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Day FIVE: Monitoring the Online Conversation & When to tweet
The small print:
All this material, whilst given freely for this course, is for your use only, and not for dissemination to anyone else, even inside your own organisation. Please do recommend that your colleagues sign up for the course so that they can participate too at http://twooc.wordpress.com @lizcable @TrinityVisionUK
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DAY 5: Outline Monitoring the Online Conversation Activity: Search for current conversations using #twooc on your Twitter profile, and get a feel for what’s going on in our “classroom”
E-tivity: Setup some monitoring tools to alert you to conversations. Share your experiences using the #twooc hashtag What else should we be monitoring online that’s not included in the list? Please contribute your thoughts using the #twooc hashtag
Tools: Please play with maybe one or two of these – if you try them all you’ll take all day! They are in order of ease of use/usefulness/cost www.google.com/alerts www.topsy.com www.socialmention.com http://www.gigaalert.com/ www.socialbro.com/ http://kred.com/ www.socialoomph.com www.tweetreach.com http://bufferapp.com www.twithawk.com
Resources: The best time to publish a blog-post: http://trackmaven.com/blog/2014/05/best-time-publish-a-blog-post/ How not to use Twitter Trending Topics for marketing: http://socialmediatoday.com/index.php?q=SMC/103334 Best and worst times to post on social media: http://www.fastcompany.com/3036184/how-to-be-a-success-at-everything/the-best-and-worsttimes-to-post-on-social-media-infograph
@lizcable @TrinityVisionUK
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Day FIVE You talking to me? If only we had some way of keeping an eye on what’s going on online. Of being alerted to anything important, whilst knowing that when we do login again, there’s a couple of things we can check to get us back in the loop. Well, that’s what today is about. Making sure you’re on top of the social stream, and that you know how to check what’s happened in your timeline that’s relevant, whilst you’ve been offline. Also, while we’re at it, wouldn’t it be good to find out if anyone is talking about us? And what about conversations that are going on that you’d really like to know about? Perhaps what your clients are doing online, or your customers, or breaking news stories, or even who your competitors are talking to, and what they are talking about? Twitter itself is actually quite good at keeping you up to date, and even in the few days since you started this course, it has improved. It keeps a record of every time someone interacts with your profile, as you can see on your notification tab:
This includes when someone Follows you, Mentions you, Retweets you, Favourites a tweet of yours or Puts you on a list:
>>> Notice you can toggle between All notifications and just People you follow.
@lizcable @TrinityVisionUK
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#twooc You can filter these interactions to see only your @ mentions by selecting ‘Mentions’ on the left.
In your “notifications” setting on your profile, you can also set Twitter to email you as well, whenever anything happens on your account, but this very quickly floods your email inbox with no useful information. To turn email notifications on or off (thankfully) Navigate to “settings” from the icon on the top right of your screen and select “Settings.”
There is a whole menu on the next page (shown on page 65) of alerts via email you can toggle on and off. I have them all turned off permanently. You can then tick or un-tick the relevant notifications you would like to receive for your account. Remember to select ‘Save changes’ once you’ve selected the relevant notifications you would like to receive.
@lizcable @TrinityVisionUK
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I have these extra options because I have bought Twitter Advertising in the past .
You’ll notice that for each option on the menu, Twitter asks you to choose between “Anyone” and “Tailored for you”. If you choose “Anyone” Twitter will feed you alerts indiscriminately, you will receive all activity. If you choose “Tailored for you” Twitter will attempt to alert you to only what it thinks you have shown a preference for. A bit like the Facebook newstream. I like to see everything as that’s how serendipity happens, but as I only have very few alerts set, this may become more intrusive if you choose to be alerted more. You may need to revisit these settings as your account grows, and your usage becomes more sophisticiated.
@lizcable @TrinityVisionUK
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Monitoring the social stream I’d like to introduce you to a few tools that may be of use for monitoring the social stream - this can also help you measure the return on your investment, and in particular highlight the kind of anecdotal evidence that gets management buy-in to social media business plans. First of all, we have Google Alerts. Simple, clean, and to the point. It’s also very fast, and very thorough.
You can set up as many alerts as you like, for as many terms as you like. I like it because you can send the results either to an email address (with a choice of frequencies) or to an RSS 1 feed for those of us who use a feed-reader. I choose the latter. I don’t like it because the resulting stream has no kind of aggregation, or reporting, or any action you can take inside the dashboard (there isn’t one) it’s just a list of individual mentions that you then have to act on (or not). So it’s good for alerting you, say if you’ve done a seminar/article and want to get first alerts of mentions and amplifications, but you’ll need to have another tool for more sophisticated metrics.
My ears are burning Listening is the first part of any social media strategy, so tools that help you listen are worth trialling. “Two ears, one mouth, use them in that order” - Twitter may appear to be a one to many medium, but in fact, it’s an opportunity to open up one to one dialogues, and that is what starts a relationship. The key to success is in finding where these conversations are going on online. Think beyond what you do, and to what other people do that may be of interest to you. With this in mind, a few more tools for you to play with:
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Really Simple Syndication OR Rich Site Syndication.
@lizcable @TrinityVisionUK
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Mention My go to Mobile app of the moment – if you have a smartphone, download for free and play. You only start paying if you want to share social media monitoring and tasks with a team.
Beyond Google alerts There’s Giga Alerts - This is another freemium2 tool, and one I have paid for for clients who want a first sweep of everything that has been said about them recently. It’s free to trial, so have a go, you’ll be amazed what you find about yourself online.
This searches both the web – static web pages with no social streams – including pages with “blogs” built in platforms other than social platforms, and social streams.
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Freemium is a very common model in social media – LinkedIn uses it as do many of the tools we’ll discuss on the course. The idea is, you get a certain level of functionality for free, and after that you pay for it. As you build followers, you’ll need the more expensive accounts, so test them out now while they’re free for you to use.
@lizcable @TrinityVisionUK
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Topsy A great tool for searching the web in realtime for social mentions.
The analytics are amazingly detailed for a free tool, and you can also tweet from here, and set-up email alerts and RSS feeds.
It’s free to use (until you start paying for avanced features ;) ) so why not have a play?
@lizcable @TrinityVisionUK
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Socialmention Monitors several social media streams at once, and has plugin widgets if you want to syndicate (re-display) social content on your website.
I find socialmention useful for telling me “what are people talking about when they talk about my searchterm.” We can see here that when I search on “#twooc” Top Keywords are Twitter, today, community, behaviour, building. What this allows me to do is to use those keywords strategically in my content, or in my search terms, to find other people who are interested in the same things that I am. You can also see it has a rudimentary “sentiment analysis” – attempting to analyse online conversations and figure out whether what is being said is good or bad. There’s also a whole “passion”, “reach” etc algorithm which you might enjoy figuring out.
@lizcable @TrinityVisionUK
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TweetReach TweetReach is great when you first start out on Twitter as it tells you the reach of your tweets – and differentiates between reach and exposure. This is the free report, it only counts the last 50 tweets with #twooc in them.
Now here is the top level (paid for ) report for #12dot from the first 12 Days of Twitter course in June 2011. This report tells us specifically who is amplifying us the most by how many times and how influential they are (how many followers) – so we know who is really worth engaging with. Of course, as it’s a training course, we’re engaging with you all, but you grasp the concept.
@lizcable @TrinityVisionUK
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When to tweet?
http://www.fastcompany.com/3036184/how-to-be-a-success-at-everything/the-best-and-worst-times-to-post-on-social-media-infograph#2
This question has already been asked on the course a few times. When is the best time to tweet? There are lots of answers to this question, and of course it depends partly on who you are trying to reach. For our clients who are retailers our most productive times, without exception, are weekends, swiftly followed by evenings. Not 9 to 5 at all. For our clients who are looking for an international english speaking audience, your best times are at the start and end of the working day, and at lunch times in general. Brilliant guy I’d like to introduce you to: http://danzarella.com. Dan tweets a lot about the science of social media measurement and metrics. Take a look at the fabulous graphic overleaf, he pretty much makes this point. The key measure here is number of retweets. You need to know when your most influential and active audience is online. Because that’s when you’ll get retweeted. We’ll be returning to retweets for a whole day of the course tomorrow, as it’s crucial stuff.
Best time of day to tweet
@lizcable @TrinityVisionUK
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Best day of the week to tweet
@Danzarella is making a really useful contribution here, but it’s very generic, and dependent on local time zone. What we need to know is when is OUR audience online?
Social Bro A great little tool is Social Bro (www.socialbro.com). This will generate a report for you for free based on the top 100 people you follow (you pay to have it analyse more than 100) – the report will highlight the best time to tweet.
From this chart you can see that the best time to tweet during this week is ‘Mon 20:00 Hours’. This is the best time to hit the maximum number of people. Why not sign up to Social Bro yourself and see how your report is different? This is a tool I pay for willingly every month, and there’s only two of those. @lizcable @TrinityVisionUK
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Buffer Buffer is great for scheduling tweets and measuring the number of retweets. You can schedule your tweets to be sent at particular times during the day and throughout the week. You can also link up your Bitly account so that all your shortened links are in one place.
Trending Topics When a topic is trending on Twitter (listed on the left hand side of your home page) that means a lot of people are talking about it and mentioning the conversation. If you can think of a way of tieing in the trending topic with your brand, and make it witty and memorable, it can be a good opportunity for marketing (note, read the Habitat case study in Resources before you start!) In my classroom sessions I’ve asked people to make up tweets around the following topics which were bound to trend: #wimbledon #olympics #London2012 #adalovelace In the second week of January I was offered the chance to buy cupcakes for friends to be sent to them the following Monday, widely known as depressive-Monday, as it’s the day more suicides are likely to happen, and everyone is generally down in the dumps. Genius marketing, and trended on Twitter. If you have something primed and ready to go, you can unleash your marketing when the trend peaks. @lizcable @TrinityVisionUK
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#twooc Tailored trends Twitter recently introduced ‘tailored trends’ which highlights trending topics within the community of people you follow on Twitter and your location– rather than the whole of Twitter. We’ve had a bit of a look at this and have decided that on the whole this is not all that helpful. The great thing about trending topics is finding out things that people outside of your network are getting excited about and then finding new people to engage with. You can view what’s trending in a country and even in some cities on Twitter – this is far more useful than what’s trending amongst the people you follow only.
Try clicking [Change] on your Trends list, and seeing what’s trending where.
Twithawk We haven’t covered geo-location or hyper-localisation yet, but no look at Twitter monitoring tools would be complete without a look at Twithawk. This paid for service will both monitor and respond to tweets on certain topics within a geographical radius. Brilliant.
Although I do think the hawk looks a little constipated! @lizcable @TrinityVisionUK
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What and who to monitor on Twitter3 Ok, so you can now monitor the Twitter stream, but what is it that you are looking for? Look at the list below, and for each topic, write down the specific keywords and phrases that you want to monitor. Then choose one or more of the tools given (including SocialOomph mentioned yesterday) to start your monitoring.
Your own name Your company name Your brand names Your product names The problems your products and services solve The solutions your products and services provide Your competitors’ names Your competitors’ product and brand names Your clients’ accounts and company accounts Your prospects’ accounts and company accounts Your industry thought-leaders and news sources Your collaborators, suppliers and networkers Your colleagues and employees Keywords Phrases expressing needs e.g “ I need some Twitter training” Local business event organisers Local journalists Industry specialist journalists, magazines and periodicals Local radio stations Online industry networks Online membership organisations relevant to you or your client “old chestnuts” – phrases that exemplify the stuff that keeps coming up in your industry Trending Topics – to see if they are of interest.
Anything else? Please contribute your ideas to today’s discussion using the hashtag #twooc At this stage, we are monitoring in order to respond, engage and contribute. We’ll look at monitoring for the sake of measuring Return on Investment later, but some of the tools will be the same. So, a lot to go on. You don’t have to look at all these tools today. I’d recommend just setting up Mention on your phone and seeing how that goes if you are short of time today.
Til tomorrow, Happy Tweeting!
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And all Social Channels, but we’re concentrating on Twitter for this course.
@lizcable @TrinityVisionUK
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@lizcable @TrinityVisionUK
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