Twitter

Social Media Monitoring for Marketing

Where are you when your potential customers are talking?

Social media provides a chance to hear things you would never hear before, find customers you would never find before, and make connections that lead to sales you would never make before. The key is to be there to capitalize on the thought, comment, mention that your customer makes, when they make it. You have to have the system in place to make it possible, your finger has to be on the shutter to capture the moment.

Are companies really doing that? Yes.

Here is an example from today that will illuminate the way companies are using social media monitoring to build brand awareness and make connections with proven customers. Earlier I stopped by Whole Foods to pick up some Burrata Mozzarella, a creamy fresh mozzarella that is one of a kind. While there I checked in with Foursquare and tweeted my checkin as shown here:

What Followed that Tweet was a Retweet by the brand that I bought. Notice I never mentioned a brand name, just the variety of the mozzarella. So how did the company know it was theirs? I uploaded a photo of the package with my checkin. That means the company was monitoring twitter for mentions of Burrata (they didn’t follow me prior to this) and were aware of my tweet and the fact that it was their product, they then re-tweeted my post. That all happened in 40 minutes. Not bad.

As you can see a subsequent conversation took place about their product and who knows how many people noticed and didn’t comment.

So how do you do this cost effectively?

You need to use tools that monitor the mentions for you. You can’t spend all day watching, and you can’t pay someone either, unless you are GM or Verizon etc. I use Spoke Social which I am involved in developing. Here is an example of the monitoring screen that Spoke has for setting up the keywords and other parameters:

As you can see I set it up to monitor for mentions of Brunch or Sunday Brunch, within 25 miles of my restaurant Evenfall, as I am going to be starting brunch there in October. So now each time someone mentions that term within 25 miles of Evenfall I will be notified and able to message them an invitation. Will they all come? No. Will they have an interest in brunch? Likely. Will it cost me much time, money, or anguish to do it. Definitely not.

This is the type of Marketing Use that monitoring tools can have. They are most often used as a customer service tool to make sure that any disgruntled customer taking to social media and venting about your brand can be contacted and the situation rectified.

If ideas and examples like this interest you, you can subscribe for free here: (It would make me happy too.)

What do you think? Is monitoring interesting? It is not expensive, in fact it is one of 40 features that spoke has for $15 a month. I am here to answer questions for you, @spirocks on twitter or in comments below.

I am Spirocks on Twitter.

How to Use Twitters New Features for Business

Spiro Pappadopoulos

Yesterday Twitter unveiled some enhancements to its service which have been just about universally welcomed. On the heels f its native photo service it seems that Twitter is intent on finally building on its simple but addictive base. I am going to go over a few of the ways that these new changes can and should affect your marketing.

What Do Twitter’s New Features Mean for Marketers?

The first change is the new @mentions tab, which not only lists the tweets that mention the profiles twitter handle but also shows any of its tweets that have been favorited, and the handles newest followers.

The ease with which this new tab allows you to track and respond to these things is a great improvement, and you should actively monitor the mentions already. If you have not been doing that, get on it now. Yeah stop reading this and start looking at who is trying to interact with you. That is what this is all about.

I think the greatest addition here though is the newest followers listing. What a help. Sometimes I get over a hundred followers in one day, like when I recently had a back and forth with @ochocinco.

I typically try my best to follow everybody that follows me and then try and form lists etc after the fact. But sometimes it is really hard to keep up with it, this new tab will allow you to know who is following your business on Twitter and allow you to start a conversation with them right off the bat.

Don’t Do This:

Please refrain from doing any of the following with new Twitter Followers, it is a horrible idea to:

Send a DM thanking them for being a follower. Waste of their time, and so many people do it that it is not special. It is annoying.
Ask them to Connect on Facebook Too. Right of the bat? You are connected, on twitter, talk to them there. Later they may find you on Facebook if you are compelling, or maybe not. Just don’t be one of the people that tries to get a like on facebook with immediately after getting followed… You can lose them forever right there, besides it’s Gross.
Automated responses of any kind are generic so they sound generic. It is way better, way way way better to not say anything at all than to send an automated “Hi I strive to continuously help better the profit of your business. Need help?” message. Just don’t do it.

Twitter Activity Tab

The second change twitter made today is the addition of the activity tab, and this is brilliant because now we finally have insight into how others are using Twitter. The new Activity tab lists the latest favorited tweets from your Twitter Circle, the latest RTs, and new following activity.

What stands out here? To me it is the ease of having all three of these activities collected and curated for you under the tab, and secondly the new following activity details. Right off the bat the you can imagine how helpful this will be in learning more about the people you follow and their conversations on Twitter. A savvy business could monitor this new resource for conversations, retweets, and follows that may indicate a potential business opportunity.

In addition it provides a chance to learn from the greats, to better understand the way they use Twitter as a tool to succeed. I hear comparisons to the Facebook NewsFeed and obviously Twitter took a step in that direction by creating a feed of sorts, but I think you would miss out on some strategic implementation if you just thought of it that way.

Do This:

Have a business that sells big ticket items? Identify the people you follow that could be customers, and pay attention to their conversations, offer help and advice when you can and start a relationship. When they are ready to buy, you will have a head start to get the sale.
Getting up to speed at a new job, in a new market, or industry? Find those who are the most successful and pay attention to their connections, conversations, and overall activity. What they share, who they talk to, who they follow are all at your fingertips with this new tool. Use that info to excel and learn about the community in your field.

What ways are you using the new features for business?

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I am Spirocks on Twitter.

Getting the most from your Blog?

Spiro Pappadopoulos

Thoughts from the Beach…

Whether a small business or a professional your blog is not only a part of your online marketing efforts, it should be your lynchpin that holds it all together. Now since you are creating posts that share valuable and interesting information and offers on a regular basis it is time to make sure that you are getting the most from this library of content you have created.

Have you heard of Evergreen Content?

That is a term that refers to blog posts that contain information that si not date specific and still of value to the reader months or even years after it is written. Just because it is buried thirty posts ago doesn’t mean it is done and gone forever. Google search will have them indexed and send visitors too your pages when they are relevant to search terms. That is one of the primary reasons we write blogs, to create content about the business we are marketing, and allow customers to find us via search. You may have heard of inbound marketing and this is a founding principle of that method.

But we want to Turbo Charge Inbound Marketing

Search is amazingly easy, and it currently sends upwards of 20% of the traffic to this blog, but we want more, faster. Sharing via social networks and email is the obvious answer, but how you do it will determine success or failure. At GuestFeed we pay careful attention to the frequency of messages we send out for ourselves and for our customers, I created the EFT Ratio to aid us in maintaining a helpful non-intrusive vibe with our followers. I believe it is one of the primary reasons that our clients and our own followings have increased so rapidly.

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We made a tool to Help

So we spent a lot of time creating great content, most of it evergreen, and tried to determine how to best share it. The over riding principle is that no matter what we don’t want to come across as a spammer, or annoying, or repetitive. But we want to share our evergreen posts more than once, especially on twitter. That is how Spoke Social was born, we wanted to create a tool that both our clients and us could use to help automate some of the sharing. How we do it:

We write a great post first.
Next we share it immediately on all our networks.
Then we schedule it to be reposted with Spoke on twitter at a specific interval, like every 15 days, for a specific timeframe, like until August 25th.
Then we monitor the click throughs and page views for all our pages. When one of them is clearly a STUD post with great interaction numbers we share it again on Facebook a month later with a comment along the lines of ‘In case you missed it the first time check out our most popular post of the past month.’

Isn’t automation Evil?

The answer is yes and no. Yes if your feed is a robot driven non-human inconsiderate self serving stream of boringness. No if you automate a very small percentage of what you send out, and if it is sincerely helpful things you are sharing. Check my twitter feed for an idea of what I mean: @spirocks

Keep in mind that EFT ratio idea from earlier, on twitter it is highly unlikely that a large percentage of your following will see a particular tweet. It is just the way it is with twitters real time stream of tweets pushing your last one out of view quickly. So with that understanding the second or third time that you share a post may be the first time that it is seen by a follower. That means that was their only opportunity to see what you are sharing and decide if it was of interest to them.

Take a look at this screenshot, see the spikes? Those are re-shares on twitter. What this tells me is that there were a bunch of people who were seeing this for the first time even three months after the post was written.

So why do we need a tool to help us automate the Re-Posts? Well creating content is time consuming and time is short when you are running a business. Spoke allows us to schedule posts out as long as we want with exact frequency in a matter of 10 seconds. That single feature would make it worth using for us, of course we use more of Spoke’s capabilities but scheduling recurring messages alone is the key one for us. Of course you can manually schedule posts with Hootsuite, we tried that and found that we were just not doing it as much because it was cumbersome and repetitive.

The bottom line is that you should do it, it is proven to drive more traffic to your blog, which means more potential customers are exposed to the fantastic things you are doing.

That is successful marketing defined.

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I am Spirocks on Twitter.

Run your own Group Buying Promotion. I am.

Spiro Pappadopoulos

Who needs Groupon?

Keep all the revenue and stir up some serious business along the way. In this post I am going to explain how with an example I just put together for Evenfall Restaurant, it’s a home grown group buying marketing campaign. It’s Mojito Time.

The Hook: The more people that buy the cheaper it gets.

Evenfall is well known for having the best Mojitos in the area, with elbow grease, fresh muddled mint and lime, and some silver rum they serve them in pint glasses and they serve them often in the summer months. So for this promotion we decided to lower the price every week that at least 100 mojitos were sold. We started by reducing the price from $8 to $5 for the first ten day run. The every week until mid August the price will be reduced by 50 cents until it reaches $1 a Mojito.

I created a page on the restaurants blog dedicated to the promotion, you can see that here: (Make My Mojito Cheaper) and shared it via Twitter, Facebook, and a soon to be released email blast.

As the promotion progresses the deal gets more and more enticing, it is timed to coincide with the slowest season of the year for the restaurant and designed to drive businesses during the dog days of summer with ridiculously cheap mojitos. Read on to see the consideration I took, and why it makes sense for the restaurant…

[Read more…] about Run your own Group Buying Promotion. I am.

I am Spirocks on Twitter.

What Can Followers Do for Your Business?

Spiro Pappadopoulos

Skeptics of social media marketing have a lot of excuses for why they don’t do it, why they don’t have time for it, and why ‘their customers’ don’t really use it. But what they really are asking is:

How can a strong twitter and facebook following help me solve business problems my restaurant faces and make real money?

They are your Fans, and they are a resource that adds strength.

Here is a real world example of how GuestFeed did just that this past week for one of our restaurant clients. I was talking to the manager of a successful restaurant that has a private dining room for functions like rehearsal dinners, corporate meetings, and holiday parties. GuestFeed has been very successful building website solutions, and marketing the private dining opportunities for the restaurant, and as we spoke he said, “The holiday season is almost completely booked, imagine if we could book the room for some Monday and Tuesday parties.” I thought that would be incredible if their private room was completely booked for December, and I asked him what he thought it would take. He told me that if he knew he would do it.

So I said lets ask your restaurant’s twitter followers and GuestFeed’s followers and see what they come up with. So I ran a simple “What would it take to encourage your company to have their Holiday party on a Mon or Tues?” message out there. We got seven responses in the first 30 minutes, and some of them were actually within or control (what is not: tell my boss to give us wed off). We were able to put together a dinner menu and limited open bar, with a fixed per person price that came in below the restaurant’s typical price point. It resulted in two bookings in the first week worth $2800 in sales.

Money invested: $0 Time invested: Two tweets: 45 seconds, Menu creation: 15 minutes.

Your social following can be a sounding board for business ideas, a source of suggestions, and a window through which you can see your customer’s perspective. Clearly you need to dedicate yourself to the building of your followers, facebook friends, and email list for this approach to be very effective. Your results would surely not be the same if you only had 54 followers compared to my 4400+ @Spirocks account and 2347+ @GuestFeed account… but as you do that, your results get better incrementally.

This kind of interactive marketing is what we do at Guestfeed, and what every restaurant should be doing to work towards turning a period of weakness into a strength. Your connections may not all ever visit your restaurant, but via activity like feedback or bringing attention to your content they may lead others through your door. There is real value there you just have to ask for it.

Feel free to ask me any related questions you have, I mean it, I love to connect.

I am Spirocks on Twitter.

Twitter

Where are you when your potential customers are talking?

Are companies really doing that? Yes.

So how do you do this cost effectively?

Subscribe to My Mailing List

What Do Twitter’s New Features Mean for Marketers?

Don’t Do This:

Twitter Activity Tab

Do This:

Like Updates like this? Get them delivered as soon as I write them:

Have you heard of Evergreen Content?

But we want to Turbo Charge Inbound Marketing

We made a tool to Help

Isn’t automation Evil?

That is successful marketing defined.

Who needs Groupon?

The Hook: The more people that buy the cheaper it gets.

[Read more…] about Run your own Group Buying Promotion. I am.