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Eight Reasons Why You Should Thank Twitter Followers

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Credit: Sociable Boost

Twitter is not a one-way street. Your content gets retweeted by a follower, and they get crickets? Thanking followers should be something you incorporate into your daily tweets.

Some folks think “thanks for the RT” is just noise and clutters the stream. Others think it’s a hassle and are on the fence about whether it’s good practice or not. In my blog post last week “How Not To Use Triberr,” the issue of thanking followers popped up in comments.

Adam Toporek who writes Customers That Stick and Ralph Dopping, the Canadian architect who writes The View From Here, both suggested that acknowledging followers for a blog post retweet was not a practice they thought they should engage in.

So, I politely disagreed and thanked them for the idea for today’s post and hope they come back to lend a few cents below (and you, too, of course!).

Two Caveats

Before I share my reasons below, let’s review a few things…

  1. There are MANY ways to thank someone for their acknowledgment. You can comment on their blog in return; you can RT their RT with a thanks at the end; you can follow them on Twitter and say thanks; you can introduce them to someone else in your stream to ensure they’ve met; you can #FollowFriday; you can make up your own way to show appreciation!
  2. Peeps like A-lister bloggers and authors who have tens of thousands of Twitter followers are unable to thank or acknowledge mostly anyone. The stream is so unmanageable especially when you’re publishing top-quality content. I get that, and I don’t expect community leaders to attempt to do a one-off thanks; not possible.  Thus, what’s below is for we who are in building mode – newbies, mid-tier and less-than-12-month bloggers, and peeps who are growing their Twitter stream.

8 Twitter Tips

Here are my 8 reasons why I believe you should thank peeps for their engagement, acknowledgment, and ‘raderie on Twitter:

1. Twitter helps you build community. When you thank someone for an RT, a comment, a compliment, a supportive gesture, etc. it shows you’re paying attention, listening and appreciate someone for their time to engage.

2. When someone engages with your blog by sending along your content, that means they’ve taken time to either read, comment, share, and take the first step to build a relationship. Isn’t a “thanks for that”  peanuts when you think of your content being shared by a relative stranger?

 3. When you don’t know someone who has RT’d a post of yours, it offers you the opportunity to address them by name, say, “nice to tweet you,” and thank them at the same time. You just accomplished a trio of good community.

4. What profession are you in? If you’re in a specialty niche, customer service, like Adam is, then you ought to be building community with like- minded customer-service peeps. If one happens to find your blog and you speak the same language, then all the more reason to acknowledge them and say thanks.

5. Your stream can never be littered unless you’re spamming it with rotten content.  Who is the judge of what litter looks like in a Twitter stream? Has anyone told you that you put out garbage…that a “thank you for acknowledging me with an RT” is trash? Absolutely not. Gratitude is not litter; it humanizes your brand and makes you personable.

6. Why would you regard “thanks so much” as noise? Noise and clutter…hmm. I mentioned that I was choosing not to re-tweet posts from bloggers writing about Halloween family dinners and baby products. These topics are not for my brand or my community. Were I to consistently retweet these to my followers, this would be regarded as noise and a dilution of my brand.

7. Are you self-employed and building a company? If Ralph is an architect blogging for some fun and not to boost his business (because he works for a firm), and I’m in B-to-B social media marketing and PR, then absolutely you betcha I’m going to thank people for acknowledging my content. When someone RTs my content, I recognize immediately if they are new to my stream. That’s how tuned in I am to my followers. Because my followers are organic I have had measured growth, and that’s enabled me to monitor the stream well.

8. What are your goals as a blogger? If you want to be an influencer, thought leader, earn more comments, build a community, monetize and sell products, earn credibility, get ranked, etc. then you need subscribers, right? A thank you to those who pass along your content seems minimal when it comes to these larger goals.

What did I miss; do you agree or disagree?

 

 

 

Three Things Threatening Authenticity; Do You Agree?

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(This post originally appeared on Spin Sucks August 8, 2011, written by Jayme Soulati). And, the 162 comments (love that!) are worth their weight in gold.

credit: Modern 8

Public relations practitioners strive to develop authentic relationships; we want genuine and sincere romance with our tiered audiences, and we get there with engagement.

The word “authentic” itself begs for definition. It was used in a variety of ways by a variety of practitioners when I launched an effort awhile back to define public relations on my blog. Social media allows for creating real communities with give and take, with nurturing and education, and with growth by engagement. Combined, these contribute to authenticism (I often coin words).

Enter automation.

My growing fear is social media automation is quickly winning over authenticity. If you follow me online, this statement comes as no surprise. I have been lamenting scheduled tweets, the success of Triberr, and the disappearance of Twitter banter (nowadays that’s just about anything without a link!).

  1. Automating Tweets: I freely admit I schedule tweets on occasion; in fact, I was encouraged to do more of it to push attention to the blog. You can’t get traffic if you tweet a new post once. So, I did, and lo – more traffic. I also use Triberr religiously. I automate post distribution in the three tribes I’m in. In fact, I’m kind of jazzed; I recently launched Globe Spotting – a tribe with seven bloggers from seven countries.
  2. Optimizing Writing: I’m struggling with the whole optimization thing; it compromises authenticity! (While optimization is not automation, there are enough automated tools to enhance optimization, so they’re, like, kissing cousins.) A recent blog post over at Live Your Love by Brankica Underwoodhad me stewing. (She’s an expert about writing with keywords and measuring web analytics.) Bran shared how she wrote a keyword rich post and watched the traffic roll in. Then, she increased her traffic by writing a how-to post because keywords and search terms told her the market was seeking that information.
  3. Quantifying Influence: How about Klout? I predicted recently that employers and clients would begin reviewing Klout scores and select candidates with the higher scores. I just read a blog post where that prediction rang true. People on Twitter who schedule unique content, RT consistently, and write about keywords can automatically boost Klout scores – even when the keywords for which peeps are being considered influential mean nothing, such as “cougar,” “heavy metal,” or “sheep.”

All my fears for the future are likely a yearning for the past. As I’ve been pondering this preponderance of push marketing, others have stated, “nothing stays the same…to grow we need to automate.”…OK, but at what expense?

 

 

How Not To Use Triberr

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This past weekend I created a tribe and was invited into four others; something was in the water! One particular tribe was formed by someone seeking multiple shares of his content, and thus he formed a tribe of 100 “power sharers.”

A handful of my peers are in the group; the other 95 I have not had the privilege of meeting. That’s almost a good thing…you want to be in tribes with people you’ve not yet met so you can read new material, share new content and build on your community.

I accepted the invitation on Sunday; by Monday evening I was exhausted having visited my Triberr stream more than four times that day to stay abreast of the posts that were everywhere from people I didn’t know (and thus could not gauge the quality of their writing).

I began to panic and truly wonder whether I should back out of the tribe and not engage. I thought I’d give it a week to see what happens and tough it out. It’s been a few days, but the volume of content/posts in my Triberr stream is absolutely overwhelming.

Adam Toporek gave me a tip that you can hide people from the stream; I didn’t know that. If there is someone littering the stream with poor-quality content, I’m going to need to check into that little tool.

What’s making me most nervous is my consciousness about being a good influencer. I don’t want to forward schlock; I’m trying to read before I forward; however, it’s impossible for me to read more than the title and the intro.  (There’s a tip to pay special attention to your blog title and the introduction.)

There are definitely peeps writing excellent content in this bunch of 100 bloggers, and there is content I have no interest in. The breadth of content is amazing and having it all in one place is kind of exciting.

I’m getting a glimpse of some cool monetization from the mommy blogger and real estate sales person. I’m seeing ideas for content curation, and reviews by tech geeks, as well as many, many authors trying a go with blogging and book reviews.

What this “experiment” is doing for me is the following:

1. Immediate introduction to a variety of bloggers I don’t know.

2. Testing whether my peers in this tribe truly are power sharers. I’ve shared more of others’ content than they have shared of mine.

3. Getting a Twitter bump; more followers coming on board as a result.

4. Enabling me the opportunity to write this piece more neutrally (which is the right thing to do).

5. Showing me how Triberr should ultimately be used as a best practice.

6. Making me appreciate the tribes I’m in and the ones I’ve created of like-topic bloggers within my peer group and vertical.

7. Giving me a new appreciation for what Dino Dogan and Dan Cristo have built in this channel. We were there in its pre-infancy, and now look at it — astonishing growth and universe of bloggers all in one place.

Triberr comes and Triberr goes…bloggers should NOT underestimate its power to build influence, community, and brand. Trust me, I’m a case study.

Chief Marketer Social Marketing 2012 Survey Results

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Chief Marketer is one of my faves for reading about topics oriented to B-to-B social media marketing (what I do) and tips and tricks of the trade. A survey of brand marketers was just released, and I was invited to share feedback about responses by B-t0-B marketers and B-to-C marketers…we should all be saying B-to-P by now, eh?

The Chief Marketer 2012 Social Marketing Survey showed a number of interesting findings, and I detail a few in this quickie video of Soulati Media On The Street (taken with the iPhone 4S, holding the camera flipped my way and standing in my bright yellow and red kitchen — that was all for Michelle Quillin of New England Multimedia who just went smartphone on us!).

What I don’t detail is the following:

56% of brand marketers surveyed said social media is “complex to measure.” 

Why is that? My question in response you’ll need to hear in the video, actually. (Heh.)

By a factor of 3, brand marketers said they would reduce engagement on Facebook next year (I sorta garbled that in the video, so I explain it better here).

This is fascinating, and I can leave it up to the Facebook marketers and trainers to determine a really smart answer, but here’s my deduction:

Facebook has made its own life complex and thus ours.

With 1 billion registered users (1/3 of the world’s population), the little U.S. company struggling on the stock market, is still trying to ace mobile. Along the way, it bought Instagram and then launched Camera (what’s the difference?), introduced Timelines and now Collections, has privacy issues and advertising data malarkey — no wonder the medium is complex for brand marketers still stuck measuring with likes and shares (that’s old).

LinkedIn remains a favorite for B-to-B marketers at 85% adoption while B-to-C marketers are only engaging there 39% (of respondents polled).

Google+ is a critical channel for local visibility and organic search, yet most of the marketers surveyed yawned at this medium. I encourage everyone to claim their brand identity!

If you want to see the really long version of my video (12 minutes), you can click here. Otherwise, take a peek with me right now:

 

Any thoughts, Friends?

This has been the 11th installment of Soulati Media On  The Street! Thanks for watching!

Emulate, Collaborate, Create To Drive Blog Success

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Look around at the bloggers who influence you. I’m going to bet they post frequently, lead with news you’ve yet to learn, educate you about some tech thing, and generally fuel oodles of comments and engagement.

There’s something else you should take note of, too:

What new collaborative project are these bloggers announcing of late?

Let me illustrate what I’m talking about:

Gini Dietrich

A favorite blogger, author, speaker and friend extraordinaire Gini Dietrich, of Spin Sucks fame, recently announced her collaboration called The Three Things with Howie Goldfarb and Michael Schechter to run one post each Sunday about something that’s new and is meaningful.

Danny Brown

Danny Brown spins more creativity than anyone I’ve ever seen.  Back in the day, 12for12K was his pet project; it’s how I was introduced to him. Since that time, I’ve been privy to his blog changing focus, changing design, and announcing new collaborations.

His latest is For Bloggers By Bloggers, and peeps can jump in there and ask questions of leading bloggers and gain access to just about any topic.  Danny has other blogs, too, with a band of writers. Don’t forget the recent event in Toronto on social media he just put on.  Here’s a post from one of my favorite search marketing experts, Brankica Underwood.

Mark W. Schaefer

Mark Schaefer has two books under his belt, a smashing success with Social Slam (third year upcoming), and a new collaboration with some big names in Jay Baer, Tom Edison, and Jason Falls called The Social Habit.  His Sunday post shows how Mark gets out of his box to interview  the founder of Storify…a channel I need to look into.

The SMB Collective (shameless  plug)

I’d be remiss not sharing my pet project that began with Neicole Crepeau two years ago and engaged a community of small business owners to contribute posts to The SMB Collective. I’m trying desperately to resurrect this wonderful blog (gosh, where is my time), because it’s an outlet for each of us to focus on business issues and share tips.  Let me make this my call to action for you to join me. Submit a post from the archives with links and an image if you choose, and you can earn some link love.

 

Continuous Creativity 

These are just 3.5 examples of leaders on the ‘sphere who are continually innovating to keep things interesting for themselves, their brand and their community. I could interview them for this piece, but I’m going to do something I rarely like to do, and that’s assume.

Here’s what I think these three blogger leaders are doing:

1. Innovation is a requirement of growth to keep fresh ideas and content in front of an audience and community.

2. With new concepts comes more attention from a wider array of audiences.

3. Without change, the blogging journey would be boring and a community would also get bored.

4. Collaborations help everyone be on top of their game and engage with the smartest minds and close the six degrees of separation forever.

 

What does that say about your blog:

  • If you’ve been blogging 12 months, it’s time to change it up.
  • Ensure you tweak your design every six months or else the landscaping gets stale.
  • Invite more guest bloggers to write and expand your network beyond just your own writing.
  • Do more video or try podcasting. (When you upgrade your technology, you can do podcasting much easier.)
  • Do Q&A with someone you admire or who has a high level of influence.
  • Add calls to action to the blog to encourage people to subscribe and/or download a study, e-book or something.
  • Always have something in the works. There must be a top-secret project you’re working on to drive your creativity?
  • Start  on a small scale and grow from there; people are in your tribes, in your stream, in your network…ask them to collaborate!

 Think first.

Please do emulate the leaders, but engage on a scale that works for you. With more creative juice flowing, you can also boost mojo that leads to long-term success.