Last week I went to a half-day Guy Kawasaki seminar in northern VA put on by Hiscox and Entrepreneur Magazine. The first half covered themes from his latest book Enchantment. The second half was an in-depth look at how Guy uses social media. It was a great seminar, and I left fired up to both read Enchantment and more aggressively use Facebook and (especially) Twitter for our clients. Guy uses a lot of guerrilla-like social media tactics that I’ve cringed at in the past; hearing someone as credible and thoughtful as Guy articulate their benefits changed my perspective.
Here are some of my notes from the social media session, which focused on Twitter:
- Use Google search to prospect for Twitter followers — i.e. to follow targeted people likely to follow you back — by focusing on keywords in their Twitter title and bio. If you have a photography-related business, you could use these searches on Google: intitle:”photographer* on twitter” site:twitter.com and intext:”bio * photographer” site:twitter.com.
- Use Twitter search’s geo-targeting feature to prospect for followers and customers. If your photo business is in DC zip code 20001, you could search for posts with “photography” within 25 miles with this search: “photography” near:”20001″ within:25mi
- Twitter = link economy. Facebook = photo economy. In Guy’s experience, links to articles and other information work great on Twitter, but on Facebook, photos drive much more interaction than links and text posts.
- When looking for useful articles to post on Twitter, rely on sites that aggregate top current articles by category. Guy likes StumbleUpon, SmartBrief (human-curated), and Alltop.
- Don’t use all 140 characters in your tweets. Shorter tweets give people more room to add their own comments when they retweet or reply.
- Use Twitter’s advanced search or search tools in other platforms like TweetDeck to monitor and respond to tweets about your company or related to your business. Use filters to weed out retweets and other tweets that aren’t critical to monitor.
- Promote your business or products when you “earn the right” with other relevant, engaging content (the NPR model). Run promotional posts 5% of the time as a guideline.
- Make Twitter responses personal. Look at a person’s profile before responding and find something about them to incorporate. This doesn’t take long and works much, much better than canned responses.
- Quizzes are a great way to drive interaction on Facebook.
- If you run a contest on Facebook (e.g. photo contest), use popularity to get the finalists, then manually pick the winner. This avoids getting stuck with a lame winner who rigs the voting to get a prize.