Category Archives: Twitter

What can I “tweet” about?

April 04, 2013   StaceyP   No comments

If you are stuck for ideas on Twitter and not seeing a difference in followers/ retweets it may be because you need to engage with your followers more, here are some great ways to engage with your followers:

• Personal messages work! Add the occasional tweet about you and your personal life, however make sure that you don’t tweet the entire day about what you do and what cereal you had as followers will quickly become fed up.
• No matter what people say, retweet works! You should retweet what you feel is interesting to you and your readers!
• Engagement is not optional anymore, ask your followers questions and always reply whenever you can. People don’t like getting ignored especially if it is something to do with your company or a question.
• Want recommendations? Or want people to interact more? A great way is to hold contests and competitions, offer exclusive discounts/benefits to your followers and watch them build up!
• It’s okay to send tweets about your company, after all you want to get some leads right? You can post tweets about your business. However make sure you don’t go overboard, you want to have a ratio of at least 1:5 so that potential customers stay interested
• You can also tweet a twit pic of your business. If you’re in the cafe business why not tweet a picture of your daily specials to draw in the customers?

Now you know everything you need to start engaging with your followers! If you know more, why don’t you share with us by leaving a comment?

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New NDBA magazine

March 16, 2012   Elaine Isaac   No comments

Yesterday at the B2B event in Barnstaple I picked up the latest copy of the North Devon Business Alliance magazine.  I had a chance to have a quick read this morning and must say it’s a very good read. This copy focuses on Twitter and has some great articles on Twitter basics and getting the most out of Twitter.

The magazine has articles written by local North Devon business people, but I must single out one of them. Robert Zarywacz not only wrote articles he also edited, designed and arranged the publication of the magazine. This obviously takes time and I would like to offer my personal thanks to him for all the effort and hard work that he puts into it as well as his other business activities.

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Time for #NDevon Social Tweetup – 15th March?

March 05, 2012   Kevin Woodward   2 Comments

It’s been on my mind now that we haven’t had a tweet-up for quite a while – yes I know that there was a successful tweet-up at Lilico’s last month, but I couldn’t make it!

As I tweet a lot about business it is always assumed that if I ever organise anything there has to be a business angle to the tweet-up, so I have put a bit of thought into it and along with Ian Starling at The Voice we have a plan.

As some of you may know, the Voice will be broadcasting around Barnstaple on FM 107.1 for 28 days from 16th March to 12th April and are also working hard to get a DAB radio station and/or a full time FM licence to broadcast to North Devon. What better way to promote the launch of the next 28 day license than have a tweet-up at their premises the day before the launch.

A chance to see the studio in action – they’ll be broadcasting online, as they are now, (listen here) – meet some of the presenters and have a slice of cake made by the wonderful Mrs Starling herself.

A pure social tweet-up from 5.30pm – get to listen to some great music – talk to other tweeters and show some support for the Voice FM.

The Voice is located at:-

Back Of Coop, 21 High Street, Barnstaple. Need to go towards church yard. Blue door – numbered – at back!

Tweet @thevoicefm or indeed myself @llamakevin or @robertz nearer the time to find out more!

Time for a social tweet-up – I hope to see you there!

 

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Time for a #NDevon tweetup

February 05, 2012   Kevin Woodward   1 Comment

A bit of a bummer, but I cannot make it, but there is a tweetup happening this coming Tuesday!

On 7th February – at Lilico’s in Barnstaple – from 5pm to 8pm there is going to be a tweetup to help promote the use of social media for both businesses and of course for social purposes.

There is  no need to book up, as the whole point of a tweetup IMHO, is that it is spontaneous and you make your mind up whether you can make it right up to the last minute.

As far as I can see the main people behind the event are Easy Computing and Sarah Escott – two great people who deserve a great turnout!

So, if you are in Barnstaple on Tuesday, please pop in and say hi to these great people, even if just for 5 minutes!

Watch out for the next one in March – follow us on twitter to find out all about it!

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#hashtag debate

January 29, 2012   Kevin Woodward   2 Comments

I noticed on twitter last night when I got home that there had been a hashtag debate.

In particular the use of #NDevon #NorthDevon #North_Devon amongst others all in essence referring to the same thing. The debate suggested that we should try to unify these hashtags under the one banner!

It was good to see several points of view, and the thing that struck me was that all of the points of view were right!

On the one hand if we try and unify the North Devon area under the #NDevon hashtag, one that I myself prefer to use, we can get some sort of identification to the area and add interest to those people that either use or follow the hashtag. The reason I use it is that it is the shortest – with a 140 character limit in your tweets (yes, I know that there are apps that allow you to post longer, but…) the more space you have to say what you want without giving way to a long hashtag.

On the other hand, it is a little bit like google – what search criteria do you use to find a particular term. If you are new to twitter and wanted to find out what was happening in North Devon, your first thought would be to type in North Devon. In that case people using the #northdevon or #north_devon hashtags are far more likely to have their tweets found. Of course with regular use of #NDevon they will come across that hashtag and see it but it wouldn’t be their first choice. Would it?

I think as a community, it would make far more sense to have a single hashtag, for us to remain in contact with one another and to have a search facility where we can see what is happening in that stream, but to bring in outsiders we still need to use the longer hashtags.

Of course there are plenty of other reasons to use either one or other of those hashtags as well as to add subject matter hashtags as well, and all of them are valid. After all, we all use twitter for our own purposes, and we all have our own way of using it.

I may well have missed some of the debate, and if I have missed out a good point, please do add it here for others to see & debate!

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Should you ask for an RT?

December 06, 2011   Kevin Woodward   12 Comments

Well, what is an RT, I hear you say, well it is a Retweet. This happens on Twitter when you tweet something noteworthy and someone sends it to all of their followers or you see something just as noteworthy you forward it on to your followers.

The question is – who decides whether it is noteworthy enough for an RT – the reader or the tweeter.

I have seen a steady stream of requests to RT in the form of – “please RT” at the end of the tweet – but in my opinion most of them are not noteworthy enough – often they are just sales tweets and unless you are in that line of business they are unlikely to be noteworthy and what’s more I’m not sure that any or all of my followers will want to read it.

I think you should let the tweet speak for itself – those that think it noteworthy enough will RT, whether you ask or not!

What do you think?

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To work for yourself or be an employee?

November 01, 2011   Kevin Woodward   No comments

There is a little bit of everyone that says I wish I could work for myself, and yet for those that do work for themselves, there is often envy of those in employment as the monthly wage slip just turns up and the responsibility of bringing new work into the company falls on to someone else’s shoulders. Even the employee who has the responsibility of bring new orders into the company doesn’t have to worry about the next step.

This blog was inspired by a discussion on twitter last evening where for one particular business(man) was feeling that envy of wanting to be an employee, for some the current economic climate is making working for yourself quite tough. It’s interesting though, there are as many businesses folk in my world who are extremely busy as there are those that are quiet and finding it tough.

Who knows the reason why, often it is just luck – being in the right place at the right time!

In my mind it is all about risk and reward!

As an employee, it is your employer that is taking the risks – the business owner, whether they be a shareholder in a FTSE 100 company or a small SME, is the one that takes the risk. For the FTSE 100 owner, the risk can be quite small, it is just an investment after all, but as the saying goes the value of your investment can fall as well as rise and that’s the risk! For the small SME owner the risk is far greater, often the house has an extra mortgage on it to fund the business, or the bank require a personal guarantee if it lends money to the business. If the business fails, the SME owner has a responsibility to continue to pay the debt, whereas the FTSE 100 owner just loses the investment.

However, in the good times the rewards for the SME owner can be greater and it is the possibility of this happening that lures people to set up their own business. Working as an employee and seeing the owner doing really well on your efforts is often galling and is the reason why many of us want to run our own business.

It can be a lonely place as a business owner when times are tough but when times are good, they can be very good.

Being an employee times are, well just times!

What do you think?

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Today @llamakevin had 55 unfollows!

October 20, 2011   Kevin Woodward   No comments

Actually it wasn’t today, but today I received an email telling me who had unfollowed me on Twitter recently!

A very useful tool to help manage your followers and unfollowers!  – https://twitter.com/#!/unfollowr/

I used to take unfollows personally, particularly in the early days of using twitter and particularly with people who you interact with and have made it to one of my select lists, but now I don’t!

Of the 55 people who unfollowed me, I didn’t follow 40 of them anyway – most of these are tweeters who only followed me in the first place to get as many followers as they can, people who only spout quotes or links to their websites, never making any time to interact with people who they follow in any event. They didn’t follow me to learn about me, they just wanted me to follow back so that I might see their tweets. They probably would never look at mine, and probably had most of their own tweets automated anyway!

So, there were 15 people left who I followed, 2 or 3 were people who had made it onto my lists, some even North Devon folk, they have their reasons, and I unfollowed everyone of them back – removed them from my lists!

Time to move on and continue to nurture those followers that I still have!

Oh, if you didn’t mean to unfollow me, you can always follow me again, and I’ll probably follow you back again!

https://twitter.com/#!/llamakevin/

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Free Wi-fi or is it?

September 08, 2011   Elaine Isaac   4 Comments

I write this blog after posting an article that I found on the BBC website today which is titled: The Myth of Free Wi-fi. An interesting debate started on Twitter about this and I thought I would share some of the discussion here.

It was generally thought reasonable enough for an establishment such as a cafe etc to expect the users of the wi-fi to make a purchase of some sort. For example a cup of coffee is not that expensive in relation to looking at your emails or doing a bit of work in a comfortable environment. These establishments provide the wi-fi as a convenient service to customers and have to cover the cost of installation etc so should expect to receive something in return for their investment.

The article also mentioned the fact that some towns and cities wanted to have free wi-fi access in all areas, this of course costs money and would probably have to come from local council spending, which we all know at the moment is that the budgets have been cut and is probably considered a luxury rather than a necessity in our town and cities. Personally, I’d rather sit somewhere comfy with a coffee to use the wi-fi rather than an uncomfortable park bench where I perhaps wouldn’t feel so safe using my laptop! Another things that was mentioned in the discussion was the use of wi-fi in hotels. As this is not something I have needed to do personally it would be interesting to see what opinions were on this. It was pointed out that it is perhaps reasonable for hotels to charge for wi-fi in the rooms but offer a place in the public area with free access. This seems to me to be fairly reasonable as long as the cost to use it in your room is not excessive.

This debate could go on for ages, but I wasn’t expecting quite so many comments when I first posted the article online, I just thought that it was interesting!

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My take on #followfriday

September 02, 2011   Kevin Woodward   2 Comments

Today is Friday, and on twitter there is an abundance of tweets from people recommending other people as good followers and therefore people to be followed, and hopefully be followed back!

Why do this, well, allegedly the more people who follow you, the more people read your tweets, and therefore the further your message goes! Of course, if you are on twitter purely for social purposes, the number of followers that you have is probably not relevant, but if you are there for business then the more people that follow you the better.

I have said this in an earlier blog, there is no point in putting all the required effort into twitter if you only have 30+ followers, you do need 1,000′s. The #followfriday routine is one way of getting new followers, or is it?

When the #followfriday first started I used to see a regular burst of new followers on a Friday, but for some reason I don’t any more! It’s not that I don’t get the recommendations, last week I got 17 mentions which by a long chalk was one of my best weeks, but I probably only got one new follower. Why is that I wonder!

My thought is that #followfriday is now just an ego boost, people are really pleased to get the recommendation but others are not really “seeing” them – do you see them and follow the recommendations, or have they just been another tweet that has disappeared in your timeline?

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