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Soulati-'TUDE!

Eight Reasons Why You Should Thank Twitter Followers

10/15/2012 By Jayme Soulati

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?

 

 

 

Filed Under: Blogging 101, Social Media Tagged With: Blogging, Followers, RTs, sharing, Twitter

This Is Your Social Media Sharing Quiz

03/23/2012 By Jayme Soulati

I wasn’t going to blog today as I’m feeling extreme stress and inability to comprehend life and the pursuit of happiness.

Chalk it up to not having taxes done, select soccer, taekwando belt testing, yard work, client service, a newly combined blog and website with fabulous SEO and powerful inbound marketing, pulling my upper calf muscle (again) on the tennis court and burning the skin from an ice pack…sorry, just had to get that all off my chest.

Then I read , and he writes a wonderful  piece about Ragu and empathy; read it, you’ll like his creative bridge just as I did.

I’m getting to the point, promise. I went to share this down below in comments just like a good commenter should.  I hit “Share+” expecting it to be Google+. Instead, I got a litany of sites on which to share. I kept scrolling and scrolling to find the bottom and was astonished at the variety and my apparent lack of intelligence about mostly any of these.

Upon further inspection, I think we’ve got a list of world-wide shares, as I see some language I can’t understand and extensions in Russia, among others. For the purposes of today’s post (which I wasn’t going to write), I challenge anyone to dissect these below. Mind you , it took about 10 screen shots to capture these as I couldn’t enlarge the pop-up window (did you see that story on pop-up restaurants today in the Wall Street Journal?  Budding restaurateurs trying/testing cuisine concepts, ala Kosher foods, in lobbies of other businesses that close at night; neat marketing idea.

Are you familiar with even ¼ of these listed below? Have some fun, and now I’m going to go away and try to breathe.

P.S. If you scroll to the bottom and see this post script (I have no idea where it ends up with all these images), you know it took me longer to set up these darn jpg than to write the post, eh?

Have a great weekend, dear Friends!

Filed Under: Social Media Tagged With: blog commenting, comments, quiz, sharing, Social Media

Do You Give Good Link Love?

06/21/2011 By Jayme Soulati

There’s an aspect of blogging rarely spoken about, and it’s a pretty influential component. It’s link love. You can have a blog, but when your links to other sites, sources, and blogs fall short, the content may be sub par in the eyes of a few.

One person stands out in my book as being tops. She shares link love all the time, and moreover, she hunts for the best complementary content to push her message. It’s guaranteed that her fastidiousness will produce extra citations you’ve likely never seen before. Davina Brewer at 3 Hats Communications, is about whom I speak. Check out her blog here, here, and here.

Neicole Crepeau recently launched Friday Fives; a series during which she interviews people on a topic, and they offer five tips. The link love is high-end for all involved, and Neicole is ensured of more traffic to her blog.

To be consistent with links, it takes time. I know I’m guilty when I’m strapped and sometimes will just put the main domain name of a site rather than dive into a blog. That’s just my laziness, too. Or, I’ll easily ad the Twitter ID because I don’t have to go and hunt.

I’ve noticed, however, that when I do take the time to seek out other sites to enhance my message, then people who comment often acknowledge with a “thanks for all the back links.”

My friend John Akerson is good for that; I know when he’s reading he’s all about what’s behind those links. Ray Andrews challenges me, too, when I’m writing, and my readers are always creeping around in my mind when I produce an article.

Earning that recognition for your content (when it’s linked to from others’ blogs) takes time, consistency, cadence, voice, relevance, and confidence.

Have you ever considered how cool it is when someone takes time to search your blog looking for just the right content to add to theirs? It makes me beam, and I vow to do more of that for you.

(Now, how long did that take me? 90 minutes to add all the links and 20 minutes to write the post.)

 

Filed Under: Blogging 101 Tagged With: link love, sharing

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