Posts Tagged ‘twitter’

Last week we ran a full day practical Twitter training course at Business Training Made Simple. This was a hands-on course led by David Miles and aimed at Twitter novices who had either never used Twitter before or who had created an account but then done nothing much with it.

The delegates were encouraged to bring their laptops with them so as we could make sure they left at the end of the day with their Twitter accounts correctly set up. It also meant that during the day they could do practical exercises such as sending tweets,  finding people to follow, learning how to use Twitter search, and getting to grips with third party Twitter tools such as Tweetdeck, Bufferapp, and Hootsuite.

As well as dealing with the basics of how to use Twitter, the course also covered some aspects of Twitter strategy – what to tweet, when to tweet, what not to tweet, etc.

The following day, Michelle Carvill built on this with a day long course at BTMS about how to develop a good Twitter strategy and how to use Twitter effectively to raise the profile of your business and gain new customers. For delegates who wanted to do both courses back to back, there was a special discounted package price available.

This was the first time we’d run these two courses at BTMS and we were delighted with the feedback we received. For example, one delegate from the practical course wrote:

“I came away from the course with a much greater understanding of social media; a fascinating experience which was enhanced by David’s excellent presentational and interpersonal skills.”

Having proved that we have got a course that works and that people find informative, fun, and good value for money, we’re looking forward to announcing some 2012 dates for this course very soon.

If you would like to be told once these dates are published, just leave us a comment below.

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Yesterday evening I had a great time at the second Brentwood Tweetup, where I was asked to give a short talk on the power of Twitter and how this had led to us writing Fusion.

As part of my presentation, I shared eight tips on how to harness the power of Twitter:

There were over 30 people at the tweetup: some who I’d met before, some who I knew only from Twitter, and some who I was meeting for the first time. It was really good to put faces to some of the @names I’ve been following for the past couple of years and fantastic to see social media being used to bring members of the local community together.

Even those who couldn’t make it, like @MrsJaneMiles and @LDKatz71, were not left out, thanks to the live tweet stream that was showing on their tweets on the big screen throughout the second half of the evening.

A big thank you and well done to the organisers: @nevwilson, @laurie_edmonds, and @scotthornsby10!

 

 

It’s all very well writing new blog posts regularly, but once you’ve posted something how can you tell as many people about it as possible without too much effort? In particular, how can you easily tell all those followers that you’ve built up on Twitter?

Well, if you’re using WordPress for your blog then a simple solution is to configure your blog so as every time you post something new a tweet is automatically sent out for all your followers to see. This tweet will tell everyone the title of your latest blog entry and will include a link they can click to come and read it.

So how is this done?

Step one is to install the Twitter Tools plugin for WordPress. To do this, just download the ZIP file containing the plugin and then in your WordPress dashboard go to Plugins –> Add New. Click the Upload option near the top of the page and then browse to the location where you downloaded the ZIP file to. Click Install Now and then once it is uploaded to the server, simply click to activate the plugin.

Having installed the Twitter Tools plugin, you now need to configure it to work with your Twitter account. This involves getting hold of some technical sounding things like consumer keys and access tokens, but it’s pretty simple to do. Here are the steps you’ll need to take:

1. In the WordPress dashboard, click on Settings –> Twitter Tools.
2. Click the link for registering Twitter Tools as an application with Twitter.
3. When the page on the Twitter site opens up, log in with your usual Twitter login details.
4. You should now be on a page for registering a new application. If not, then the address to go to is: https://dev.twitter.com/apps/new.
5. Enter an application name. This is the name that will show up publicly on each tweet as the application that your tweet was sent from, so you’ll probably want to use something like “John’s blog” as the application name.
6. Enter a description such as “Twitter Tools for WordPress”.
7. Enter the URL of your blog in the Application Website box.
8. Enter your organisation or company name in the appropriate field if applicable.
9. Make sure Application Type is set to Browser.
10. Put the address of your blog in the Callback URL box.
11. Change the Default Access Type to Read & Write.
12. Enter the CAPTCHA code and then click Register Application.
13. On the next screen you will see your Twitter Consumer Key and Twitter Consumer Secret. Copy and paste these two strings into the appropriate boxes on your WordPress Twitter Tools Settings page.
14. Then, on the Twitter web page, click the button on the right of the screen called My Access Token.
15. Copy and paste the Access Token and Access Token Secret strings into the appropriate boxes on your WordPress Twitter Tools Settings page.
16. On the WordPress settings page click Connect to Twitter.
17. If the connection is successful, next make sure that the option “Enable option to create a tweet when you post in your blog?” is set to Yes.
18. Then set your chosen prefix for the automatic tweets – something like “New blog post”.
19. Make sure that “Set this on by default?” is set to Yes.
20. Ignore the remaining options and save your settings.

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Do you reckon that no-one gets business from social networking? Do you think it doesn’t matter if your website isn’t iPhone friendly? Do you believe that the look of a website is more important than its usability?

Then read on…..

I’ve just got back from a week away in Somerset, where we stayed in a converted barn in the middle of nowhere. Thanks to the thick walls of the former barn, we had no mobile signal at all inside the building, which was great for getting a bit of peace and quiet.

Outside, we just about managed to get a signal if we stood in the right place. As for data – well, if the wind was blowing the right way we could sometimes get a 3G signal but most of the time the only option was a painfully slow 2G connection.

But modern habits die hard, so when @MrsJaneMiles and I decided we wanted to find a nice pub for dinner one night, I did the obvious thing and put a message out on Twitter asking for a recommendation. One of my Bristol based followers picked up on this and got the word out to a number of his Twitter contacts in the Glastonbury area and within a few hours I had received recommendations for three local pubs.

Excellent! One lucky landlord was going to get a bit of extra business thanks to the power of social media.

Because @MrsJaneMiles is allergic to dairy products, I wanted to check the pubs’ food menus to see where she had the best chance of being able to eat something.

I went to the website of the first pub – The King’s Head in Wells – and was confronted with a screen that simply said “Loading: 0%”. After a not inconsiderable wait (I’m on a mobile phone with a 2G connection here, don’t forget) it crept up to 5%. Then another long wait and it was up to 10%. After about five minutes it had struggled up to about 20% – at which point I gave up.

I’ve since seen the site on a laptop with a 3G connection and it’s a very nice looking site and the pub looks great. But they didn’t get our business because they didn’t make any allowance for the fact that some potential customers might not have been able to handle the highly graphical nature of the website.

Lesson 1: As I discovered when doing the research for ‘Fusion’, the use of mobile phones for accessing web sites is growing at a phenomenal rate. So if you are going to have a very visual, graphic heavy website (especially if it uses Flash), then you really should ensure you’ve also got a mobile-friendly version of the site which loads automatically if it detects that someone is accessing it from an iPhone or other mobile device.

The next pub I looked at was The Apple Tree Inn. Their website is much more basic, but I was able to navigate around it easily on my phone (even with a slow connection) and check out the restaurant menu. We would have gone there but, despite trying them at various times of the day over a 24 hour period, I couldn’t get through on the phone. It just rang and rang with no answer.

Lesson 2: Just because someone finds you via the web, it doesn’t mean they won’t want to talk to you. Buy an answering machine or, better still, use a call answering service so as your calls get answered by a real person even when you’re not around.

And so it was that we ended up going to The Who’d A Thought It in Glastonbury – an excellent pub with a range of beers, quality food, helpful and friendly staff, and a website that works!

What do you think? Should businesses be making more effort to ensure that their websites can be accessed quickly and easily by people on the move? Do pubs/restaurants really need to bother about this kind of thing, or would most people have checked them out from home on a wi-fi connection before going on holiday? Feel free to comment below!

For the past few months, David Miles from Divadani has been hard at work writing a book in conjunction with David Taylor of 2010media.

The book is called ‘Fusion: the new way of marketing’ and it’s all about how businesses can market themselves and communicate with their customers in the new social media age using a combination of websites, search engine marketing, and social networks.

Earlier this week, the final manuscript went to the publishers and the past few days have been spent deciding on the format of the book and working up some ideas for the cover design.

So what’s in the book?

‘Fusion’ is about effective business communications in the social media age and covers:

• Why you should do business online
• The background to the modern media landscape
• Use of websites and social media
• Establishing your brand online
• Networking face-to-face and online
• Creating a social media culture
• Protecting and managing your brand online
• Using AdWords – the modern face of advertising – to drive traffic

Who’s it for?

The book is aimed at any kind of business or other organisation that wants to communicate with as wide an audience as possible and wants to market itself efficiently and cost effectively.

How will it help?

The development of modern websites, the appearance of social networking sites, and the emergence of pay-per-click as the modern face of advertising, have completely revolutionised the way we all communicate with the world around us.

Fusion will help you understand this new world order, explain why the old rules of marketing and PR are being broken, and present you with innovative and cost effective ways to reach your customers and improve the profitability of your business.

When and how will it be available?

We hope that ‘Fusion’ will be published sometime in late June. It will be available as a standard paperback book from Amazon and traditional bookshops, and there will also be an eBook version so you can read it on your Kindle, iPad, or other eBook reader.

Where can I find out more?

The authors have set up both a Twitter account and a Facebook page to keep people informed about progress of the book and to share snippets from it in the run up to publication. Please do use the links above to follow us or ‘like’ us on your favourite social network.

Also, the authors currently run regular training seminars that cover some of the topics from the book. More details are available at the Business Training Made Simple website.