This morning I had a good think about what my New Year’s Resolutions are going to be… the normal ’go to the gym’, ‘don’t let work stress me out so much’ made their annual appearances. But I am making some new resolutions this year for the business.

Social Brighton needs some new objectives/kicks up the backside/reminders just as much as any individual. So here they are:

1. Have at least a LOOK on Twitter every day

Life is so busy and whilst I am on Twitter almost daily as am individual (@kerrywaller),  as a business we don’t spend enough time practicing what we preach and fulfilling Social Brighton’s own social media objectives! Ironically, we have been so busy recently that our own social media activity has been pushed to the bottom of the priorities list. It certainly confirms our appreciation of how small companies struggle to allocate the time to social media, something we address in all our training! So in 2013, we promise to look and listen to what you are doing and engage when we can – on Twitter, LinkedIn and in the blogosphere. So much cyberspace, so little time, but we are going to try to get back on the social scene a bit more ourselves.

2. Research & Educate

It is difficult to keep up with the vastly changing social media landscape when you actually have a job to do. Businesses out there have to keep up with changes and developments in their own industry and we are committed to keeping your up to date with ours. We are constantly reading up on social media news and researching case studies for different clients so we will help others by sharing what we are up to and interesting discoveries we make. Keep an eye on our blog and on Twitter and we will do our best to share useful information.

3. Grow and Evolve

With more and more small business owners adopting a more structured social media strategy, rather than just posting on Facebook a few times a week, we need to grow ourselves to be able to take on more clients and provide an excellent service. 2013 will see new additions to the team who will help Social Brighton grow and evolve. Part of evolving for us is to think oustide the box and find ways to work with clients that works for them, whether that be bringing together like minded businesses at social media seminars or restructuring packages to work in different ways – perhaps a series of Skype conferences and online document sharing rather than face to face training? Or (and what seem to be becoming more popular with us), a casual meeting over laptops and coffee with one on one training. Whatever directions we take, we will listen to feedback and adapt to make sure we are meeting the needs of our clients.

There are only 3 there but they are all important to remember to keep us on track for 2013. Have you made New Years Resolutions for your business?

We would love to hear them!

I think Twitter is the most discerning of social networks and it drives me nuts to see people abusing it, broadcasting, spamming, boasting about numbers of followers, etc. They seem to have forgotten the quintessential point of social networking: users curate their own feeds.

Twitter had this sussed from the start – if somebody you followed started to bore you or posted too many updates throughout the day, you can simply unfollow them! So why some accounts think they can bombard people with links, dull content and no personal updates, is beyond me. You won’t see your followers grow that way.

I’m a firm believer in keeping social media use honest and organic. Don’t focus on achieving high numbers of followers – focus on the quality and relevance of those followers. Social networks allow businesses to focus their attention on those who are actually interested in their product or service if, and it’s a big IF, they engage people with an interesting Twitter feed; varied content, not too much advertising, and a lot of personality!

Better to have 100 followers who are interested in what you’ve got to say and are all potential customers, than 1000 customers who wouldn’t know what your company did if you covered it in spam and posted it to them.

Be interesting, be creative and watch your audience grow naturally.

Don’t know if you can tell but I am pretty passionate about how businesses use social media – if you ever want me to present a talk to people in your business, just give me a shout!

The Great Escape Festival hits Brighton every May and has been going strong since 2006, establishing itself as Europe’s leading festival for showcasing new music. Multiple venues are full of live music for 3 days, the city is full of music heads and, to quote someone I follow on Twitter, “New Road Brighton looks like there’s a white male indie band breeding machine on the go…” (@caracourage).

Twitter was founded in the same year (a couple of months before) and so using the social network to add value to the first festival was not an option. Now, because everyone is using smartphones (I was actually told off for Tweeting during a gig by a friend who didn’t believe I could appreciate the music properly and tweet simultaneously) Twitter is an extremely valuable tool. You can follow the hashtag #TGE12 to keep abreast of what everyone is saying about the Festival (there are other hashtags around including #TGE2012 but the former is the one used by The Great Escape Twitter account).

On Twitter @GreatEscapeFest is not only tweeting about news and shows around the festival and informing us of gigs all over the city that we may have forgotten were on, but also actually communicating with it’s community too. Nice to see a human presence behind the account!

I love the fact the community manager behind Great Escape is out watching gigs (or has sent people out in their absence) to take photos and are enjoying the festival like everyone else. That makes that Twitter account far nicer to follow.

I also rate how they manage complaints and comments: after a complaint about queues, they managed to solve a problem. Now that wouldn’t have happened before social media unless people actually bothered to call – if indeed there was anyone to call.

Social media is now a critical component not only in terms of promoting events and raising awareness, but also in terms of sharing. People with smartphones love to share photos and comments about where they are and what they’re doing. By utilising social accounts, festivals turn their customers into promotional vehicles. Of course, they can’t control whether people share positive or negative experiences but if they have a crisis management plan in place then they are at least prepared for the eventuality of negative feedback.

I hope that @GreatEscapeFest continues to engage music lovers after the event to help keep The Great Escape up there the leading new music festival in Europe and give it’s social participants something back. A Storify of tweets, photos and videos would be a great way to curate something special from the masses of rich content out there. I’ll look forward to seeing what they do!

Now I’m off to catch some more live music and, despite my friends objections, I will certainly be tweeting too (@kerrywaller) #TGE12

I scanned Twitter for a few minutes before I even got out of bed this morning (yes, I’m a Twitter addict) and two of the tweets I saw instantly registered as great tweets. I knew straight away that I would, at some point, refer to them in a conversation or training session with a client. This is because they were examples of how brilliant Twitter can be for business – if it’s used cleverly.

No one really wants a brand to advertise to them on a social network unless they’re giving something away or providing some useful information. So it takes a great deal of thought from business owners or community managers to create the right online ‘voice’ and balance of content which people will engage with.

A lot of what I do with Social Brighton is training people about best practice on social networks and teaching them how to build networks and engage their audience whilst marketing their business and managing the perception of their brand. And I often use examples of accounts to inspire them or, in some cases, to show them what not to do. These accounts are sometimes local, sometimes global and they span many industries depending on who I’m working with.

I’ve decided to share a few of them here now and again in the hope that it will help Brighton’s businesses get their social activity moving in the right direction to meet their business objectives. We can always learn something from others!

The first great tweet I saw this morning from @Metrodeco is a great tweet because they show they are real people. Through tweets like this we feel like we get to know them a little more – it isn’t just a business shamelessly trying to sell us something. We learn that they hire talented baristas and we know that they make a great looking coffee.

Personally I like the china and wonder what Corey looks like too – maybe I’ll have to go in and see!

The second tweet that caught my attention was from @BrightonNick who posted a photo of this incredibly huge fish and a chef preparing it for some delectable sushi. Not sure about you but this certainly made me think about @moshibrighton1 as a venue to visit soon!

I’m well aware there were many other brilliant tweets out there but these were the two that I saw in my Twitter stream and gave me the idea of this new series of blog posts about Brighton’s Best Tweeters.

Have a great weekend! I’m planning on going out for coffee and sashimi myself…

Facebook Timeline is coming to brand pages on 30th March and, as I mentioned in a previous post ‘Facebook Timeline for Business: What’s New?’, there is more emphasis now on posting decent content to encourage more interaction with fans. As always with Facebook it’s all about engaging people. If you post dull content that nobody interacts with, you will end up not being able to reach them because you won’t appear in their feed. The focus now is really getting your fans to:

• like your posts
• comment on your posts
• share your posts
• vote in your polls

If people do not interact with the content you post in the above ways then you will cease to appear in their newsfeed. And obviously if they hide your posts visbility then you won’t either. You will however still appear in their ticker feed (top right corner of your page) but you will not be visible to their wider networks.

So what should you do?

You need to take a fresh look at what you post and how it relates to your audience. Go back to the roots of your social media strategy and answer the following questions:

1. Who are your audience / target market?
2. What are they interested in?
3. What does your organisation do/offer/talk about that they will want to share?
4. What times of day and days of the week are they online (and interact most with what you post)?

When you’ve answered the questions above you should have a better idea of how to engage the right people at the right time. If your frequency of posts has been low you will probably need to increase the amount of times you post (once a day is apparently not considered to be enough anymore) to make any kind of impact.

You will certainly be wise to look at the times and days that you post in particular. If your audience are online more at the weekend and you work Mon-Fri, you should schedule a higher frequency of posts over the weekend. By using the metrics available to you with Facebook Insights and services like Bit.ly you can monitor this and adjust your social activity accordingly.

As for who your audience is and what they are interested in, that is obviously unique to your brand or industry.

Another way of utilising Facebook Timeline and creating interesting content is to build the history of your brand by posting historical milestones or important moments in time. Red Bull have tried this approach and have created an interesting chronology of their brand for their audience. Food for thought perhaps!

Time to get your thinking caps on. Comment on this post or on Twitter and share your ideas!

By using the lovely site Visual.ly you can create an infographic based on either a certain hashtag (below) or a personal Facebook ‘Monster’ by allowing it to access you Facebook profile and information (you will not see THAT below). You do have to sign up and wait for an invite from Visual.ly before you can get going but when you’re in, it’s all about the infographics: creating, uploading and sharing. I chose #SXSW as it was a recent hashtag I was following on Twitter.

This is just a bit of fun but I love the way that there are sites like this that allow any of us to create something visual that doesn’t look like you made it on Microsoft Paint. Social media is all about posting content that people want to share and it can sometimes be really hard to come up with ideas. There may be an opportunity for your business to create something like this, especially if you start your own hashtags on Twitter or join in with other hashtags yourself! Food for thought possibly.

infographic created with visual.ly

Facebook Timeline is coming to brand pages whether we like it or not so lets get to the bottom of what it means for your business. There’s a fair bit of reluctance out there…. but lets embrace the change and make the most of it. On 30th March your page will be changed by Facebook anyway so better to be prepared, understand the changes and amend your social media strategy accordingly.

Page layout

There is now a large cover image at the top with an avatar underneath and a chronological series of updates, including posts where others have commented on your brand. There are rules about what you can and can’t include on your cover image (such as no contact details!) which you can read here.

Whereas before you only had an avatar and possibly a welcome page to ‘brand’ your company, there is now more scope to make an impact upon first visit. Although individuals may only visit your page once when they first decide whether or not to ‘like’ you, it is an opportunity to brand your page so that it represents your company and what you’re about. Notice how Red Bull’s image is not a photo of a can!

If you want to design your own cover image, the size needs to be 850 x 315 pixels.

Underneath this the rest of the page consists of a chronological timeline which is similar to your personal profile. The focus now then is on content and what you want to be seen by people. More of that in the next blog post.

Tabs

You used to see: info, wall, photos etc, down the left hand side of your page – only 4 of these are visible now and one of them has to include photos. So have a think about what you want people to see. Depending on your location, you may not need people to see the map and opt for something more interesting instead. Brighton Source, for example, have opted for this image which matches their current issue and looks great!

Messaging feature

Your fans can now interact with your business (if you choose not to disable this option) although you have to wait for them to start messaging; you can’t initiate the conversation. This needs careful consideration – by not disabling this feature, you could be opening up your brand to comments, questions or abuse that you are not prepared to handle. However, if you choose to leave this feature active and have a strategy in place, you are actually promoting your brand as one that is prepared to listen to customers and could repsond to questions, gather valuable feedback and diffuse negative comments.

Admin panel

I think this is a really useful layout, giving you a snapshot of notifications, messages, new likes and insights. You can expand them all for a more complete view of the data. The information here is really important so don’t ignore this panel; it gives you the data you need to tailor and schedule your updates for maximum impact/reach.

Transparent Metrics

Don’t be scared but anyone can now see any brand page’s metrics which include largest group check in’s (if your page is also a place), most popular age group, city and week. Find a business page on Facebook Timeline and click on the ‘Likes’ tab to the right of photos to see some data about them.

Now this might seem scary to a lot of businesses but social media best practice is all about embracing transparency and so at least you now have the chance to see how other people are growing communities and monitor the performance of your competitors.

There is more emphasis now on what content you post and how you can manage the posts on your page, which warrants a separate blog post – watch this space!

Have you taken the plunge yet or holding on until the last minute?

Google Reader is a truly wonderful thing once you get used to it. It can save you no end of time, improving productivity and really is so simple to learn. Everyone who uses the internet and reads content from different websites can benefit from getting their head around Google Reader so I thought it would be useful to write a quick post to help people get the most of this tool.

What is Google Reader?

When you consider that 98% of 18-24 year olds use social media, 800 million people use Facebook, 100 million people use LinkedIn, and 177 million tweets are sent per day, it’s not surprising that a social media expert would be the most helpful new hire for a small business!

Social media holds enormous potential for customer engagement, marketing opportunities and increasing the profile of your business to attract new customers. One half of small businesses in 2011 successfully connected with new customers and that figure will only increase in 2012.

This excellent infographic provides some food for thought. Do you have the skills to embark on a social media strategy in your business?

Klout provides social media analytics to measure the influence of a profile across social media networks. You are given you a Klout Score based on your ability to drive action through creating content and engagement; how often links are clicked on, responded to, retweeted and how many followers or fans you have. This is all calculated by an algorithm and incorporates true reach, amplification and network impact.

The Klout Score is currently used by over 3500 companies who reward influencers with Klout Perks. Klout consider themselves the standard for influence. You may well have been invited to join Klout by a friend who uses it (who probably wants to beat your score).

Klout score

I signed in with my Twitter, Facebook and Google+ accounts (although Klout only uses the most relevant network at present) and was informed that my Klout score was 44/100. This is apparently pretty good. Phew!

I could also see the Klout scores of people I know on twitter (who I influence) whether they have signed up to Klout or not. Being quite competitive, I now want to improve my score, although I’ve no idea why because you don’t get anything in return…

… but then I read about Klout Perks. These are exclusive products or experiences that you earn based on your influence. An array of delights from films and books to nights out and free phones! But, alas, I am not eligible for any of these perks yet. Boo!

Maybe that’s because of the topics I am, according to Klout, influential in. Hmmm.

I must admit, I was quite loving Klout until this point. The topics I am supposedly influential in are way off the mark. I think…

Business and drinks? That makes sense considering the content of many of my tweets and status updates.

Kitchen? No idea.

Red Bull? Can’t stand the stuff.

GSM? My only interactions with GSM (the dodgy independent phone repair shops) involve intimidation and extortion. Did I tweet about that? Come to think of it, perhaps I did. Certainly not in a positive way but ‘influential’ I will accept. Maybe it was because so many others had bad experiences with them that they responded to me.

As for Heathrow and coffee, I once waited for a very long time once for some friends to arrive from holiday and did little else other than tweet.

So, if I think about my social media activity, content and engagement I would not have come to the same result that Klout’s algorithm does.

For the ‘science bit’ on how the algorithm calculates your score, click here

Klout style

The Klout style is an assessment of your influence style or personality. Each of the 16 squares on the matrix is a particular style and according to Klout, I am a networker. I have more faith in Klout’s ability to get this part right as it is more about social interaction and engagement on your main social network, rather than the topics bit which must be based only around key words.

Klout: a case study

When Virgin America opened up a new flight route to Toronto in 2010, they asked Klout to find 120 people who were all high influencers and offered them a free flight. The plan was obviously that this group of people would spread the word about the wonderful experience on this new route.

What in fact happened was that those 120 people generated more than 4600 tweets about the new route, which led to 7.4 million impressions and huge coverage in blogs and news articles including the L.A Times and CNN money. It has to be said that that is pretty amazing! And yet so simple. Good service generates good word of mouth. So if you give good service to the most influential people on social networks, they will spread the word for you!

 ”Throwing free samples to a whole bunch of poorly targeted bloggers has serious limits,” said Klout global sales head Garth Holsinger. “The individuals we engage are identified because they’ve worked hard to establish a credible voice on subjects that matter to them.”

#Socialviewpoint

Word of mouth has always been the most powerful marketing tool and now social media allows companies to track the message. Klout may be flawed and has certainly come under much criticism but is still used by millions of people and over 3500 companies. From a personal perspective, it is a bit of fun and some of us who engage daily with people on social media and get a buzz out of a high level of interaction, Klout rewards us for that behaviour with a higher score. Meanwhile, businesses can use it quite effectively to amplify word of mouth but there are other sites out there that are similar to Klout such as Peer Index. It may be preferable and save you time to use one of these companies to find influential people to promote your brand or product, rather than committing the time and resources to finding them yourself online.

Many websites and magazines use questions, quizzes or analyses to provide the user with a score and categorisation of their behaviour to engage people in their content. In a similar way, Klout doesn’t tell us much we don’t already know or give us a score that we can actually do anything with as individuals. But people want to know whether they are a Curator, Thought Leader, Dabbler or Specialist in the Social Media world in the same way that teenagers fill in magazine quizzes entitled ‘What kind of friend are you?’ to find out if they’re a Loyal, Considerate, High Maintenance or Mental friend. Let a magazine or website tell you what kind of person you are?! Bonkers really, but people love it. I’m no psychology expert but there seems to be a fundamental desire to categorise our identity and this is why Klout is so popular.

What do I think of Klout? A bit pointless, a bit of fun but people seem to love it. Now, what’s my score gone up to today….

What’s your opinion?