Simple Social Strategy: Linked In

I've read several explanations of Linked In, they always go;

If Facebook is you at a crazy party, and Twitter is you running around in the street in your pants shouting through a Megaphone, then LinkedIn is you, at your day job, behind a desk, with a tie and sock braces on... Personally I like to think that if Facebook is you at a crazy party, and Twitter is you running around in the street in your pants shouting through a Megaphone, then LinkedIn is you, at your day job, behind a desk, with a tie and sock braces on.

LinkedIn For Professionals

LinkedIn I suppose is a professional network, what really started as an online CV and resumé has now become a professional networking group, linking you with people you've worked with, for and arranging potential contacts through shared industries and colleagues.

With a potential pool of 100Million contacts, LinkedIn is like being at the world's worst, or best Morning Coffee Networking group, depending on how you like those thing. Personally I've never gone to one as the idea of a room full of strangers dressed in suits scares me, I'd rather die than stand in a room with 100 Million of them. So that's the great thing about LinkedIn, from the comfort of your desk, you can reach out, and discover new like minded professional for a chat or second opinion, or hit up new contacts and point them to your LinkedIn Company page.

LinkedIn is a little more complicated than Facebook and Twitter but it's relatively easy to set up a profile and get your experience and company details on there. The basic account is free and this will give you more than enough usability to start with, upgrading gives you access to directly contacting contacts, but really it's something you don't need when you first set up.

Like Facebook and Twitter, it's not going to work for you if you just use it as a noticeboard, you need to make everything engaging, from your profile to your status updates, you need to supply your profile with real and meaningful content, join groups based on your profession, and contribute insightful and helpful information to these. It's the same old story, be interesting, clever and helpful and you'll build a nice group of valuable contacts. Be a boring arsehole, and you'll probably end up with a contact list of boring arseholes.

Unlike Facebook, you can see the people who have been looking at your profile, which is interesting, for example I can see that you've looked at my profile everyday for the last 6 weeks, no wait that's a just a bit weird.

QUICK TIP: This might not work forever, so get in there quickly, but if you download the app for iPhone, go to the 'People You May Know' tab, and you can quickly invite anyone in that list to become a Contact. This seems to negate the need to have some connection with them you need to link on the main site.

Please get in touch to talk through your Social Media Strategy ask any questions and see what Citizen can do for you.

Get in touch ben@citizenstudios.co.uk

Visit www.citizenstudios.co.uk

Or call 07738 175 614

Simple Social Strategy: Twitter

If Facebook is an Oil Tanker, then Twitter is a speedboat (Sorry to mix my analogies, after this), this is Microblogging in the extreme, it's limited character count and instantaneous swirling, continuious stream of messages mean it's perfectly suited to customer service, consumer insight, real-time communication and utter bullshit/bollox.


Tweet, Tweet

Twitter was born in 2006, and quickly swept up 200 million addicted tweeters, loads of celebrities, loads of fake celebrities, but more importantly loads and loads of real people, and real customers.

Twitter is the second pillar of your Social Media Strategy, and you have to be prepared to integrate it into your life, Twitter isn't something you assign 30 minutes at the end of your working day to, Twitter is for your mini-down-times, so when a document is PDFing, you're on the train, the toilet or just waiting around in cafe, it's something that you have to bring into your life, and make second nature to your communications.

The starting point for any user is to populate their account, and then find a few people to follow, generally the more people you follow, the more followers you'll scoop back up, but, you can end up with a pretty naff and spammy feed if you just chase the numbers like this. You want a follower base of genuinely interesting and connected people, because if someone likes your message and retweets it, you potentially have a huge audience.

The slow and correct way to build your followers is to make yourself valuable, to be interesting, ask questions and engage people. So instead of saying 'We've just posted a new blog about Chips', say 'I freaking love Chips, doesn't anybody here not love Chips?', Chips are pretty amazing, I can't recommend blogging about Chips highly enough.

Be aware that it will take time, I've been on the site for 2 years now, and posted over 2000 comments (ALL HILARIOUS), and I'm close to 600 followers, so don't expect over night success, unless you're really funny, or you keep pointing nude pictures of yourself (and you're hot).

There's 3 types of messages, General Updates, which are you comments, Retweets, which is where people take your comment and post it to their followers, and Direct  Messages, which are private email messages and all of these are restricted to 140 characters, Twitter will Auto Shorten links saving you valuable character space.

A good practice to get into is to look for your product or company name by using TwitterSearch find what people are saying about you and respond, follow and retweet the ones you like, this kind of direct contact with your customers is what Twitter is all about, a good example of this was demonstrated in my recent VistaPrint debacle.

It's said that it takes about 2 weeks to get to grips with Twitter, it's really important that you download it for your smartphone and use this access to widen your social standing, every positive message you get out into the world about your company is going to raise your profile, no matter haw many followers you have. Twitter gives you a megaphone to tell everyone how great you are, just make sure you point it in the right direction, if you haven't already, get online now and give it a try.

QUICK TIP: If you put #in at the end of your Tweets, they'll post onto LinkedIn as well, can't hurt right?

Please get in touch to talk through your Social Media Strategy ask any questions and see what Citizen can do for you.

Get in touch ben@citizenstudios.co.uk

Visit www.citizenstudios.co.uk

Or call 07738 175 614

Simple Social Strategy: Facebook

If you have an idea in your head, it's not really worth anything unless someone else hears it, the challenge you have is, to get this message into the minds of as many people as possible, today there are a thousand ways to do this, but where do you start? Teletext, Post-It-notes, PENS! What about branded pens? No, they're all stupid ideas.

I always advise clients to set up 3 basic things to ensure they've got a good Social Strategy foundation, this week I'll take you through some very basic ideas around the 3 main Social Media sites Facebook, Twitter and Linked In, I'm going to start with Facebook, and point out some very basic reasons why you need to be represented.



Facebook Vs The World


With 600 Million users and growing, the worldwide take-over of Facebook is kind of half way over, if you're not represented as a business then you really need to drag your sorry arse into 2011. Facebook isn't a fad, it's not just used by children and it's not just somewhere to waste time (although it's really good to look at people you don't really know from the offices' photos). It's fastest growing demographic is those twenty-five years and over and it's said that in 2011 over one-quarter of all internet page views were on Facebook.com. It's a face as massive as Lovejoy's, so why should you get on it?

Let's start with The Like button, this button essentially 'Likes' your site from another profile. Currently Facebook is registering over a BILLION Likes a day. If you don't know, then this is why the Like button is so powerful;

Once a user 'Likes' your page, the status 'Ben Brown Likes Peartree Productions' appears on BB's profile, now the average user has 140 Friends, so this message is potentially exposed to 140 people, if it catches the eye of say, Karen Brown (his nosey wife), she checks it's not pornography, and finds she likes it too, then you can see this message is exposed to another group of potential customers. Very basically, you can see how the exposure of a message is exponentially growing with each contact, and the potential is endless.

Another example I like is how I've used Facebook to find a good local mechanic to service my car. Previously when looking for a garage I've searched Google, obviously it's great for finding a list of thousands of mechanics, and with a little tweaking I can localise this search, and find one close to me. That's really helpful, but what I don't know, is which of these are any good. A fact proven to me when last time I took my car to a backstreet garage. When I returned the 'child' on reception hadn't booked the car in, so I  waited an hour for the work to be done, and finally drove it away only to find it had a nail hammered into the tyre. Obviously I was too scared to take it back.

What Facebook offers by categorising it's Business Pages is a similar but much more effective version of Google and other listing services. Now I can search for a garage directly on Facebook, these results will be localised to me, and most importantly I can see which of these my friends have 'Liked' so I'll know straight away which ones are good. This directory searching of Facebook is becoming more and more commonplace as people are looking for personal recommendations and more reliable companies in these difficult economical times.

These very basic ideas give you a little insight into why presence on Facebook is pretty much essential, and something that's as important to building your Corporate web page, indeed it may be more important, and some companies are actually moving away from corporate sites and focussing their online strategy entirely towards their Facebook page.

Now excuse me someone I went to school with has just painted their front room and posted some pictures, and I really want to see if I can make out what DVD's they've got in the background.


QUICK TIP: Make sure you change your Facebook Profile URL, so you can have a nice neat address like Facebook.com/citizenstudios




Please get in touch to talk through your Social Media Strategy ask any questions and see what Citizen can do for you.

Get in touch ben@citizenstudios.co.uk

Visit www.citizenstudios.co.uk

Or call 07738 175 614

The Daily Torygraph

Today marks the official launch of the DailyTorygraph.com a site planned and built by Citizen Digital and populated by Dave Waters and Bertie Miller from The WaterMill London.

I've been aware of the Torygraph for quite some time now, it's existed previously as a Tumblr site, and has been running close to 2 years. In that time it's built up a small following of fans, but we felt that it hadn't reached it full potential, nor did it have the infrastructure to achieve this. Tumblr is a nice platform, but to push out into a bigger audience we felt it deserved a more sturdy, versatile infrastructure.

We decided to rebuild the site in Wordpress, and make full use of Facebook 'Commenting', 'Liking' and 'ADDTHIS' sharing facilities, and use data on these options to drive content from the site into key areas of the page to extend the visitors time on the site. From this data-stream we built a 'Most Shared this Week' and 'This Month' section and did the same with the tags to flush the first page with as much interesting content as possible.

Once we had the site built we then set-up the Social Media pages on Facebook and Twitter. The Twitter site was especially interesting to do, as after a a bit of research we found the account of most of the Telegraph journalists and Photographers, and painstakingly went down the list and followed all of them. We did this for all the major newspapers, and the results were amazing, they loved the site, and retweeted the link, in fact this was such a success that it knocked our first server over and we had to quickly upgrade to a more robust option.

The site launched officially today with a redirect bringing in more traffic from the old Tumblr site and the figures have been outstanding. We've done close to 5K unique visitors this week, and they're staying on the site too, with 8k page impressions as they drill down into the content.

It's a great site, but as with any site, it's only as good as it's content. We were lucky to find a content stream this rich that was laying idly in the wilderness, just waiting to be reborn. The Watermill team deserve all the credit for diligently doing this every single day, and for having the foresight to listen to our proposal, and let us get on with the building of a platform that's going to generate great rewards for them, we've got some amazing ideas to push the concept further and are in talks about developing an iPhone/iPad app amongst other things.

If you want to talk to Citizen about Social Media marketing, or web design and build give us a call, or drop us an email.

Get in touch ben@citizenstudios.co.uk

Visit www.citizenstudios.co.uk

Or call 07764 898 010