To follow my debate about ‘having an animated icon on twitter’ and whether it benefits you, I decided to ask people on twitter about their feeling on recieveing an automated direct message once you follow someone.

Personally I don’t like them, I don’t think they fit in with twitter and the people that use them, this is because I find them to be robotic, short sales pitch with generally no real value.

When I follow somebody on twitter it’s because I find their tweets interesting, I want to contribute to a conversation or they are person behind them has similar interests to myself, I don’t follow them in hope of them forcing sales pitches down my throat from the get go, I want engagement and to speak to a human. The following reasons are why I believe they shouldn’t be used:

• They are impersonal and intrusive, I see them as being quite similar to receiving junk mail once you sign up to something you are generally interested about.
• 
  
• It cheapens your brand. People are increasingly becoming savvier, and find it quite insulting to receive a direct sales pitch so soon after interacting with somebody.
• 
  
• They don’t have the desired impact for a marketer. If people are interested in you and what they have to offer they will research you further themselves, they don’t need to be spoon fed information.
• 
  

Here are some of the tweets I recieved in response to the posed question:

@AirConTechLtd wrote - '@tim_eem It's a little arrogant really that they have to little time to care about their followers!!'

@pinkspiderweb wrote - '@tim_eem #debate No. I don't like automatic DMs, they're too impersonal '

@nimuesnestgifts Wrote – ‘@tim_eem annoys me so I usually unfollow immediately! May as well be a bot if using auto DMs as far as I'm concerned’

It’s not really come to any surprise but using automated Direct Messages are not popular, my advice would be to switch them off and communicate to your new followers personally, as this will get you a higher response rate and adds a personal touch which twitter users crave. If you don’t have time to do this then don’t do it, no Direct message is better than having one which irritates people

How do you feel about them? Have you had any success in using them? Comments are appreciated!

The socialjamm team.
www.socialjamm.com
www.twitter.com/socialjamm

Web link-shortening giant, Bit.ly has released data about the best times to post on the top social networks.

Optimum Times to post on twitter:

The best time to post on twitter is between 1:00pm and 3:00pm ET (10am to 1pm PT) in the early days of the working week, as this is the period of time that garners the highest click rate. The absolute optimum time is 1:00pm on a Monday, the reason for this being, one can only speculate is that most people tend to check their twitter updates on the first day back to work on their lunch breaks.

Optimum times to post on Facebook:

Facebook differs to Twitter with the optimum time to post being Wednesday at 3:00pm ET. The general rule for Facebook is to post after lunch, (1pm Onwards) as this is the time that will get the most click through rates. These results could be due to office workers looking distraction in the afternoon, to get over the post lunch lull.

When not to post on Facebook and Twitter:

The statistics have shown for both Facebook and Twitter that the worst times to post, in order to get interaction with your followers are in the evening after 8:00pm up until the next working day.

*Twitter Tip – Although you may be tempted to post on twitter first thing in the morning, it would be wise to post at around 11:00am to catch the traffic at lunch time.

The socialjamm team.
www.socialjamm.com
www.twitter.com/socialjamm

The people behind the service that allows you to share photos on twitter before twitter did, have released their first app. The app allows users to edit photos and add filters before sharing them to twitter. It is currently only available for Iphone users, with an android version proposed for release in the coming months.

The popular service started in 2008 has over 35 million users, only 15 million users less Instagram, the photo editing and sharing tool acquired by Facebook early this month for $1 Billion.

It is widely known that twitter wanted to acquire Instagram before Facebook made their incredible bid, so is this the reason that Twitpic have decided to release an app? According to Everet, this is not the case; he commented “Our goal is just to provide the best possible product for our users. As far as trying to position ourselves for acquisition by any particular service, that’s not our focus.”

We will have to watch this spacer in the coming months to see if twitpic’s audience grows to the heights of their previous 45.7% share of photos uploaded to twitter (2.25 million daily image) back in May 2011, before Twitter struck a deal with photobucket to have users upload directly without using a 3^rd party service, and if this does indeed prompt twitter to make a bid for this service.

The socialjamm team.
www.socialjamm.com
www.twitter.com/socialjamm

With the popularity of our posts about how to optimise your pages to gain twitter followers (found here) I have been requested to post further tips to enhance your twitter experience. This post will be a general overview of my experience with twitter and what I have learned from using it.

I signed up to twitter 3 years ago and like everybody (maybe not celebrities) when they start Twitter, I found it a struggle to gain followers. I had basically signed up to it to see what it was all about. I didn’t really understand the potential it had, and like most people I would tweet randomly and hope that people would find my musings interesting and follow me. It wasn’t surprising that I didn’t get many followers and if I did they weren’t relevant to what I wanted, I hadn’t found my purpose or voice….

At the time I was primarily a web and graphic designer and I was starting to get requests to design social media pages for businesses and naturally my interest in social media marketing took off. (I now work as a professional social media manager and obviously run this blog)

Twitter for me, now had a purpose, it could be used as a platform to gain and share knowledge, to market myself and engage with other social media enthusiasts. So following this I set up my own twitter page again.

My original aim was to gain as many RELEVANT followers as I could in one month.. The first thing I decided to do was follow people in the same industry as myself who have an abundance of followers and see what they were doing that made their pages so successful.

My first realisation was at how often they tweeted. Power users tend to tweet and re-tweet up-to-date content regularly, engage with a high percentage of their new followers (My guess was that they didn’t engage with everybody as not every person who adds you would be relevant to yourself) and inject sparks of their personality into their tweets.

Following these observations I started to implement these behaviours into my own tweets and subsequently saw the amount of followers I had double in the space of one month. This correlation is no accident, twitter is a platform that you have to work at to gain the results you want, you have to post smart and often, engage with users and re-tweet relevant content to capture your audiences attention and gain that all important follow.

So basically in a nutshell in order for twitter to work for you to gain relevant followers you should do the following:

1. Have a purpose and a voice.

2. Think about your audience and what they what knowledge they would like to gain.

3. Write and post your own content (A blog is a great way to do this)

4. Engage with people (It is a social platform after all)

5. Don’t use it to only promote yourself (80% content 20% promotion is the tested and proven amount)

6. Be yourself.

If you follow these steps you will see that your twitter following will increase, with relevant followers, giving you more business opportunities, a wider circle of people in your industry to engage with and an opportunity to gain increased knowledge on your industry through research for content to share and other peoples shared content.

What have your experiences been with twitter? Do you have any other tips for success? Let me know in the comment box!

The socialjamm team.
www.socialjamm.com
www.twitter.com/socialjamm

With over 175 million twitter users it can be hard getting people to follow you,half of the battle if getting people to your page, the other half is keeping them interested and getting them to follow you. A great way to gain instant interest (and hopefully a follow) from viewer of your page is to design and implement a custom twitter background.

A custom twitter background allows you to:

1. Stand out from the crowd:

A custom Twitter design separates you from every other standard twitter background.

2. Strengthen your brand:

It can tie in with and strengthen your brand, as long as you use the same brand colours and logo. This means that viewers will find it instantly recognisable with your other branded marketing materials.

3. Add more contact information:

You can take advantage of the extra space available to you to include contact information which you couldn’t fit into the 160 characters twitter limits you to in your bio. (see this post to optimise your bio http://socialjamm.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/how-to-optimise-your-twitter-bio-to.html)

4.Market Social Media and Blogs:

You can also use the space to market your other social media channels such as linkedin / Facebook / Youtube / Pinterest or your Blog if you have one, driving more traffic to those sites too.

5.Promote a Special offer:

The space can also be used to promote a specific offer that you are offering, a good call to action can entice people to buy your products or visit certain websites etc

6.Show off Your Personality:

Using images is one of the best ways to convey your personality, and this is an opportunity to let your personality to shine through.

The following 2 profiles have been designed by myself for my own profile @tim_eem and @socialjamm:

We will show you how to design a custom twitter brackground in our next post. So take these reasons and brainstorm what you would like to include on yours!

The socialjamm team.
http://www.socialjamm.com/
www.twitter.com/socialjamm

Your twitter bio, background and photograph/icon are the only elements that remain consistent throughout your page. Your bio is basically the place to tell the twitter-world what you tweet about. 90% of the time it is the first thing that people will read in search results and when visiting your page, so it is important to optimise it to display the correct information about yourself or your brand to help make your page easily searchable to potential followers.

Twitter limits your bio to 160 characters. This means that you have to be quite savvy to get the most out of this space to gain the maximum amount of followers. The following key factors will tell you what information you should include in your bio. This will then be followed by the most efficient methods of how best to compact and optimise this information into the 160 character limit.

Key factors for your twitter bio:

The key factors for your twitter bio are information to let a user know what you will be tweeting about,who you are and optional links to relevant content.

What do you specialise in:

The reason people use twitter is to share and gain knowledge via tweets, so it is advantage and in your best interest to share what you specialise. this will allow the user to see if the information that you will share will be of any use to them.

Your personality:

In general people like to know who the person who is behind the tweets after all twitter is a social network. A little bit of information about your personal interests can help you gain followers and humanise your page, but beware it can also alienate your audience for example, posting that you are an avid Manchester United Fan could turn avid Liverpool FC fans away from following you, unless of course you are tweeting about Manchester United. Instead I would recommend that you post that you are an avid Football fan as this shows your interest in football in a more general sense.

Websites / Blogs / Social Media Links:

This is a great place to promote and advertise websites, blogs and social media links (yours or other peoples) that provide similar information to what knowledge you will be sharing as it is constantly displayed on your page.

Optimising your bio:

OK, so now you know what information you need in your bio how do you go about optimising it?

As I mentioned earlier you are only limited to 160 characters so the main aim is to get as much relevant (and I stress the word ‘relevant’) into your bio to gain the right followers. The best route to take is to use key-words, this keeps it simple and efficient for a user to read to make the decision to to follow you or not. IT also makes it easier for searches to pick up these words and display your page against them in twiters/google/bings search results.

Now I’m not saying to write a short list of key words along with with a website address for your bio, this just looks spammy, unprofessional and impersonal. E.g.

SEO, web design, graphics, marketing. http://www.marketingblog.com

Would you be interested in following a page with this as its bio?

The best way to do this is to add your key words into a sentence, making it look a lot more human and personal e.g.

Champion of marketing, design and interested in all things web. Avid Football Fan and co-writer of http://www.marketingblog.com – for up to date marketing tips

This gives the user relevant information about what you do, contains key-words for searches, gives a hint of a personal interest and includes a link to your website.

Try these other tips:

*Remember, although people can’t see you treat your bio as your introduction to the world. Only post here what you would like others to know in real life, some things to avoid:

• Vulgar or offensive language.
• Links to inappropriate pages.

AND FINALLY

Remember to spell everything correctly! Nothing screams unprofessional more than a spelling mistake!

Following these steps will help you gain more followers and rank higher in search engines. We hope you have found this information interesting.

Now go and update that bio!

The socialjamm team.
http://www.socialjamm.com/
www.twitter.com/socialjamm

Virgin Media have partnered up with the fastest man on the planet,
Usain Bolt, to help promote their new 'Keep Up' campaign which offers
Virgin Media customers their fastest ever broadband.

The ad campaign caught my eye last Saturday during the ad breaks on
Take Me Out on ITV, where short clips were shown of Usain in 'costume'
which consisted of him sporting a blond beard and pretending to be
Richard Branson, the full ad was finally shown andthe message became
clear.

With everyone jumping on the olympics bandwagon I thought this campaign
stood out as a fun and unique way of promoting Virgin Media and the
campaign is also being run across all platforms including TV, online,
print and social media which I haven't really seen done very effectively
in the past.

The digital campaign is what stood out most for me, as the campaign was
promoted on the YouTube homepage on Monday with a dedicated channel set
up featuring all of the videos. They also used Twitter as a launch pad,
creating the account @i_am_R_Branson with a link to the YouTube channel
and also having Richard Branson and Usain Bolt tweeting from their
personal accounts using the #iamrbranson.

Overall it was a fun and unique way of promoting what would otherwise
have been a standard celebrity endorsed advertising campaign which
stood out enough to get coverage across a number of mainstream media
sites including the Daily Mail, Guardian, Marketing Week, The Mirror
and Digital Spy.



You can check the YouTube channel out here -
http://www.youtube.com/user/iamrichardbranson

Thanks to our Guest Blogger - Saf

The socialjamm team.
http://www.socialjamm.com/
www.twitter.com/socialjamm

Twitter Tip 1 - Claim your name as soon as possible:

Twitter has fast become the 2^nd highest used social media network, with 175 million+ users and this means that a considerable amount of names have already been taken. I would recommend signing up as soon as possible to claim your name.

Twitter Tip 2 - Think about your audience:

Think about your audience and what they will be searching for.  Your Twitter name is a powerful influence on how you rank in search engines (google / bing etc) and twitters own search results. It is your identity, so when using the service consider using a name as close to your own name, your brand name or your online alias, as this will ensure that people will be able to recognise you or your company and find you with ease.

If you can’t find a name close enough to represent your brand use a key word to appear in searches that supports the subject you will be tweeting about e.g. if you are going to predominantly tweet about social media and your name is ‘Tim’ agood example of a name would be - @socialmediatim.

Twitter Tip 3 - Keep your name as short as possible:

(Your username can contain up to 15 characters) Twitter only allows you to type 140 characters per tweet, so try and keep your name as short as possible for when people retweet your tweet or mention you, giving them more space for their input.

Twitter Tip 4 - Try and avoid the use of underscores:

Twitter has a high number of mobile users, and not all mobile phones feature an easy to access underscore button, in general people prefer to be able to log on and type in a simple name to search for or mention you in a tweet. It also sounds much more professional when saying it aloud to someone for example @socialmediatim is short and to the point …@social_media_tim becomes social underscore media underscore Tim, quite a mouthful.

Twitter Tip 5- Changing your username:

If you have a twitter account already you may be familiar with the fact that you can change your name as often as you like, although this is good for experimentation to see what username works best for you and your brand, I would recommend that you don’t change it too often as people become familiar with your username and will use it to search for you.

Twitter Tip 6 - What to avoid:

Try to stay away from using vulgar or offensive words / terms (unless of course this is what you will be tweeting about) In general people will stay away from these profiles as not many people want to respond to or retweet from somebody with an offensive name. Treat it as you are introducing yourself to 175 million+ people in real life and use common sense.

We hope you find this post helpful and will be posting other ways to optimise your twitter page in our next post.

You can tweet any twitter or other social media questions you may have at us @socialjamm or post them in the comment box below!

The socialjamm team.
http://www.socialjamm.com/
www.twitter.com/socialjamm