Those techniques are mostly variations on a theme, involving a combination of (at the simplest end) buying followers, and (at the more labour intensive, and masquerading as a genuine marketing skill end) following large numbers of more-or-less-carefully targeted users in the hope that they’ll follow you back. Usually not just following them, either – often you’ll be told to Like or Favourite multiple images or posts, or comment in some generic way to suggest a real interest in that user.

Meanwhile, an increasing number of marketers are arriving on all these platforms. Whilst growth has slowed a little on Facebook, Instagram is definitely flavour of the month (year, probably!) among businesses wanting to be part of its relatively responsive and active community.

And even though we absolutely think that businesses should be part of these communities, we can’t help wondering whether their presence is a benefit overall. Because the problem with “techniques” like those I mentioned above, is that it’s all fake. You don’t actually Like those images, or have any interest in what that user is going to publish in the future. You don’t care about the answer to the superficial questions you ask. It’s all about getting attention.

Now multiply that by hundreds and thousands of others all doing the same thing, and throw in the spammy “follower collector” individual users too, and what you end up with is an entire ecosystem of users who couldn’t care less about anything being said or done on the platform, so long as their web stats go up.

In case we really need a reminder, this is NOT what social media is about. It’s not what made it exciting when it first arrives, and it isn’t what keeps people coming back.

When we see how many businesses are working this way on Twitter and Instagram, we feel genuinely sorry for those marketers who are slaving away, day after day, clicking through user lists in a desperate bid to get their numbers up. Once that’s done, often by gaining reciprocal followers from other marketers doing the same thing, both of them are in the miserable position of trying to get genuine engagement from the other…see how this goes? It’s futile, exhausting, and massively dilutes the value of the social media site.

Back to reality

The cure for this is really pretty simple: stop looking at Social Media as a “tool”. It’s not. It’s a channel to allow other people to find and interact with you, and the thing about other people is that they’re unpredictable. No matter how much you’d love a 200% increase in followers / web visits / whatever, you can’t force it to happen.

If you step away from that perspective, and shift your focus to other things, it’ll be more enjoyable for everyone concerned. So, here are the top activities those businesses should do in the time liberated from hours of mindless clicking:

One: RESPOND. Look out for mentions of your business or brand, and be appreciative. Deal really thoroughly with questions, don’t just refer users to your website. Celebrate user generated content that’s relevant to what you do.

Two: CREATE. Be as creative and critical as you can of what you’re adding to the huge pool of content already out there. Make it worthwhile. The best possible images, the most thoughtful features. Share as much of the “behind the scenes” of your business as you can.

If you need a third activity, and want to get back into the numbers comfort zone a little, EVALUATE. There’s nothing wrong with spending some time analysing what type of content (articles, videos, images) and what topics, seem to please your audience most. That’s really part of being responsive.

But quit the manipulative stuff. In the long run, it won’t work. And in the short term, it’ll make your job tiresome as hell.

Don’t click!

I’m sure we don’t need to mention that clicking on links in this kind of message (anything which seems “a bit odd” for that user) is a bad idea. Reporting the user for spam is also counterproductive since they almost certainly are unaware that the messages are going out from their account. DO, though, send them a message letting them know there’s something odd happening.

A contact told me my account is spamming, what do I do?

If you receive a notification from one of your followers that they’ve had a spammy message from your account, it’s likely that either your account has been hacked, OR an application that you’ve previously authorised to have permissions on your account has been hacked or has turned rogue. In either case, here’s what you do:

1. Change your password. If you can stand the annoyance of remembering more passwords, it’s a good idea to do this regularly anyway!

2. Check your Authorised applications. To do this, log into Twitter.com and click on the far right item in the top menu – your username/ avatar with a little drop down triangle next to it. Choose “settings” from the menu that drops down.

Then, click the “applications” tab:

That will show you all the apps you’ve ever authorised to access your Twitter account. If your account is sending out spam, we’d advise you to delete all but the apps you can’t live without. If the spam continues, you may have to delete those one by one too, until you figure out which one’s causing the problem.

Make your Twitter account safer in future

To help avoid this happening again, try changing your Twitter password regularly and / or making it more complex (include numbers as well as letters, and avoid obvious word choices).  It’s a good idea to check the Applications tab regularly, and  revoke access to any apps you don’t remember authorising, or no longer use.

Have you had trouble with your Twitter account spamming? Please feel free to share any other tips for preventing or dealing with this!

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Of all the social media platforms, it was LinkedIn that dominated the discussions, but in our informal chats afterwards it became clear that many of the attending professionals weren’t sure what exactly LinkedIn is, or is for.

They’re not alone

According to Google’s keyword search tool, there were 1.8 million searches in the UK, last month alone, for “what is linkedin”. So, here’s our absolute basics guide to LinkedIn – we’ll follow it up with a second part in the next few weeks, looking at strategies for the more advanced user.

What is linkedin?

So, to start with that question! LinkedIn is a platform to help you connect with people you know in a professional capacity – old or current work colleagues, suppliers, or networking contacts.

If you’re familiar with using Facebook, the easiest analogy is that it’s a “business” version of Facebook.

Beyond the basic functions of keeping in touch with, seeking help or assisting those in your wider professional network, you are also able to see your contacts’ contacts (LinkedIn calls those your “2nd level network”) or even their contacts (your “3rd level network”). If you’re comfortable doing so, you may ask your immediate contacts to introduce you to particular people who are relevant to your business.

In addition, the site hosts tens of thousands of special interest, sector and geographic forums (“groups”) worldwide, has a Q&A function if you’re looking for answers to a specific question, and even allows you to create highly targeted advertising campaigns.

Should we be there?

In May 2011, LinkedIn recieved just under 3.6 million unique visitors from the UK. So yes – LinkedIn is fast becoming a “hygiene factor” for professionals and businesses; potential contacts or customers are highly likely to look you up on the site.

If your business isn’t there, the details are poor, or the key messages are contradictory to the impression you give offline, that can be detrimental to your business.

Getting started

We advise all our business customers that they should have a complete, professional looking Company page on LinkedIN, supported by good personal profiles for at least their senior managers. LinkedIn is another shop window for your business, and one which goes beyond the standard corporatespeak that many fall into on their websites. That way, even if you don’t (yet) plan to use LinkedIn for specific business objectives, it will be working positively for you.

A quality company profile

The Company page should be properly linked to the employee profiles, and copy provided for the appropriate sections on each of your key products and services – if someone has made it as far as your company page, why waste the opportunity to show them what you can offer?

Fine tuning personal profiles

Employee profiles should include a clear, professional head shot, and be reasonably fully completed – not necessarily including every detail of their past working life, but giving a full picture of their skills and experience.

Most importantly, their background information – skills and past employment history – should ideally be phrased in a way which shows the value they add to your existing customers. A personal profile isn’t just the same as a CV!

For both personal and company pages, there are applications within LinkedIn which allow you to significantly enrich the profile, using everything from slide packs to blog posts.

Join the dots

Next, you should try to connect with as many relevant people as possible. One way to do this is to export your personal email database and load it into LinkedIn, which will then show you who you already know on the site. You’ll start to receive invitations to connect, so you might want to give some thought to your personal policy around this, too.

Once you’ve got a credible presence on LinkedIn, you’ve taken the basic opportunity to give yourself and your business a positive representation on the web, away from your corporate website. The next stage is to start using the site strategically – take a look at How to be a star on LinkedIn.

Need to look great fast?

We offer inhouse, private LinkedIn training courses – a few hours up to a full day, depending on what you need!

Hoax posts or tweets are increasingly common, and often brilliantly crafted to take advantage of users’ fears, or breaking news situations.  Sometimes they’re fun, other times they’re downright sinister. Either way, if you’re using social media in a official capacity, you don’t want to be called out for perpetuating them, do you?

Why we get so many hoaxes on social media

The fast moving nature of social media sites makes them fantastic environments for spreading a hoax. Sometimes they’re just invented by pranksters wanting to fool people for the sake of it, other times they’re looking to get exposure for a particular Twitter or Facebook account.

Recognise these?

A couple of the latest viral hoaxes are pretty much representative of how many of them get started. You might have seen this popping up in your Facebook newsfeed:

This particular hoax spread so quickly because most users are aware of the “evil Facebook” concept – a critical mass of stories in the media about how Facebook is plotting to steal your data / bank account details / soul and must be stopped. Consequently they’re quick to copy and paste text like this, and think they’re doing their friends a favour.

Unfortunately most of these types of stories are wrong in one of the two key aspects – what the problem is, or what to do about it. In this case there’s some truth to the issue; depending on your Privacy settings,  Facebook’s Terms of Service allow them to make use of  (NB, not “own”, though) certain of your content – but none whatsoever in suggesting that this course of action will make any difference.

The other big trigger for hoaxes recently was Hurricane Sandy. Again this is quite typical – a big news event where everyone wants to be first to share things, is a great opportunity for hoaxers.

Within hours, this image was doing the rounds:

Looks stunning, but is totally photoshopped. That one was gleefully jumped on by skeptical types with wonderful results:

If only all hoaxes were so easy to spot.

Don’t make your organisation look bad

Anyway, here’s the thing. If you’re sending things out from an organisational account where credibility matters, it’s really not that hard to avoid passing on a hoax. Here are three ways to check that story.

1. Mainly for Twitter based scams, check out http://istwitterwrong.tumblr.com/. In fact do, anyway, it’s a fun read.

2. For Facebook, Snopes.com is usually fairly quick off the mark

3. If all else fails, simply try googling the first line of the content if it’s text based (like the Facebook example above), or a few descriptive words if it’s an image. “Statue of liberty hurricane” run through Google would show up pretty quickly that the “Sandy” image has been around for years.

Hope that helps keep your reputation in the clear – and leaves you free to enjoy the more imaginative hoaxes for what they are.

Just to recap: QR codes are those square, usually black-and-white, barcode-style graphics you sometimes see on marketing materials these days.

You install a QR code reader app to your smartphone, which is then able to decode the data held within it to perform an action – usually, taking you directly to a specific web links, but it can be to do other things such as loading business card details directly into your phone’s contact list.

QR codes aren’t at all complicated, and you can set them up for free via any number of online services such as http://quikqr.com/ or http://goqr.me/.

QR code fails

It’s quite common to see examples of marketers Missing The Point with QR codes on a massive scale.  The Point being, that you’re essentially just saving the user from doing something longhand – typing in a URL, or your phone number.

This is only really helpful if you’re going from an offline to an online environment – otherwise, the user could often just click a simple link to achieve the same thing.

So a QR code on a paper flyer might be useful; a QR code embedded in a website, which just links to a YouTube video, is not. A QR code on a For Sale sign which, when scanned, takes the user directly to the online details for that house, is very useful; the same QR code embedded in an email, less so. You get the idea.

How you definitely don’t want to use a QR code

There are times, though, when ONLY missing the point would’ve been a blessing.

Here’s a collection of QR code uses so spectacularly misguided that they verge (literally, in the case of example two) on the homicidal. We love these so much that they just had to get their own blog post here – click below and enjoy!

But before we look at O2’s response, let’s look at how not to do it. Argyll & Bute Council’s response during the enormous outcry that followed the banning of the Neverseconds blog remains a classic of the genre. A quick search on their @mentions that day revealed that they were swimming in questions, pleas, and a certain amount of downright abuse, running into hundreds of tweets. Their response:

Yeah. That’s about as running for the hills as you can get. As far as I’m aware, not one single person who Tweeted them on the issue ever received a response.

O2 didn’t play it like that. Somebody, somewhere, gave their customer service team permission to be human, and to relate to customers on their own level.  There are some great examples from during the network outage itself  in this article from the New Statesman , and you can get a flavour of how they respond below:

In a world where we’re constantly bombarded with corporate blandspeak, it doesn’t take that much to stand out; If I was one of those customers, I think the surprise of receiving a genuine,  humorous reply would probably have bonded me to O2 for life.

With that in mind, here are our three Top Tips for dealing with angry customers on Twitter:

1. Bad language won’t kill you

However you feel about swearing, for a large part of the population it’s part of everyday life and the normal way to express anger. Just because railway companies get away with putting up those signs designating pretty much anything they don’t want to hear as “abuse of their staff”, doesn’t mean you can make the rules on Twitter.  A prissy reply telling the customer off for using bad words is rarely going to be constructive.

2. Inject a little humour

Humour is one of those things that sets us apart from the animals – and from robots. Forget everything you’ve learned about appropriate corporate communications, and let the customer see that you’re a real person dealing with the issues as best you can.

3. Don’t be afraid to apologise

If the customer is complaining about obvious incompetence or failure, acknowledge that. For one thing, they’ll be so surprised that you’ll have a great opportunity to fix things while they’re catching their breath!

Of course, all of this will be of very limited value if you’ve left someone manning your corporate Twitter account in a sealed room, with no support from the rest of the organisation. The tips above will go a long way to making the angry customer > customer service interaction a constructive one, but if the lines of communication aren’t there to back it up, you’re going to run into trouble. Make sure that whoever is running your social media presence has their finger on the pulse and a clear path of escalation to senior management if they need it. Then hopefully, you’ll never have to resort to the Twitter Witness Statement like Argyll & Bute.

Running promotions on Facebook is one of the key strategies many businesses use to attract new Likers to their pages, and to increase the amount of activity on their pages. How many times do you see “Like this post to win…” or “share our page to enter” pop into your News feed? For us, it’s at least a couple of times a week.

But. Facebook has very tight rules around running contests on their platform. You know that, right? Of course you do, you ticked that little box saying “I have read Facebook’s terms of service” when you signed up for your business page.

Yes of course we’re joking. Nobody reads those things. They run to many pages, and the majority of scenarios they cover won’t apply to most users and, well, they really ought to know that “I have read the terms & conditions” is the most frequent lie of this decade. So no, Facebook aren’t making it easy for you.

Nevertheless, there are one or two areas in there which will affect most organisations, and contests are one of them. Get on the wrong side of the law and Facebook will delete your page, just like that, gone. No discussion, and we’ve only heard anecdotally of ONE instance where a company got their page back – and that was because they knew someone who worked at Facebook HQ.

It won’t happen to me, right?

Until fairly recently, we’ve not heard of too many instances of pages being deleted, but it seems to be on the increase. The notice on the right was posted by a New Zealand-based burger chain who lost their almost 10,000 fans after someone complained about a contest breaking the rules.

Other brands we know have been hit include a French clothing retailer (lost 130,000 fans) and the Indian pages for FCUK and Cadbury’s. Smaller companies don’t tend to hit the news when their pages are lost, but we’ve heard of a few.

So statistically, given how many companies are in breach of the rules on a given day, it’s not *likely* to be you, no. But all it takes is one of your Likers (or even, without wanting to be too cynical, a competitor) to complain about your page. At the click of the Facebook Terminator’s mouse,  all that time and money invested in building your community will be gone.

What can I do to protect my page?

Obviously our main advice is to read the rules, and take them seriously. Oh and make sure your agency does too, if you’re outsourcing – we’re aware of many who are running contests on their clients’ behalf right now, either because they’re ignorant of the rules or they think it’s a reasonable risk. The full Facebook Promotions Guidelines can be found here.

Secondly, stay up to date. At the time of writing, the Promotions Guidelines were updated just over two months ago. Facebook don’t make a big noise about it when they make changes, and they do so regularly.

Thirdly, if you’re going to run contests, the easiest way to ensure you’re compliant is to use a specialist application. These will keep the promotion on a separate tab on your page, and will guarantee that all the other guidelines are followed, such as disclaimers. The premium service we use to create custom facebook tabs for our clients is great for this, so give us a call if you’d like help.

Thirdly, don’t put too many of your marketing strategy eggs in one basket. Remember, you don’t have a contract with Facebook (or any other social media site you use!) and even if you do nothing wrong, they could pull the plug at any time. Try to diversify so that you’ve also got a communication channel with your customers via your website, or have encouraged many of them to opt-in to your email database.

The UK user base for Twitter is growing every day. Every time you see one of the huge Saturday night TV shows (X Factor, The Voice, etc etc) promoting their Twitter handles or hashtags, more of their mass-market audience think “hmm, what’s that all about” and many of them will go ahead and set up an account. And Twitter is addictive, so what starts with following a feed from Saturday night TV can easily become a big part of the  36 hours an average UK user spends online each month.

Many heavy internet users now rely entirely on their online experience for information – they’ve not bought a local paper in years, and usually fast forward through TV ads. So, you’re only going to get the chance to influence those people if your business is active and well connected on Twitter.

Plus, the way Twitter works makes it almost unique as a fast communication medium with your business’s current (or future!) customers.  Here’s an example of all the things one brand could’ve discussed with their customers, in just a few hours on twitter…

I already use Twitter, but how do I use it for my business?

If you’ve already got to grips with the basic functions of  Twitter, but aren’t sure how to apply it to the commercial world, here is a super-simple, five-minute outline of how to create a strategy for your business on Twitter.

Step 1: Look and learn

Before you do anything, take a look and see whether anyone is already discussing your company or products on Twitter. Use the Advanced Search function for a short-term snapshot, or there are other social media dashboard tools which can help with this – socialmention.com is one of our favourites.

What’s being said? Is there a bias towards customer service or support (for example, a lot of people complaining about a particular function of a software programme) or are people complimenting or just mentioning your company – either of which gives a great opportunity to develop a dialogue with your customers?

It’s also worth taking a look at what your competitors are doing – this is just as likely to highlight what won’t work as what will! Both of these exercises will help you with step 2.

Step 2: Twitter Objectives

Or, deciding what you want Twitter to do for you – and even more importantly, how you using it will benefit your customers. That’s the thing about social media, if you don’t offer some value to your followers, they’ll tune you out pretty quickly.

The detailed answer to Step 2 can be complex and will be different for most businesses. If you found that the answer to “who’s talking about us” in Step 1 was “nobody”, then you might want to start by changing that – even the smallest neighbourhood boutique or restaurant will benefit from happy customers giving them some love on Twitter.

Think carefully about what you could do (“find and reply to people asking for recommendations in my sector“) or say (“let followers know in advance when we’ve got a sale coming up“) which will benefit the Twitter community.

As an example, we’re always happy to help anyone who asks us questions on Twitter, but as every third Twitter account belongs to a “social media guru” we tend to focus on providing a great information feed. So although there are masses of spammy, low quality articles out there around social media, our followers know that following us on Twitter will help them find just the most important, carefully selected articles which are relevant to them as business marketers.

Step 3: Your perfect follower

Just sending out great content or being helpful won’t get you an army of  Twitter followers – at least not in the early days. You need to be a bit more proactive.

Create a “perfect follower” profile for your business.  Does it matter if they’re male or female? How old they are? Where they live? How often they tweet, and how many followers they have? You may never come across Mr or Ms Perfect, but at least you’ll know what you’re looking for.

Step 4: Build your audience

Use your follower profile from Step 3 to set up some searches, so that you can find the right kind of followers either from their Bio information, or from the kinds of things they talk about in their tweets. Join in with their conversations, but politely and without pushing your business – imagine you’re standing next to them at a party and you won’t go too far wrong.

Step 5:  A great content plan

Work out what makes great, shareable Twitter content for your particular business. If you’re a Bakery, your followers would probably appreciate recipes for delicious looking cakes – even if they’ll never get around to making them because they’re too busy.

That doesn’t mean that you’d send out nothing but recipes though. To keep things interesting, try and brainstorm at least four or five “themes” to talk about. Is all this starting to sound a bit like being in charge of a magazine? Then you’re on the right track.

Step 6: Be a good Twitter citizen

This one covers a multitude of sins, but the way you run your Twitter account REALLY reflects on your business. Everything from poor spelling to ignoring @ mentions may lead followers to draw negative conclusions about you. Spotting someone mentioning your product and thanking them, even if they didn’t mention your Twitter username, gives the opposite impression.

Avoid the negatives by checking in regularly, chatting to your “friends” on Twitter even when they’re not singing your praises, following back, and occasionally reviewing what you’ve sent out over the past month.

Then, you just need to figure out ways of creating extra positives and delighting your followers!

Get help

If you’re struggling to get from the outline above to a detailed plan for your organisation, our private Twitter training might help.

We come to your office and work through the whole shebang with you, from getting set up to fleshing out the outline strategy above. If you’re interested, here’s how to get in touch.

The theme of this last week’s work with some new clients has been disappointment – feeling that they started investing time in social media because the world and his dog had told them it was a sure fire route to business growth, and it’s not turned out that way.  But as with so many things in life, the devil is very much in the detail – So here are our  top five social media failure points, and what you can do about them.

1. Inconsistency

This one’s really a failure to integrate social media properly alongside the other regular key tasks for your marketing. You’re set up on all the main social media sites, but only find time to check and update them sporadically. From your contacts’ point of view, that means you’re either swamping them with updates (“might as well post everything I can think of on Twitter while i’m here“) or absent and not holding your end of the conversation. You’d not dream of leaving your email inbox unchecked for a week or more, so why do the equivalent on social media?

The remedy: Decide how frequently it’s realistic for you to post – and stick to it. Even a regular monthly update on your Facebook page is much better than nothing for three months, and then three posts at once. Scheduling tools like Hootsuite or Tweetdeck are your friend here. Secondly, make your social media part of your regular schedule, or get someone else to do it for you. You need to be checking your incoming contacts daily as by tomorrow, they’ll very likely have moved on and not be listening to your response.

2. Lack of reach

Like any marketing activity, only a small proportion of people seeing your communication will either read or act on it – so good reach is vital. By “reach”, we mean a sufficient quantity of first degree connections (ie direct Followers, Likers etc) and a willingness for them to interact with you in ways which make you visible to their own networks ( a Twitter re-tweet, or commenting on your Facebook posts for example).
DON’T confuse reach with the absolute number of your Followers or Likers – here’s what happens if you do.

The remedy: Sit down and take a half hour or so to develop a “good follower” profile. What type of people, in what area of the world, do you need to reach out to?

This list will have something in common with your target prospect characteristics but probably won’t be the same;  remember to allow for influencers who may never buy from you, but who can be very effective in increasing your visibility. Then start building relationships with those people, rather than just increasing your follower count with meaningless numbers.

3. The PR trap

We still see lots of businesses who haven’t understood the difference between social media and their other marketing channels, and constantly post old-style “push” marketing content. If most of your content could be summarised as “look how great we / our products are” then this may be your problem. Nobody, and I mean NOBODY, gets a social media account so that they can receive advertising, so your contacts are most likely tuning you out completely.

The remedy: This all comes down to value. You need to be offering something of value to your contacts BEYOND what they’d get from reading your corporate website or trade magazine advertorials. So, brainstorm all the types of content you could post which provide some kind of value. For example, are you tapped into industry developments and able to be their first port of call for breaking news? Can you search out content which helps them solve problems (like this article, for example )?

That’s not to say some of your content can’t subtly promote your key marketing messages, but put yourself in your contacts’ shoes: a photo captioned  “here’s Emma in her pyjamas at 5am because we’re leaving for X trade show” is much more fun to read than “we’re exhibiting at X trade show on the 12th of June”.

4. Tumbleweed

AKA, total lack of engagement. You’ve got a good, relevant following, but they don’t converse with you or advocate on your behalf. Your @mentions Twitter tab is empty apart from spammers, and your Facebook page is a one-way conversation with yourself.

Remedy: This one isn’t easy, we’d be the first to admit. People are busy, and often they’re happy to read but don’t feel the need to engage.  To help make them reach for that “reply” button, compelling content helps (see above), as does asking the odd direct question and making them think less hard about responses – yes, sometimes that does mean you’re going to end up talking about what you had for lunch. What’s so bad about that – would you refuse to discuss anything but hardcore strategy in a face to face meeting?

5. Bad Manners

You get past all the previous tests but relationships don’t progress beyond an initial contact. They comment or reply to you once, or maybe just follow you and say Hi. Then you turn them off with what they see as poor etiquette, and you don’t hear from them again.

The remedy: Make sure you’re polite and considerate at all times. On Twitter for example, consider greeting new followers IF they’re genuinely relevant and of interest to you, and starting a conversation. Check their bio before you respond . Our names are clearly in our bio, but we lose count of the responses addressed to “Rose” – not a huge deal, but not endearing either. Think about your followback policy on Twitter (and following Facebook comments by Liking the originating page). Thank people who share or otherwise pass on your content. And obviously, always reply to messages or Facebook comments!

We hope these help you in the direction of a great social media presence, and if you’re still struggling, why not book one of our private consultancy and training sessions? One of our clients this week summed up the benefits perfectly:

“I really enjoyed {the session} and found it extremely useful.  It was so great to have you focus completely on our business and make the real time changes to our pages.  I felt you really understood our products, market and strategy.”

– more music to our ears!

We do love a good infographic at Rose McGrory Towers, and this is a cracker.

7 unarguable reasons why businesses need to embrace social media, explained in the most down to earth and practical terms. We couldn’t have put it better ourselves!