A handy set of guidelines to help to navigate the social media ocean without being a dick

Here’s a very brief guide to social media platforms and how they are used for traffic generation and social branding. It’s based on my previous post, but has a more updated model. Let me know your thoughts, still a work in progress.

Ever wanted to be able to export all uses of a particular hashtag? Well, turns out you can, and very easily with a tool called The Archivist. And the company behind it? Twitter? Tweetdeck? No, Microsoft!

Tim Aidlin and Karsten Januszewski of Mix Online have produced a tool that allows you to pull in tweets from a specified hashtag and store them for later analysis. The great thing is that when you first run the tool it will pull in as many mentions as it can find, but if you then leave it running ti will auto refresh every ten minutes. Not only does it produce pretty graphs itself but it also allows you to export to Excel for more in depth analysis.

This tool is very useful to a great number of people for many different reasons. I manage a number of brands on a day to day basis, and being able to track certain hashtags is incredibly useful, especially when we run campaigns using a specific hashtag. And just a few days ago I attended a conference where the use of a hashtag was prolific, using this tool @Jas was able to pull in all the tweets and store them for later reference. Incredibly useful, something I expect to be on a fairly regular basis. Thanks go to @Jas for pointing me in the direction of this great tool!

Everybody clicks on links and can end up at a site and they can’t tell what the site is about. This is even more true for a lot of blog, which tend to have the latest post on the front page, without much context. This can be confusing for newcomers. Put it this way, imagine opening the book and the first page you find is actually page 129.

So what are landing pages?

It’s simple really; it’s a certain page that is created for new visitors from specific areas such as the link from your Twitter profile. This guide focuses on creating a Twitter landing page, but the principle can be applied to visitors from other areas. The content will probably largely overlap, but it can be nice to have a note or specific content for users from different locations, such as people clicking on one of your ads, your facebook profile or your youtube channel, dig, reddit etc.

NOTE: a landing page is more than just an about page. Actually, in many senses, it’s less. The landing page is meant to give the visitor a very brief understanding of who you are and what you do. About pages tend to be longer and more detailed, with some authors describing each major character and story arch. This isn’t necessary for a landing page.

What should I put on my landing page?

• A brief bio of yourself. Nothing major, a few lines will suffice
• A description of your blog. This can be more detailed than your personal bio, but don’t spend too long on. Try to make it as concise as possible, and it goes without saying; make the blog sound awesome
• Links to other stuff you do. Do you have another blog? A facebook page? A vlog? Link to them!
• Finally, a link back to Twitter (Facebook, YouTube etc) with a suggestion for the visitor to follow you!

The most important rule is to keep it short. People have come to your site from Twitter to find out a little more about you, not your whole life story. Put too much and people will get bored and leave.

Why should I bother?

The book metaphor wasn’t enough? Okay, I’ll extend it. Imagine that after you’ve opened the book there is a personal note in there just for people who have bought the book from a specific shop. Won’t those people feel special? And loved? And at the end of the day, that’s what it’s all about. Making people feel loved.

Also, it doesn’t take more than 5 minutes so you really have no excuse not to.

Case studies abound about how twitter can be used for sales, and there are various studies about the demographics that use Twitter. However, there is little in the way of research about what users tweet about, and if brands have a place on the social network. That is until now. A study, which looked at roughly 150,000 tweets, examined how users were talking about brands using micro-blogging platforms such as Twitter. The paper, published by Prof Jansen at Penn State University, reveals that 19% of tweets are brands mentions.

This is further broken down into 20% of tweets expressing a sentiment, of which about half were positive and about a third negative. The remaining 80% did not express sentiment but instead were largely questions about brands and answers either from the brand, or from the community itself.

This study is significant for several reasons. Firstly it provides conclusive evidence that conversations about brands are occurring on Twitter, and in large volume. This means that with successful monitoring of the channel a brand can learn vast amount from its customers. This information can be used in a variety of ways, to discover and improve where consumers find complaint as well as to discover and build on compliments.

However, this should be common sense, and is definitely well known in the social media community. What is more significant however, is the degree to which people are turning to Twitter as a customer service tool, with large numbers of consumers asking questions about brands. And the community is responding. This has implications for businesses. Brands on Twitter can harness the power of Twitter to streamline their customer service offerings. The danger lies in not having a brand outpost on Twitter; if customers are receiving bad advice and support from the Twitter community it will reflect badly on the brand, even if they aren’t the ones giving the advice. Consumers expect them to be there. The degree of control they exert over the customer support questions is a topic for another day.

The most important thing to take from this is that vast amounts of people are flocking to Twitter for customer support, but there are few brands that are actively promoting their Twitter outposts as sources of help. More worryingly is the number of brands that are still not monitoring the conversation and just broadcasting out the brand message. What they fail to realise is that these conversations are happening right now, whether they are there or not.