Jim's Marketing Blog

Marketing tips and ideas to help you grow your business

Get Twitter Direct Messages from people you don’t follow!

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Twitter has just made a huge change to the way DM’s or Direct Messages work. You can now choose to allow everyone who follows you on Twitter, to send you a Direct Message.

[Update: This feature has now been rolled out to every Twitter user. See below for how to enable it for your Twitter account.]

As you can see from my tweet below, this has generated a lot of interest. (If you can’t see the tweet, click here).

Twitter Direct Messages from anyone who follows you

What’s new? You can now receive Direct Messages from anyone who follows you — without you following them back. It’s that last part that is the big difference. Until now, you had to follow someone, before they could send you a Direct Message. This stopped mass spamming and for most users was a great idea.

Here’s what the setting looks like. You can find it under the ‘Account’ tab.

Twitter direct messages from followers

NOTE: By default, this option is turned off. If you don’t want to be Direct Messaged from people who follow you, you don’t need to change anything. It’s 100% opt-in.

Why I’ve turned the Twitter direct messages feature on

I have (for now) chosen to turn it on. So, if you follow me on Twitter @JimConnolly you can direct message me in private.

Here’s why. Firstly, I am a very public person. I publish my email address on every page of my blog. So long as people are not spamming me or making selfish requests, I love to hear from them.

Secondly, I think this feature could be extremely useful for businesses.

Business benefits of allowing Twitter DM’s from all your followers

Consider customer service. Until now, if someone had a customer service issue with your business, you would need to follow them and ask them to follow you, in order for you to look after them in private. This allowed them to share potentially sensitive information with you, away from the gaze of all their followers. Now, so long as they follow your Twitter account, 100% of your conversation can be handled in private.

Then there are journalists. Pretty much every journalist uses Twitter. Now, if you have a story for them — especially one of a sensitive nature, you can share it privately.

Contacting your political representatives… ditto.

What about Twitter DM spam?

The typical knee-jerk reaction so far has been that this will create a huge DM spam problem. Mainly, it seems people failed to understand they have to turn the feature on. If you don’t like the feature, don’t use it. Simple.

It’s also worth remembering that someone can only send you a Direct Message, if they follow you on Twitter. If someone is spamming or abusing you, you can block them. This stops them being able to follow you or Direct Message you. Unless you actually want to follow spammers, this works fine.

It will be interesting to see how this is received by business users, once they start to realise the commercial benefits.

PS: If you follow me on Twitter, @JimConnolly – feel free to Direct Message me and let me know what you think (or just say ‘hi!’).

Twitter: How I attracted more traffic and more followers by doing less

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As a marketing guy, I am always testing ways to make things more effective.  What follows is my experience, after a simple 5 day Twitter experiment, which was just a bit of fun, yet led to some interesting results and totally changed the way I use Twitter!

Here’s what I did and what the results were:

I elected not to tweet any links to this blog and then see what impact it had on my traffic.

Here is what happened.  By the way, you can join me on Twitter here.

Traffic from Twitter

Before I started, I expected to see a slight drop in traffic from Twitter.  Surely, if I am not Tweeting links here, fewer people would know about my posts – right?

Wrong!

Instead, traffic from Twitter increased by close to 300% over those 5 days.  This is reflected in the diagram later in the post.  Now, on the first few days, I sent a tweet out, which alerted people that I was not tweeting links to new posts here.  Obviously, those tweets had no links in them and didn’t generate additional traffic, as I monitored real-time traffic from Twitter and there was no measurable increase.  The reason was simply to let people know that nothing was wrong .

So, why the increase in traffic?

It seems this blogs readers and my Twitter “followers” picked up the slack!  Knowing I wasn’t tweeting links to my posts here, they did it for me.  Now, I am not sure how this would pan out if I carried the experiment out over 6 months, but certainly over the 5 days, my online network were a lot more active in promoting my posts.  I also saw lots of new faces showing up in my Twitter stream; people sharing my posts, who I had never heard of or seen previously.

Tuesday saw the highest traffic day to this blog in its history.  This was the result of several factors, ranging from some well connected Facebook and Twitter users sharing that days post, (which ironically was how to get more traffic using Twitter) and that post being featured on a number of popular sites, including webpronews. I have looked to see if these events could be traced to the experiment and it’s impossible to say yes or no with 100% certainty.

I am not a big believer in coincidences and I believe it’s entirely possible that with so many new people sharing my posts this week, it brought my blog to the attention of those publishers, Twitter users and Facebook users.

Here’s what happened to traffic as a result, compared to the past 6 months:

Blog subscriber numbers

One of the challenges with using Twitter to inform people of your latest posts, is that you eliminate the need for your followers, to subscribe to your blog.  In essence, you are training them not to subscribe to your primary social hub! If they decide to stop using Twitter or you decide to drop it for the next big thing, you can lose a lot of readers, very quickly.

For me, this alone is a good reason NOT to train people to use Twitter as the way to subscribe to your blog.

Some caveats

This was just a fun experiment, carried out over a very short time-scale; rather than the kind of marketing research I would carry out to get the heavy detail required for a fully-fledged project.  You should NOT use these conclusions as the basis of a change in your own Twitter use!

It is also extremely important to mention that the results would have looked VERY different, if I did not already have lots of great people, who regularly share this blog with their followers.  In addition, Twitter accounts for a tiny amount of my daily visitors here, behind; Google, RSS, Facebook, back links and Stumbleupon.  Once my largest source of traffic, Twitter has grown slower than all my other marketing channels.  In other words, I wasn’t risking much.

As I hope I have made very clear, this brief experiment was intended to see what the short-term results would be, by not using Twitter to share my new posts each day.  I had no idea that the results over such a short period, would be so interesting; which is why I intend to change my Twitter use over the longer term now, as I explain in a moment.

I find it interesting that the past 5 days coincided with my best traffic day ever and a sharp increase in follower numbers, see below.  Note, the numbers were increasing fastest from the 13th, not the 12th, which was the heavy traffic day.

Conclusions

For now, I have decided to only share posts on Twitter, which are related to Twitter (like this one) or posts that I believe have particular relevance to the people I connect with there.  Previously, I shared every post on Twitter twice: Once in the morning and again in the afternoon or evening.

I’m really curious how the numbers will look, over a longer period.  Any marketing professional worth their salt will tell you that you need good data to reach accurate conclusions.  On something like this, you need to be working with a larger set of data.  I will, of course, share my findings with you.

So, for the foreseeable future, I will be using my Twitter time primarily to share YOUR great posts and connect more with you.

IMPORTANT:  If you usually catch up with my latest posts via Twitter and don’t want to miss anything, subscribe to the blog or get new posts delivered direct to your inbox, using the “Free Updates” box at the top right of this page.

Tweeting Wolf!

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Did you ever read the story, about the boy who cried wolf?  The story goes that just for fun, a little shepherd boy would raise the alarm in his village by crying wolf.  The villages would come running to the rescue, only to find out he was paying games with them.  Then, one day, a wolf really did come and when he cried for help, no one bothered responding.

In marketing, particularly social media marketing, I see a lot of people crying wolf.  I see people sending out messages on Twitter, with links to their site and the direct request to “PLEASE RT!”  The first time I see this, I check their link out.  Is it a link to a special announcement?  Is it a very special offer they want you to retweet for them?  Is it the launch of a new product or service? No. On almost every occasion, it’s just a link to a blog post they wrote.

Here’s the challenge with that approach: When those people REALLY DO HAVE something to announce or launch, they will get very little traction from their followers.  By constantly asking/telling their followers to retweet their work, they devalue the request.

Conversely, when you very seldom ask your social network to help you share something, they respond extremely well.  That’s where the magic is.

I while ago, I sent out a link to my followers and asked them to retweet it.  It was a link to a site that had information on a missing child.  Throughout that day, I saw people sharing that link all over the place.  I started the Tweet with the words PLEASE RETWEET at the very beginning.  People are not used to seeing anything from me that asks for a retweet, so it grabbed their attention.  I have previously seen amazing results here on this blog, when I asked people to retweet a post, which asked readers what topics they wanted me to write about, so I could be of greater service to you and more relevant.  The feedback was superb.

Build as much credibility and trust as you can with your social network.  Be a source of value and help.  Then, in my experience, if you need their assistance with something important, they will want to help you and in great numbers too.

Let’s work together and grow your business. To find out more click here!

Twitter follower numbers have little to do with influence!

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Twitter follower numbers mean a great deal to a lot of people. However, it seems that as Twitter matures as a service, the number of followers someone has, has very little to do with their influence. For those of you like myself, who use Twitter as part of your marketing mix, this is worth knowing; as you can waste a LOT of time chasing follower numbers, when it’s the quality of your Twitter network that really matters.

Twitter follower numbers and influence

I’ve noticed a significant change over the past year, where many of the people with tens of thousands of followers, who ReTweet my posts, generate little if any traffic to the blog.  Yet, many people with relatively small Twitter followings seem to have far more influence, when it comes to getting their followers to take some kind of measurable action.

It seems that I am not alone in this observation.

A recent paper by Meeyoung Cha from the Max Planck Institute, was covered in The Harvard Business Review.  With Twitter’s full permission, Cha’s team monitored 54 million ACTIVE Twitter users and was able to measure a number of metrics, including things like ReTweets and the number of times a user / brand was mentioned by their followers.  They came to the conclusion that Twitter follower numbers do not equal influence. Cha said:

“Our claim is that follower count is not sufficient to capture the influence of a user (i.e., the ability of an user to sway the opinions of her followers). It only shows how popular the user is (i.e., the size of her audience). But, as we showed in our paper, retweets and mentions, which measure the audience responsiveness to a user’s tweets, do not correlate strongly with number of followers.” (There’s an excellent, short summery of the paper in this post on ReadWriteWeb)

Tens of thousands of Twitter followers & near zero influence

I am seeing examples of this every day.  Only last week, a guy ReTweeted a link to this blog, to his 40,000 followers.  As he works in marketing and claims to be a highly influential Twitter user, I was curious what the click through rate would be – So, I monitored it!

In the 60 minutes following his ReTweet, just 5 (yes, FIVE) people in total visited that particular post.  I will give him the benefit of the doubt, and say all 5 clicks came from his 40,000 followers.

An hour later, I asked a friend of mine with under 1000 followers, to share that same link and using her tracking software, monitor how many people clicked the link.  26 people clicked through in the next 60 minutes, using her unique RT link, all of whom showed up on my own analytics software.

What are your thoughts, regarding influence on Twitter?  Please take a moment to share your feedback!

Let’s work together and grow your business. To find out more click here!

Just because Bob can, does not mean he should!

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One of the great things about being in business today, is that we can get an idea, write it down, click a mouse button and get it in front of thousands of people in seconds.  Better still, we can reach all these people for little more than the cost of our time.  However, instant communications also present us with a challenge.

The marketing challenge of free, instant communications

Not that long ago, it would cost a small business owner a lot of money, to send a traditional mail shot via the postal service to a few thousand people.  It would take ages to print out all those letters and even the ink was expensive.  Then you had to fold them, stuff them into envelopes and either stick a stamp on each envelope or frank each one.  Because the cost in both time and money was so significant, people thought long and hard about what they wrote and who they sent those letters to.  Every letter needed to count, when you were paying hundreds or maybe thousands for each mail shot!

Today, Bob can write an email during his coffee break and send it to his list, with the click of a mouse button.  It will cost him nothing and take seconds.

As a result of this shift, you and I now find our email inboxes and social media streams, regularly littered with a lot of low value crap, from people like Bob.

Of course, the smartest business owners and marketers out there, are even more focused on the quality of their messages today than they were a decade ago.  They know that in order to stand out in a world full of “Bobs”, their messages have to be professionally crafted.  They also ensure that they only send their messages to people who are interested and who have given them permission to get in touch.

While people like Bob are filling the marketplace with low quality, badly targeted messages and getting added to an ever increasing number of blacklists, the savvy business owners and entrepreneurs are taking a different, less common route.  They are focusing on value first, volume second.  For them, quality comes before quantity.  They send the right message, to the right people. It’s such a simple concept, yet it’s becoming increasingly rare.

Just because there’s little financial cost attached to sending emails or using social media sites, doesn’t mean we won’t end up paying a hefty price for using them ineffectively.  If we get it wrong, we risk simultaneously damaging our reputation and missing out on an avalanche of new business and opportunities.

Let’s work together and grow your business. To find out more click here!

Dealing with critics!

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How well do you handle criticism?

If you use blogging, newsletters and/or social media sites as a way to market your services, you will receive varying levels of criticism.  Paradoxically, the more successful you become, the more criticism you will receive, because your work will reach more people.

I wrote a post in January, about the criticism bloggers receive, which readers never get to see – emails etc.  Today’s post covers other forms of criticism, and offers some ideas on why it happens and how to deal with it effectively.

I would also like to encourage YOU to add your tips at the end of the post!

Genuine, informed criticism

This is when someone, who knows the subject in question, believes they have found something in what you are doing or saying, which is incorrect.  Their motives are well intentioned and their feedback is often of great value, even though many people greet it with hostility or sarcasm.  In my experience, genuine, informed critics almost always tell you their opinion via email, the phone or face-to-face – Rather than via a social network or blog comment etc.  That’s because their intention is to help and nothing else.

Genuine, yet ill-informed criticism

Some people are going to tell you that you are doing something wrong or that you “don’t get it” and their intentions are good; yet their feedback is from an ill-informed perspective.  Like the people in the above example, these guys mean well, but unlike that example, their help is more likely to hinder you than it is to help you.

If we act on criticism that is factually wrong, we make bad decisions.  This is why it’s really important to check the source of the feedback we receive, before we decide to take action.  If someone with no expertise or experience in something is criticising you in that area, get some more feedback from an informed source.

Non-criticism, criticism

Just because someone disagrees with our point of view, does not mean they are being critical of us.  It’s easy to regard those who see things differently, as being negatively critical, when they are simply offering a different perspective.  This is especially the case with blog comments, where readers will often take a counter-point from the blogger or a fellow commenter.  The whole point of asking for comments and feedback, is to get different opinions and ideas.

Finally, consider the motivation behind negative criticism

People do what they do for a reason.  If we take a moment to consider why someone might make a critical comment about us or our work, it’s easy to see the point they are making in the correct context.

Some do it to attract “traffic”.  For example, the best-known bloggers often find less established bloggers writing extremely critical posts about them, in the hope that the popular blogger mentions them and in so doing, delivers a ton of traffic to the critic’s blog.  Some do it to get noticed.  Others do it because they just LOVE to look for the negative (I get lots of these, whenever I make a spelling error.)  Some do it just to have a little fun, at our expense.

The bottom line: There many reasons that people feel compelled to negatively criticise and many different types of criticism.  If you use (or plan to use) blogging, social networking sites and newsletters etc, as part of your marketing mix, negative criticism is all part of the feedback you will receive, as your audience grows.