are interested in the community
• Retweet anything that adds value to your followers
• Mention people that are talking about the industry
• Follow influential users
• Just get talking!

TweetDeck – Accounts and Searches

Time to set up searches, but why? What you want to achieve is to find users that are interested in what you have to offer and to find people to follow and get into conversations with. A search is literally that, you are just searching for a particular phrase or hashtag. Now I may have just baffled you there but ‘hashtags’ are used on twitter mainly to show what the post is about. So for example, if I wanted to tweet about this blog post then I could say something like:

“Social media basics: How to effectively use twitter #socialmedia #twitter #guide”

#hashtags have to all be one word, there is no way around that. You would set up a search for each hashtag that you want to follow.

For this I would suggest using TweetDeck to begin with. It is free and great for searches.

Here is how to set it up:

First lets add an account

Now lets set up some searches

Now you just need to keep following the searches that are relevant to your business and start talking to people who are interested in the community that you want to be part of.

Mentions

Mentions are one of the most important parts of twitter, this is how you have actual conversations with users. There are 2 ways of mentioning someone. The first is just by including their ‘handle’ in a tweet, a handle is their username so ours is @WeAreUpstream, you would just include that anywhere in the tweet and we would be notified of it. Like below.

The other way is to reply to a post, this makes the reply not show up in your followers timelines. This is very good when having a conversation but not good if you are trying to make public tweets. Example below, the examples are using TweetDeck but it is possible to do all of this in the web browser version of Twitter.

Retweets (RT)

These are used when someone posts something that you think your followers will like. Again this can be done in two ways. There is a RT button which on TweetDeck is the arrow pointing right. The other way is to copy the post into your own update bar, add RT at the front followed by their twitter handle. Like below.

Now you have all the tools and know how to get you going on Twitter. Jump in and give it a go. Make sure that you get involved, you don’t have to go head first but make sure that you keep it up. Make twitter part of your daily routine, TweetDeck should help with this as it is always on your desktop.

Good luck!

Facebook

So you now have hundreds if not thousands of likes and followers. That’s fantastic, time to relax right? Wrong. Now is where the hard work begins it is time to build a solid community.

Imagine you are planing trees. Yes you could get a forest in no time with fast growing soft wood but a hint of wind and they will all come crashing down around you. Lets look more in the long term and lets plant some redwoods.

In order to understand what you need to do you firstly need to understand how the platforms work. Today I will be discussing Facebook.

Edge Rank

Facebook has a News Feed for all users. This is where all the latest and greatest posts from friends family and brand pages end up. There is the option of viewing the News Feed in a number of different ways, however one is the most common holding somewhere in the 90% range of all users so this is what we will be focusing on.

These highlighted stories used to be known as “Top News” so if you dont think that you have seen it before then don’t worry. Now this is where things become a little less clear, there is dark magic afoot that Facebook likes to call “Edge Rank”, I know the terminology is racking up here. I will put a little glossary at the bottom for reference. Anyway Edge Rank is the equivalent of Google’s algorithm for rankings however is individual to every single user. Basically Facebook looks at a number of different factors that affect how well your posts rank.

So the 3 factors that contribute to the Edge Rank of your posts are

• Affinity
• Time Decay
• Weight

Affinity

So. Affinity is the affinity the user has with your page, this is worked out by how much interaction there has been between them and you. So likes, comments, pageviews all add to the score and each different interaction carries different scores. These have not been disclosed but the deeper the interaction the higher the score, so a like is worth less than a comment which is worth less than a share.

Time Decay

This is fairly self explanatory but often overlooked. Basically time decay is the time between your post and when the user views their News Feed.

Weight

This refers to the score given to your post. Again there are is a logical progression to this without there being a definitive score. A text update is the least valuable, followed by links, pictures and video.

So from that I hope that you can see. What you post and when you post are very important if you want that top spot in the News Feeds of your fans. With affinity you have the advantage that a page like gives you a good affinity score so likelihood is that the first couple of posts from when they initially like the page will be seen, this is the time to hook them in. You need to tailor content to suit your audience, if you are not sure what to post then ask yourself this question “Does it add value to their day?” if the answer is no, try harder.

My theory is that if you post the same type of content all the time then not only will you get a lower interaction rate, I think the weight attached to the post will drop. This is only a theory and not proven, however it is always really good to switch up what it is you post. To begin with you need to experiment to find out what works best, if you get 20 likes at 6pm and 1 like at 4pm then you know when you should post. Each individual page will have a different optimum time to post, but if you take in to consideration your demographics then you can take a fair guess at when they will most likely be online. This will act as your starting point for experimentation.

Text is not always bad. Take Snoop for example. 1 text update got an amazing reaction from his fans.

OK so you have your time to post and you know you need content. We are making solid progress! Now how best to decide what to post?

What to post?

Try and allocate different days to different areas of what your business does, this may sound difficult but it will give you structure and purpose when posting. Here is an example for an estate agent.

Monday: New house Monday

Tuesday: Advice on what to look for when buying a house

Wednesday: General tips

Thursday: Advice on how to make your house as sellable as possible

Friday: Surgery – Open question day

This is a very basic schedule but it will help you and your fans know what to expect from each given day.

Now as for how often you post. This is a contentious issue within the social media community but I am a firm believer that it depends on the audience and the content. So try to make sure that you are not flooding your fans News Feed with post after post but make sure there is at least 1 post per day. Even on the weekend.

There are tools that can help you with social media schedules and monitoring. My favourite at the moment is Sprout Social from $9 a month it will give you all your analytics as well as let you schedule posts for when you are too busy. Now don’t think that it means you can schedule posts and let it look after itself, social media is all about being social and getting involved in the conversation.

Time to be social!

So people are liking your posts and commenting on them. They are posting to your wall, it’s all going on! Now it is time for you to keep the conversation going. If someone comments on a post then comment back or like their post. Ask them questions and start debates. This is all fantastic for your page and the more conversations breeds conversation so things will only get bigger and bigger.

It is important that your page has a human feel to it and that people know who they are talking to. A good way of doing this is to sign each post with the posters name. This also helps if there are multiple admins to ensure that everyone has their own voice when posting.

In a couple of posts time I will cover what you do when your Facebook page has gained pace and you have a good amount of regular interaction.

One final note. Look out for spammers, they are everywhere and make your page look bad so keep an eye on it!

Around  month ago social media developers of UrberMedia launched Chime.in.

Chime.in is a new networking site where the users can share and find all their interests, topics, communities, friends etc.  Even though is very new, in the community you can find most of the topics you are interested in.

The community has a bit of everything:

• Followers

Following people on this social platform is more than Twitter followers and Facebook friends. In Chime.in you follow people because you are interested in the information they share. Normally the people share or “chime” their interests like articles, good pictures, links going to their favourite blogs.

• Shares

Videos, photos, links and comments…you can share everything you want (like in most of the platforms).

In the chimes or posts you have a maximum of 65 characters in the headline and 2000 in the “body text”. You can also add a maximum of 5 interests that here act like categories, tags or labels.

Here the Retweets from Twitter and shares from Facebook are almost the same. You can re-share all the information that the users shares, although you are not following them.

One issue I found is that I cannot send the post from Chime.in to Twitter although I have connected my Twitter account with my Chime.in. When I try to share one chime from Chime.in to both platforms it doesn’t work. Does anyone know how to do it? Maybe I’m doing something wrong but I couldn’t figure it out!

You can like what the members of this community share and at the end of the day Chime.in team decide the most popular shares between polls, links, chimes and media.

• Interests

Are you interested in photography? Fashion? Social media? Branding? You can follow these interests and make your shares be part of the topic timelines by adding “tags” when you share a chime.

For example: If I like the photography and when I share a good picture in Chime.in I can add the interest (like kind of categories, labels or tags) “photography” so those following this interest will be able to see my share even though they are not following me.

• Communities

People with similar interests focus in on a specific topic are the ones that are part of the communities. You can be member of the community and share information related with the topic of the community.

You can also create your own community easily:

1. Chose a topic
2. Go to “Build a Community”
3. Chose the interests for this community.

In my opinion the communities are the strength of this new social platform. Active users are sharing their interests in the communities making easier for us to find large amount of information.

Chime.in iPhone App

I have the iOS 5 installed in my white iPhone 4. I like all the apps so I downloaded the Chime.in app around one week ago.

The application still doesn’t have any ratings, but anyway I decided to use it. Maybe I can be the first one!

Some things I realised when using it is that the notifications didn’t synchronize with the site. If you have seen the notifications from the computer and then you go to your Chime.in app you have se same as you had before to see it in the computer.

Other thing is that the app it doesn’t warn you when you have new notifications. For this reason you have to check it every time you want to know if you have new notifications.

I like the design because with a glance you can see your Chimeline and your interests Chimelines. You have also the option to choose between two different designs:

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My Conclusion about Chime.in

The platform is quite new and I think they will be improving it.

I acknowledge that the design and functionalities are very good if you consider it is still in beta. The option to upload a background image is one thing that give a plus to this platform because you can make your profile more personal (you cannot do it in Google +).

The last few weeks I found myself spending more time here than in my Facebook so I can say that I’m enjoying it.

I think is a good place to find interesting information, are you on Chime.in? What do you think?