Buying followers for social media: the Pros and Cons, and what you need to know

Companies selling instant Follower or Liker boosts have been around almost since the dawn of social media itself. In the early days, we assumed that these companies would die out as users got more sophisticated and more able to spot those accounts whose “popularity” was entirely faked.  That hasn’t proven to be the case at all; in fact, the industry in fake followers seems to be thriving.

So, can buying followers ever help a business be successful on social media? Are all bought followers the same? What are the implications on the different sites of boosting your account in this way? We know you’re wondering:  here are the answers!

What am I buying?

First of all, it’s important to recognise exactly what you’re buying when you purchase followers. In the vast majority of cases, you’re gaming the number that appears in your account bio – your number of Twitter or Instagram Followers, or Facebook Likers.  The number itself will be bigger, but that is the limit of the benefit you’re getting. The accounts won’t belong to real consumers in any normal sense.

The basic level – bargain basement followers

The organisations selling these followers, often based around “click farms” in parts of the world where labour is extremely cheap, have hundreds of people setting up fake accounts constantly.

The “quality” of those accounts (ie, the effort they’ve gone to to make the account look like a real user) varies from the “egg avatar with randomly generated name” type through to those which would stand up to some very brief scrutiny – that is, they have an avatar pic, something written in more-or-less coherent English in their biographies, and a handful of generic and usually nonsensical posts.

Once you have paid for the number of followers you want, the supplying company will just follow your account with the purchased quota of fake accounts. You should NOT have to supply your password in order for this to happen!

Here are the pros and cons of this cheap’n’cheerful approach:

Pros:

• These accounts will generally continue to follow you, as they’re not being used by real people;
• They make your account, particularly at a quick glance, look more popular than it actually is.

Cons:

• To anyone who bothers to look, it’s usually totally obvious when an account has purchased these followers.
• Apart from the sudden jump in numbers, the accounts themselves just scream “fake” in terms of their meaningless biographies and nonsense posts.

Below is a perfect example of a fake follower account on Instagram. Implausible name – check. Meaningless biography – check. Incoherent and random posts (and only a few of them) – check. Following a high number of people in order to get a few to follow them back – check, and very low ratio of followers to people being followed- check again.

Followers for hire

Another approach that some of the more expensive follower-sellers take, is to incentivise real users to follow your account. This can be just with a payment, or some other kind of incentive such as search credits on a directory site.

Pros:

• As they are actual social media users, there’s a (small) chance that they might read some of your content, and your product or service might happen to be suitable for them;
• They look like real, organically acquired followers to anyone examining the account

Cons:

• As the incentive is for the initial follow, this type of account is likely to unfollow over time as they purge their timelines of content that’s of no interest to them.

The real issue with bought followers

So we’ve looked at the pros and cons of artificially inflating your account’s popularity with different types of users, but of course there are much bigger implications. The only significant, long term benefit of doing this, is that your account looks more popular than it is, which may in turn influence the kind of people who regard that as an important signal. And don’t take a closer look to see who all those thousands of followers are. Therefore, you may gain some followers who wouldn’t otherwise have bothered with you.

The big downside though, is much more potentially significant, and the exact implications vary according to which of the sites you’re buying followers for.

In all cases, the number of additional followers you gain (who are maybe really interested in your product or service) will likely be a small number compared to the number of fake accounts you’ve bought. So you now have a follower base that’s the opposite of what you should be aiming for with social media – engaged advocates who are likely to show a return when you put effort into creating good content.

Now pay us to access those dead end accounts!

And where it really gets bad is if you’re going to do any paid for marketing, which these days is pretty much crucial to your long term strategy.  Twitter and Instagram (to a lesser degree) and Facebook (to a significant degree) all employ algorithms which restrict your access to your own follower base. Putting it simply, there’s no guarantee that a particular piece of content will be seen by all your followers…unless you pay for that to be the case. But unfortunately, none of the sites have a tick box for “just charge me for showing this to my *real* followers“. So you’re stuck with forever paying to show posts to that big set of fake accounts , in order to get to the handful of genuinely interested followers who are mixed in with them.

On Facebook, the situation is significantly worse. Being able to recruit your keenest and happiest customers to your Facebook page, and then market to them *and their friends*, is the real marketing gold. The social network of your existing customers is a wonderfully self-filtering group of people who are much more likely to also enjoy your product, than the average person picked off the street.

As soon as you buy followers, not only are you going to end up paying to show your posts to them, but you either have to stop using the “friends of Likers” options or end up paying to put your content in front of all the accounts who are linked to your fake followers, too. Ouch. Expensive, and self defeating.

And putting a dent in your Algorithm results…

In addition, most of the social media sites give your account some kind of a ranking figure (which you won’t ever be able to access) which influences how much priority your content is given in the timelines of your followers. Exactly how the algorithm works is very much a trade secret, but we’re pretty sure that engagement levels will be a big factor. And engagement levels are calculated by comparing your total follower numbers to the number of likes, comments etc you receive on a typical post.

So, if you’ve gained 1,000 followers organically but then become impatient and bought 10,000 more, the next time you post something, even if Jesus and the angel host are personally on your side, your engagement levels are going to look terrible because 10,000 of your followers are never, ever going to engage. So you are effectively handicapping every future piece of content you post.

(Bear in mind, that if you sign up to a social media agency who buys followers for your account, the same will apply – and you won’t necessarily be able to reverse it without binning your account and starting again from scratch….so watch out for providers delivering implausible growth rates!).

Is it ever worth it?

As with most things, there are some circumstances where buying followers could be a valid strategy – and we’re just talking from a marketing effectiveness point of view here, and leaving aside the ethical issues of cheating / misleading the public…

For example, if you need an account to look impressive in the short term, for whatever reason, and have no intention of doing paid for marketing through that account or building on it long term for genuine engagement.

If it’s on a site where you’re not really expecting commercial returns, but are using it just to influence brand perception (Instagram fits that description for some businesses).

If raising your follower numbers is the “be all and end all” for your management then yes, buying followers will accomplish that goal.

But overall, tread very very carefully. Once you have thousands of non-genuine followers mixed in with your hard-won real followers, it’s difficult to go back.

UK Social Media Statistics for 2017

The tree is down and the tinsel is wilting, so it must be time for our annual review of social media use in the UK at the start of 2017.  We do this for two reasons: one, because statistics that focus purely on UK based users can be hard to come by, and two, because it also helps us clarify our own “hunches” about how things are going for each of the major sites, and use that information when we’re working with our business and third sector clients in the UK.

There’s also some good news: UK specific statistics have become a little easier to find this year. Props must go to agency We Are Flint for carrying out their own primary research during 2016, complete with actual transparency about how the research was carried out (link below to the entire report) and Statista.com is also offering a decent amount of open source information. We’re grateful to both organisations for those contributions, as well as the other source sites linked within this post.

UK social media in 2017: general thoughts

We talked in our last annual update about the fact that the mainstream social media market is now mature. Nothing has changed there; there haven’t been any significant upsets this year, and it’s been a while since a genuinely “new” entrant offered anything different. The “Big 3″ in the UK (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn) have more or less stayed static in user terms for several years. Apart from a potentially interesting Twitter vs Instagram clash, the only action is around the smaller players and ancilliary apps like Snapchat which we see more as utilities than social networks.

We’re going to kick off this year with two charts that we think contain the most crucial information for social media strategy planning if you’re a UK business: Total UK Users by Site (based on the current “best estimate” as described below, where the site has not provided figures), and the percentage of those users who log in daily.

Remember, a registered user who never goes onto the site isn’t going to be a viable target for your marketing!

UK Facebook Users 2017

So let’s kick off our indepth review with the Big Daddy, Facebook. Once again the overall number hasn’t budged all that much; we’re looking at around 32 million user accounts in the UK. That’s been pretty steady for around three years now. We Are Flint’s report puts the proportion of over 18s in the UK who use Facebook at 78% – so still, after all these years, probably the single most consolidated channel available to marketers for accessing most of the population in one place (after snail mail, which surely only those printing their own money can afford these days!).

We also have, courtesy of Statista.com. a nice breakdown of the demographics within that figure, which does offer some interesting observations. No, Facebook probably isn’t “cool” any more. My ageing Samsung Galaxy, if it was ever cool, certainly isn’t now either, but that doesn’t stop me using it constantly.

Looking at these stats, the same is true of Facebook: the largest demographic is the 20-29 year olds, clearly showing that it’s not just everyone’s Mum using Facebook these days.

With organic post reach now sitting at around a measly 10%, the major area of interest for businesses using Facebook now is the development of new types of advertising, and the fluctuation in cost. This year we’ve seen enhancements or new introductions in ever more sophisticated ad targeting – Lookalike Audiences, Dynamic Ads and a whole suite of options around remarketing to website visitors. For large ecommerce sites this is a godsend. For smaller businesses, anecdotally it seems as though the cost of reaching the standard 1,000 eyeballs, or achieving a good volume of link clicks, is on the increase. This may be partly due to the more targeted types of advertising being more costly, which is not unreasonable if the results match up to their promise.

There are numerous studies showing that social media advertising is by far the cheapest medium.  Ad Espresso tell us that overall CPM on Facebook actually declined during 2016, but there are so many factors influencing what any individual business will spend that it’s almost inevitable that your mileage will vary. As an aside, if you’re interested in what factors affect your ad spend, and how they affect it, Ad Espresso have a superb report here covering every aspect, from ad placement to the demographic being targeted, and the day and even hour that the advert runs in.

UK LinkedIn users 2017

Like all the mature sites, LinkedIn’s growth is also slowing, but there is still some growth. Last year we had a figure of around 19 million UK users; this year the figure is 21 million. You can see LinkedIn’s own global figures here.

When planning your strategy, though, it’s important to remember that the average user uses LinkedIn very different to the way Facebook’s average user uses Facebook. And that’s why you won’t see too much emphasis on metrics such as “monthly active users” or time spent on the site in an average month. Unless they are actively job hunting, or actively using LinkedIn as part of their job role (think Enterprise software sales execs), we believe that most people who are registered with LinkedIn, don’t necessarily touch that account for weeks at a time.

Again we’re going on anecdotal evidence with a pinch of common sense – by its very nature, LinkedIn’s content offering doesn’t begin to compare with how compelling Facebook’s is, where users are on the site multiple times each day exchanging banter with their social networks or just surfing for something to cheer themselves up.

UK Instagram Users 2017

Instagram themselves haven’t released any new data since that which we used in last year’s report, giving us 14 million Monthly Active Users in the UK, from a global MAU figure of 300 million. The global figure was updated in December 2016 to an impressive 600 million, but it would basically be a total guess as to whether the UK’s growth has kept pace with the global growth.

It’s hard to tell at this point whether Instagram is continuing to cannibalise Twitter’s market, particularly among the younger demographic – that seemed to be the case in previous years, but the research that we’re referencing here doesn’t really support it.  Which is good from a marketing point of view, because the lack of native “retweet” function and inability to include links in a post, means that driving anything other than general brand awareness is harder work on Instagram!

The We Are Flint survey suggested that 29% of UK adults use Instagram, which would give us a figure around the 19 million mark.  The same report also gives a proportion of 64% of users as being under 30 – but gives the same figure for Twitter, which has generally been considered to be an older demographic thus far. Even more interestingly, Instagram has something of a peak in the higher income brackets (though not as much as Twitter does); 46% of users reported a household income of over £48k per annum.

From a general strategy point of view, Instagram has joined Facebook and Twitter this year in filtering which of your followed accounts’ posts you actually see. That seems a clear pointer that in the not too distant future, you can expect to be paying Instagram for any kind of guaranteed reach at all, in the same way we now have to pay for reach on Facebook.

UK Pinterest Users 2017

We’ve not had anything directly from Pinterest this year on the subject of UK user numbers, so the stats below come from third party research.

All the indications though are that Pinterest’s early period of stellar growth has definitely stalled.  Although Pinterest did tell us that their global MAU figure was up to 150 million in October of 2016, just 5% of the UK population log in to Pinterest on a daily basis.

Interestingly, at some point the Pinterest user demographic has got a LOT younger. In the US, and in the early days of UK use, older (as well as more affluent) users were in the majority. In 2017 however, research from both Statista and We Are Flint suggests that 50%+ of Pinterest users are in the 18-29 age bracket.

The female gender bias has persisted however, with 38% of women who are online reporting that they use Pinterest, whereas only 20% of men say the same thing.

In terms of how people are actually using the site (which should give you some clues as to whether your business will be commercially successful there), here’s a useful summary from Pinterest’s CEO, Ben Silbermann :

Pinterest is more of a personal tool than a social one. People don’t come to see what their friends are doing. (There are lots of other great places out there for that!) Instead, they come to Pinterest to find ideas to try, figure out which ones they love, and learn a little bit about themselves in the process.

UK Twitter Users 2017

Twitter did provide a very minimal status update around the middle of last year, which gave a global MAU figure of 313 million, and 79% of those accounts being outside the US. That would be sufficient to keep them ahead of Instagram in the global rankings, just.

Other independent research gives us figures of 45% of UK Online Adults using Twitter, with 37% of those account holders logging in daily.  Using the ONS figure of 45.9 million for the UK’s online population, that would give us a user base of around 20 million.  That seems plausible, if maybe a little generous, compared to the last “official” UK figure of 13 million which was provided in 2013.

The same research reports a surprisingly young demographic, too: 64% of users are 18-29, 57% 30-49, and 33% 50-61.  The more affluent citizens are also over-represented on Twitter, with 62% in the 48K+ household income bracket – bearing in mind that the median UK household income this year was just over £26k.

If you’re interested in how people are actually using Twitter, there’s a really good, and up to date, report here from the BBC.  From that we learn that a relatively small number of highly active users dominate in terms of posting content – 1% of accounts are responsible for 20% of all tweets, and 85% of all tweets are accounted for by just 15% of total accounts.

The number of actual tweets sent each day has remained almost constant since 2013, despite increases in monthly active users. So, if you’re planning a campaign on Twitter, be aware that there are a *lot* of users out there who read but never post!

So there we have it: the social media landscape for the UK in 2017. As ever, we hope it’ll help you plan your strategy – and if you need some help figuring out what you should be using and how, get in touch!

Credits

https://weareflint.co.uk/uk-social-media-demographics-2016

www.statista.com

www.social-media-co.uk

Can you get clear results from Twitter advertising if you’re a small business? You certainly can, but that’s not to say you definitely will. We’ve been working with Twitter advertising for a while now, and have recently had a particularly successful campaign for one of our outsourced social media management clients.

Here’s a short case study to share with you what worked, why, and what kind of results you can achieve.

The twitter ad campaign basics

The campaign was run for one of our longstanding clients, Urban Front Doors. Urban Front make gorgeous, contemporary hardwood external and internal doors like the ones in the header for this post – the kind of thing you see on Grand Designs (and often do, actually!).

Their designs are generally bought by architects and interior designers, obviously in consultation with their own clients, high end developers, and direct by clients who are project managing their own self build or refurbishment.

We have spent a long time building up a very targeted audience on Twitter – this is what we get from an analysis of the accounts who follow them, and it’s exactly what they’d want it to be:

We have run campaigns for them a few times previously, which has enabled us to build up a good understanding of what targeting is effective.

Earlier this year, they had a lovely promotional video created, which emphasised their core USPs of British manufacture and good craftsmanship. We thought this would be a good opportunity to try out a video based ad campaign on Twitter.

Setting up the campaign

In order to run a video ad, you have to upload the complete file directly to Twitter – you can’t just point it at a Vimeo link, for example. Once the file is available in the Videos

section of the Twitter advertising platform, you are able to customise the accompanying title and text, the “cover” image (what people will see until they play the video), and a relevant URL.

We decided to create a custom cover graphic featuring the #doorcouture hashtag that captures their product positioning perfectly.

The video will play “natively” within users’ timelines, without having to load an outside site – hence having to load the entire file to Twitter initially.

In terms of targeting, this was a mix of existing followers and similar users, with users who follow some other carefully chosen Twitter accounts. We’ve found this feature to be often very effective in “pre-segmenting” people who are very likely to be interested in the product. We also have a fair amount of data on exact click-through rates of followers of each account from previous campaigns, allowing us to prioritise those most likely to engage with the advert.

The campaign ran for just under a week – a Sunday afternoon through to Friday evening, to capture both professional and personal user traffic.

The results:

The campaign delivered just under 171,000 impressions; 2,089 views of the video, and almost a thousand clicks through to the website.

The total spend was just £250.

In addition, they gained around 200 additional followers during the week – a normal week might see around 10-15, so we can reasonably attribute most of those to the campaign.

We think that is a pretty good result, and the client agrees. It’s hard to imagine how else you could achieve that level of interest from targeted potential customers with such a small spend.

Quick takeaways

A few takeaways on the key things that contributed to this campaign being such a success:

• Build up the right follower base to start with. There was no follower buying, and no high volume following to get the numbers up done on this account. Their follower numbers aren’t huge – just over a thousand – but they ARE targeted, and particularly for a relatively niche, premium item, this is a much better approach. When we then came to target that base in an ad campaign, it pays off all over again.
• Fine tune targeting using data from previous campaigns. This level of effectiveness didn’t just come out of a first time shot in the dark. Having, and making use of, engagement data from past campaigns really helped.
• Consider every aspect of the copy and images – including the cover image for video. Working with some great content – in this case the video – obviously provides a big head start. But just leaving the default cover image means you lose an opportunity to get a key message across, and it’s just as important to copywrite the title and accompanying text well enough to tempt users into playing the video.

If you’re thinking about using Twitter’s paid ad platform, our advice would be a) experiment and b) track and analyse your data thoughtfully. You could end up with the best cost to exposure ratio you’ll ever get.

The trip there, though, was pretty much as bad as it gets. Thanks to my friends at Easyjet, with a little help from some bad weather, what should have been a quick 80-minute flight was turned into an almost 12 hour odyssey of discomfort and frustration. At the end of which I helped a number of elderly people unload their cases from a coach, get to their hire cars and find beds for the night, while thinking about how very distressed my own parents would have been in that situation.

But by way of compensation (and it looks very much as though this is all we’ll get!), in the couple of days that followed, EasyJet very kindly helped me to write a masterclass on how not to use social media for customer service. I don’t know why any of the below still shocks me, but it does. In 2014 and with all the technology available to a big company, there is just no excuse.

Don’t travel if you’re not fit enough to withstand a 12 hour journey and sleep on a pavement at the end of it

So the trip started with just the routine nonsense – first a 20-minute delay, then 40 minutes, then we’re all rushed to the gate but end up sitting on the runway for another half an hour due to missed takeoff slot. Ridiculous excuse of “sorry folks we’re having a busy day here” (er, what? Did some unexpected flights appear on your schedule, or…?!) is par for the course. Eventually we get under way, but just as we head in to land, the pilot aborts at the last moment due to heavy cloud covering the runway at 200ft. Fair enough, it’s a safety issue – albeit one that is short lived in the south of France in summer, and certainly wouldn’t have been an issue at 4.30pm when the flight should have landed.

So that’s where the fun really started. Eventually we land at an airport some 350km away from our original destination. Which we are eventually shipped back to, very slowly, on a bus. I’ll leave you to imagine the level of information and assistance that was provided at each stage. The crowning glory was dumping the entire group, including some quite distressed elderly people and two people in wheelchairs, on the pavement outside a now completely closed airport at almost 2am. From where it’s a bit tricky for anyone to get to their hire car (shut) or bed for the night (many had private rentals booked, who don’t exactly have 24hr reception).

With the level of customer care already established, the coach driver even felt quite comfortable employing the world’s largest Gallic Shrug in the face of a lot of panic, and leaving everyone to unload their own cases – a nice extra touch.

So, can social media save the day?

But, I’ve had some fantastic responses from other organisations over Twitter when things have gone wrong, so I thought i’d try out the “all the best customer service staff get allocated to Twitter” theory. Which EasyJet proceeded to blow out of the water – although to be fair, it may turn out that this is stellar compared with the responses over other channels, who knows.

So here it is: the guide to using social media to ensure your aggrieved customer will never, ever buy from you again. With grateful thanks to EasyJet for the illustrative tweets.

Masterclass point 1: On no account try to make it easier for your customer to correspond with you – YOU make the rules here, dammit, and they need to work to them.

Masterclass point 2: by the time you’ve made the customer jump through hoops, ensure you’ve totally forgotten what the conversation was about.

Masterclass Point 3: a double whammy. Point A: On no account empower your staff to take ownership of a situation. Point B: invoke infuriating platitudes at the first possible opportunity. **

Masterclass point 4: If in doubt, fall back on whatever corporatespeak is standard for your industry. In this case, blame everything on “safety” or “data protection” (see below).

Masterclass point 5: ON NO ACCOUNT use a social CRM or make any other attempt to keep track of the conversation. That should make it easier to “misunderstand” what you’re being told.

Extra points if you can get in a misguided and unnecessary (so i’m told by a qualified expert on the legislation) reference to Data Protection.

Masterclass point 6: Congratulations! You’ve reduced your pesky customer to banging their head on a wall in frustration. Having proved you’re utterly useless, the customer will go away and not bother you again. Or ever use your products and services, but never mind!

** You may be amused (or not) to hear that the Customer Satisfaction Manager’s response was to send me an email reiterating that EasyJet are sorry, (but, my inference, not sorry enough to compensate us or improve the way they handle these situations). But they hope that we’ll travel again with them very soon.

What have we learned?

You just have to ask, what is the POINT of all of this? Why bother having a Twitter account if the people using it don’t know how to follow a conversation on Twitter, and have no authority to take action of any kind?

I wish I could answer that, but I can’t – except to say once again that if your company culture and customer service is poor, do not touch social media with a barge pole.  Expectations are higher on social media, and people expect to be treated thoughtfully and as individuals, not fobbed off with corporate rubbish. If that isn’t possible for whatever reason, you’re going to fail horribly.

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!

Found this post helpful? Why not subscribe to our blog, or follow us on Twitter?

That’s now changed. As of mid November 2013, Twitter has begun rolling out their advertising programme to UK based businesses with more modest budgets.

Why advertise on Twitter?

Before we look at the costs and options, it’s worth thinking about why a business might choose to pay for exposure on Twitter rather than achieving it organically – through building a large follower base or creating shareable content.

The primary reason is likely to be time. Unless you’re well-known in general (a personal or brand celebrity) or are able to produce that once-in-a-lifetime viral content, getting significant visibility on Twitter in a short space of time is very difficult. So if you have a short notice launch, want to promote something a little different for what you’re known for, or are just impatient, then paid advertising is your best option.

Rather than having to wait for your audience to build naturally, and then start retweeting your content to their social networks, paying for advertising allows you to leapfrog your tweets directly into the timelines of your target audience.

Which brings us to the second reason you might consider paying for exposure: targeting. There are a range of ways in which you can target different Twitter users in the advertising scheme, allowing you to be much more precise about the kinds of people who’ll see your tweets or account.

What’s on offer?

The Twitter advertising platform is quite sophisticated, with a good range of options. Initially, you have to decide whether you want to promote your account (as in, appearing in the “Who To Follow” area of Twitter) or individual Tweets:

You then have a choice of how to target users – basically, this defines what criteria a user has to meet before your account or tweet will be shown to them.

As you can see, there are some pretty interesting choices there.  If you’re launching a consumer architecture practise, being able to target people who engage with Grand Designs on TV could have great potential; if you’re working in the B2B sector then being able to target everyone who currently follows the Twitter account of a leading industry publication could be very useful too.

Within those targeting options, you can  further refine by geography (although this is pretty coarse for the UK currently) and even gender.

For a Promoted Tweets campaign, you then need to choose which of your past tweets you’d like to promote – or let Twitter do that automatically based on popularity.

What does Twitter advertising cost?

As an example, we set up a campaign targeting anyone who’d used the word “renovation”, in the UK.  The budgeting section is where things get interesting – because you can set very low overall budgets AND a small daily budget. That means it should be easy to keep control of what you’re spending, and run a small scale (albeit possibly not entirely representative) pilot.

Here’s a screen shot of our campaign budget settings:

The slightly less promising item here is the “spend per engagement” bid. As you can see, this is what you will actually be charged if a user interacts with your Tweet in some way; and it is generally quite hefty.  If you compare with something like Pay Per Click ads, where (if you set it up right) a user could be searching for an immediate purchase, the typical bid amounts on Twitter seem quite high to us. I guess it will partly depend on the truth of the small print that “you will never be charged more than your maximum bid, and you usually pay less”.

Any other gotchas?

Just one – there are some interesting comments about who will and won’t be eligible for the advertising programme. We’ve found that a few of our newer clients aren’t, and it seems to be just down to the overall level of activity on their accounts, plus how long the account has been established. Twitter says:

“The most successful advertisers on Twitter tend to be those who are avid Twitter users. This means they have a history of sharing exceptional content and engaging with their followers. If you are interested in advertising but your account is fairly new, be sure to complete your account’s Twitter profile and spend a few weeks familiarizing yourself with Twitter’s best practises…”

This looks like an attempt to impose some quality control and avoid the “big budget newbie with an egg avatar” taking over the world…which seems fair enough.

Where is it?

You have to register for the Advertising centre, so to get started, go to https://ads.twitter.com/ and see whether your account makes the grade!

Conveying your message creatively requires a completely different approach to writing for other marketing materials – at least, it does if you want to make an impact with your audience.

For this post, we’re going to use Twitter to illustrate, because it’s the most challenging platform in terms of creating great content; it’s noisy, busy, there’s a lot of competition for your target audience’s attention, and you only have 140 characters to play with.

So, how do you need to change your writing style?

Writing the Old Way

It’s so much easier to learn from specific examples, so we’re going to go very specific here to illustrate the difference between an “OK” tweet and a “great” one.

Let’s pretend we’re tweeting for a hypothetical software company. Our imaginary company is about to release a new version of its flagship product, and you’re going to tweet about it.

If you were following the “old” rules – the kind of writing required for a press release, or even an email to customers, the content would just announce the release:

or perhaps, shout about a few of the new features it includes:

There’s nothing wrong with these; they’re “OK”. A typical “OK” tweet for business keeps to the old rules; properly spelt and with correct grammar, and informal enough not to be wildly inappropriate for the Twitter environment. But, a “great” tweet does so much more.

A slam dunk Tweet

A “great” Tweet will be more engaging (in terms of grabbing the imagination of the reader and creating some resonance with them), do more for the reader’s perception of the company, and make better use of the opportunities Twitter offers. Here’s our take on it:

Obviously, the image is important, but we’ve just grabbed a stock one – your “real” image would show your developer team half-hidden behind pizza boxes, or a row of takeaway cups from a well-known coffee purveyor stretching away into infinity. You get the idea.

Good social media content

So what makes our last tweet better? A number of things, and these would be our “top tips” for making your social media content writing more creative:

1: Offer real Insight

The tweet gives a “behind the scenes” view of what’s really going on at Fabsoftware; the reader is getting a privileged insight. This is always more interesting than the official corporate line!

2: Humanise the organisation

One of the messages that the tweet very clearly conveys, is “real people work here”. Showing that, over time, is a great way to build affection and brand loyalty – and also perhaps more tolerance for the odd mistake…

3: Be  Entertaining

Playing to stereotypes about coders pulling fast-food fuelled allnighters – what’s not to like?!

4: Exploit Twitter’s unique capabilities

Including a quick snapshot image (even if it’s been, ahem, slightly staged) works well because of the sense of immediacy. And as we all know, a picture can be worth a thousand words…..

Change your thinking

Doing social media content well isn’t really about changing your writing style as such; it’s about thinking differently about how you present your organisation, and what you can share with the wider world. Get that part right and the writing will follow.

It’s another of those areas where there is some absolutely terrible advice doing the rounds (some of which we’ll share with you below) so an article here seemed to be called for!

Tweets and Facebook posts – back to basics

Hopefully, before you even think about tweeting or posting on your business Facebook page, you already have a strategy. You know who your likely audience are, and have figured out what you can offer them that they value. That means, you have an outline idea of the type of content you’re going to be sending out. If you haven’t done this, go back a stage and get your strategy sorted; it’s amazing how much else will then come into focus.

Like the answer to today’s question. You know what your value is to your Twitter and Facebook audience, so you should Tweet or post….when you have something interesting or relevant to say.

But won’t we lose followers?

Let’s explore this a bit further. I’ve been told, just this week, by the social media team in a large and prestigious organisation that they have to post constantly because

“we were told by a big Social Media company that we must tweet and post several times each day”

Unpacking that a bit further, it seemed that the “reason” was to do with not losing followers, and with gaining new ones.

Will somebody please think of the children users!

As with so many things in marketing and comms, if you’re able to put yourself into your audience’s shoes for a moment, the lack of logic behind this becomes pretty clear.

From the point of view of one of your Twitter followers or Facebook Likers, they have connected with you because they think that your content is going to enhance their Timeline in some way.

If, after a few days or weeks, they often see content coming into their timeline which is not interesting to them, what will their likely response be? They will unfollow you. It might take a while for the irritation to build, but sooner or later, they will depart your social media shores.

Now let’s look at the alternative. Someone connects with you on social media, and in the first couple of weeks they only see a couple of pieces of content from you in their timeline – but both of those are useful or funny or whatever.

Who on earth would think “ah, but two days have gone past and I heard nothing from that company, so dammit, it’s not good enough. I’m unfollowing them.” Nobody, that’s who.

Silence is golden

Basically, very few people will break their connection with you on social media because of what you don’t do – unless your account really does go completely dormant for a significant period. You get unfollowed because of what you DO do. Posting irrelevant, repetitive or just plain dull stuff repeatedly into their social media feed.

So in summary, never, never post or tweet for the sake of having posted or tweeted. The only exception to this is if you are actively pursuing a spam strategy of the “chuck enough mud and some will stick” variety, like the one suggested in the helpful article here. Nobody likes mud anyway, and you might not like what it sticks to, but as with all kinds of spam it must do something for someone or nobody would do it. However,  if you’re a reputable company, this is not a road you want to travel. In fact, “...to get noticed, you will need to tweet a lot more frequently” may be one of the worst pieces of social media advice we’ve ever seen – time to start a Hall of Fame, perhaps…

Solihull Police’s Twitter account came to our attention earlier this week, as a result of some fun they were having with the snow-related shenanigans. They are doing a great job, and there are a whole bunch of lessons here that ALL organisations on Twitter can learn from – but especially those in the public sector, where the use of social media is far too often stilted, formal and dull.

Check out the account for yourselves, but in the mean time, here are our Big Four lessons for Twitter brilliance, as illustrated by Solihull Police.

1. Stop taking yourselves so seriously.

In fact, this could be lessons 1,2,3,4 and 5 as far as we’re concerned. As we’ve mentioned before, social media in general, and Twitter in particular, isn’t a place for po-faced corporatespeak.

Whatever it is that your organisation does, whether you’re Undertakers or brain surgeons, there is a lighter side ( or a darker, but still funnier, side, which is fine too).

It’s a fine line, of course, but mastering this one makes your Twitter feed 100% more engaging, immediately.

It also shows confidence in your organisation – you don’t feel the need to be defensive or stick to the party line. For example:

Well played with the retweet! I’m sure we’ve all seen the equivalent interaction where the slightly “off message” response would’ve just been ignored.

2. Join in with the community

Note: this does not mean making awkward comments about the X Factor.

Keep it to things which are relevant on some level – this might be thematically or geographically – in this case, the “snow crisis” which was affecting the local area at the time.

But again, humour is key:

3. Involve staff, and have a holistic approach to social media

Particularly in a larger organisation, if your social media efforts are confined to the office junior in the Communications team, it’s going to be difficult for them to give a real flavour of what you’re doing. Not impossible if they’re supported by a good flow of information from other departments, but difficult.

Some staff are more talented communicators than others, and if you can find those individuals and involve them in your social media strategy it will make all the difference.

Across the West Midlands region there’s a well developed network of staff at all levels who are contributing – from the Solihull Borough Police Commander’s personal Twitter account, to individual officers’ blogs, which are promoted through the main Twitter feeds:

This gives a much better insight into the different staff roles, opens up additional channels of communication, and is much more resonant for outsiders than a generic “press release” style corporate commentary. Do check out PC Stanley’s blogroll and other social media links for a glimpse of the level of activity going on here!

4. Understand Twitter and play to its strengths

It’s not all about fun, but our last example is perfect for demonstrating how serious and important that fun aspect can be.

Exhibit A:

There are two things which are notable about this. Firstly, whoever’s in charge of the @SolihullPolice feed has made the link between people frequently browsing Twitter to kill time while they’re on public transport, and the likelihood of the missing children being in transit somewhere. Then they’ve used that understanding to turn the public into the eyes of the police, by specifically addressing those people.

Secondly, without all of the “fun” stuff, the Twitter audience would simply not be big enough or engaged enough to have made that sighting happen. Twitter is amazing for mobilising a community, but first you have to build your community.

Again, that applies to all organisations; applying the same strict rules you’d use when approving a corporate brochure is likely to destroy any chance you have of harnessing the unique opportunities that Twitter offers.

Have you got any other examples of Twitter superstars in the public sector? Feel free to add them in the Comments if you do.

The thriving underground economy around buying Twitter followers and Facebook Likers was highlighted recently during the US elections, when Mitt Romney’s Twitter base expanded by an implausibly large extent seemingly overnight.

Most people are now aware that artificially boosting their social media audience is a risky venture, even if they’re not sure exactly why. Having said that, there are a few scenarios where doing this still looks like the logical way to meet specific needs within a social media strategy.

So if you’ve ever wondered how that tedious “business guru” with 55,000 Twitter followers managed it, and whether it could be beneficial to your account to do the same, here’s a quick lowdown on the industry, how it works, when it might help you – and when it won’t.

How does buying followers work?

A quick Google search turns up pages of websites offering to sell you Twitter followers, Facebook Fans / Likers, YouTube views and so on. Twitter followers are usually the cheapest, from as little as $5 per thousand, and Facebook Likers the most expensive.

The costs are  directly related to the amount of hassle involved in setting up a fake account, making it look vaguely plausible, and preventing it being deleted by the platform owner. There are other methods, but the majority of  the dealers who are selling these followers have set up thousands, sometimes tens or hundreds of thousands, of fake accounts which they then control. On receiving payment they begin following your Twitter account with the appropriate number of their accounts, or use them to Like your Facebook page or watch your YouTube video.

With the help of some clever software, this can take the dealer a matter of seconds, so it’s more than possible to make large profits even at the kind of low rates they’re charging.

The key point, though, is that none of these accounts have real people behind them. So the potential for them to use your services or buy your products is absolutely zero.

They won’t buy…so what can they do for me?

This fake follower industry’s been around almost as long as Twitter has. In the early days, it’s likely that most people didn’t understand what was happening here and genuinely thought that they were taking a short cut to a large and genuine audience on social media. These days, many users know what they’re buying – but do it anyway. What they want from the deal is something different.

Here are a couple of logical reasons people buy followers, even when they suspect they’re fake:

1. Credibility. At first glance, a Facebook page with 3,000 likers or a YouTube video with thousands of views, gives the impression that it must be a quality resource. There are still plenty of social media users out there who can’t be bothered, or don’t know how to, see past the basic numbers. Having that big number visible can lead to interest from real people.

2. Sheep syndrome. When a business launches a new social media account, it’s friendless and lonely. They don’t want to show it to existing or prospective customers because it’s  the social media equivalent of the empty wine bar – there might be nothing wrong with it, but if there’s a packed bar next door, most people will choose that. Fake followers can act as “extras” to get past that stage.

3. Visibility boost. Some of the social media directory sites weight their search results heavily by follower volume, so the more followers you have, the more likely your account is to show up high on the list for, say, your local town. YouTube search results are also influenced by viewer numbers.

These are all perfectly logical reasons for buying in fake followers – provided you don’t get caught. Artificially inflating your numbers is against the terms of service of all the major social media sites, so ultimately anyone using this approach is at risk of being kicked out, and for that reason alone we’d strongly advise against it.

That short cut could be making life hard for you

If that’s not enough for you, there are a few other good reasons for being wary of fake followers.

Those great first impressions won’t last. If a Facebook business page apparently has a huge audience of Likers but nobody ever responds to the organisation’s posts, what impression does  that give? Visitors are likely to assume that it’s a dull place to be, and may be less forgiving of that than a company which is honest about being in the early stages of building an audience.

Socially savvy users will run a mile. Anyone who’s experienced in the social media world will spot fake audiences a mile off – a quick look at one or two of the Twitter, Facebook or YouTube accounts in question will reveal obvious giveaways in terms of who else they follow and what else they do or say. There are also services like Status People’s Faker app which claim to reveal how many fakes follow an account, and have been known to call out some big names in the past.

Skewing your metrics can have unforseen and damaging consequences in the longer term. For example, assuming you’re aiming to build a Facebook page with a genuine community, and you’ve bought Likers to bridge the gap until your audience recruitment strategy delivers results. A year down the road, Facebook’s Edgerank algorithm will be using the proportion of your followers who interact with you to determine how interesting your posts are – and how likely it is to show them in your Likers’ timelines. If 50% of your Likers are fake accounts who’ll never engage, you’ve disadvantaged your Page from the outset.

If a job’s worth doing…

…it’s worth doing legitimately. There are “best practise” ways to build your audience, credibility and visibility which will provide great foundations for your longer term social media presence, without any of the risks involved in buying an audience. If you’re stuck with those, we can help.