The document provides guidance on using social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube for business purposes. It recommends aiming for 40% original content, 30% replies, 20% retweets, and 10% links on Twitter. For Facebook, it suggests customizing privacy and notification settings. And for YouTube, it describes how to create a business channel, upload videos, and embed videos on a website.
1. Social Media: A Quick Reference
Twitter: What to Post
Having an account is one thing – using it is another. Aim for 40% original content,
%30 replies (this may reverse as you develop conversations and community), 20%
retweets and 10% links. If you are just talking outward and not listening and
responding, you won’t develop the trust relationships that people really value on
Twitter.
Original Content: Do you have tips of your trade? Excellent products? Have
you, personally, had a good day? You may mix in some personal comments,
especially if you are wearing your “business hat” and being personal at the same
time.
Examples:
I’m going to the Chamber Mixer at XXX on Thursday. Who else is?
We’re closed for the long weekend – I’m going kayaking!
Key point – if you would say it while talking to people you meet at a professional
event, it will probably work on Twitter.
@replies: This is a great way to introduce people to each other, thank people for
real-life public meetings, give credit where credit is due, and promote people who
deserve it. Messages starting with the @name will only be seen by people who
follow you and that person. But in Victoria, where the Twitter community is
intermingling quite a bit, that could be quite a few people!
Examples:
@personX we’ll be coming to your presentation this week
@personY, meet @personX, a fellow boat owner
Congratulations to @business for winning Best in the City (this one will be
seen by everyone who follows you because it doesn’t start with the name)
Direct Messages: If you start a conversation on Twitter and want to take it
private without moving to email, or if you just want to let only one person know
about something, a direct message is the best way to do it. You can only use a
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2. direct message when the recipient is following you. Otherwise, you have to use an
@reply… or politely ask the recipient to follow you so you can send a private
message.
Example:
DM personA Do you have my phone number?
DM personB Thanks for the lead – I’ll let you know how it goes
DM personC I’d like to send you a dm – would you like to follow me so we can
chat?
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3. Finding People to Tweet With
Find Followers:
1. Import contact list into your Gmail account using CSV file.
go to Find People in Twitter
Press “Find on other networks” tab
Select Gmail
Choose new people to follow
2. Find individual people by putting their name in the blanks (eg: Catherine
Novak)
3. Invite people your want from your contact list (use that CSV you created) via
email
4. Go to search.Twitter.com, Advanced Search and search by location or by
name
5. Look at who the people you follow are following
6. Save some Twitter searches, such as #yyj (for Victoria) – Hootsuite and
Tweetdeck can do this for you.
7. Pick people you follow, go to their profile and see who they are conversing
with. Anyone who looks interesting, follow them
Go to www.twellow.com and lookup Victoria under the Twellowhood tab. It lists
people in order of the number of followers they have – so you will get the active
local people first. It also lists people by category (which it gets from scanning
Twitter bios)
Another excellent resource is Klout.com – it rates people by their influence on
Twitter, and also finds people to follow by subject area. If you are looking for
influential people in your area of interest, your search is over.
Download TwitterLocal and look at it once in awhile – it posts everything that local
people write, and you choose the radius around Victoria that it will take in.
Search Twitter using keywords for your areas of interest
Get people to follow you
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4. 1. Retweet good information from people
2. When you start to follow someone you really want to follow you back, send
them a reply
3. Be consistent with your tweets – go on 2x a day, at the beginning and just after
dinner for now.
4. Add links to more information, whether it’s a web page, a picture, a reference
to someone else on Twitter
Start with your own contact list. Twitter can search it if you import your contacts
into a Gmail account.
Also useful: www.mrtweet.com. This gives recommendations of people based on
the recommendations and “retweets” of the people you follow. For instance, if
@ideazone follows and retweets someone frequently, I get a recommendation to
follow that person. Not perfectly relevant all the time of course, but I find it comes
up with some good people I may otherwise have missed.
Twitter tools:
TweetDeck or Seesmic Desktop
Organize your followers into groups for easier filtering and reading
Potential groups:
• Local people
• Media
• Industry
• Suppliers
• Staff
Using Search, monitor discussion of your industry, brand, keywords, competitor’s
brand…
See at a glance all your @mentions and direct messages
Post from multiple accounts
Post to Facebook
Filter any column
Hootsuite
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5. Hootsuite is one of my favourite Twitter management tools, incorporating an “at a
glance” look at Twitter across several columns, at-your-fingertips information about
people, showing whole conversations, shortening links, scheduling tweets, saving
searches, making lists and groups, even sending your tweets to other networks,
like Facebook and LinkedIn. (Just be careful not to put in too much “twitter lingo” if
you tweet to one of the other platforms.
Hootsuite is particularly useful for spreading out tweets through your day or week,
rather than putting out a bunch of information at once. That way, you are more
consistently present. Plan your original content in advance and plug it into Hoot
Suite once a week or so, setting each tweet to be released later.
Twitter Shorthand:
RT – “retweet”, where you forward someone else’s tweet. Retweets can have
comments added by you. You can even edit them a little bit for length but DO
NOT change the meaning of the content.
@[followedbyname] – this is how to address a public reply, or just get someone’s
attention on Twitter.
#[anytopic] – this is called a hashtag, and it’s a way of categorizing a tweet, and
making it searchable with other posts on that same topic. Why use the hashtag?
Think of the difference between these two posts:
Example: I fail to see why the French think Jerry Lewis is funny
Example: My Black and Decker can opener just broke. #fail
If I were Black and Decker, I would not want my brand name associated with the
hashtag #fail – (and #fail is a very common one!). Black and Decker didn’t write the
post, so they can’t delete it. Therefore, they had better do a good job of addressing
the broken can opener issue.
#folllowfriday – this is the Friday “tradition” of recommending some Twitter users to
the rest of your followers. Sometimes these recommendations get retweeted, and
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6. sometimes people use the lists to find more people to follow. Either way, it is
“good karma”.
Facebook for Organizations:
A Quick Reference
Quick Facts:
Facebook has 547,562,100 users as of yesterday – if it were a country, it would be
the 3
rd
largest in the world.
The US surpassed Canada this last year in percentage of Facebook users, but
Canada’s usage is still growing. Over 61% of Canadians have a Facebook
account.
Be the Boss of Facebook – not the other way around
Settings (at top right, by your name):
Your control panel for how much “noise” you put up with from Facebook
Notifications controls how much information you receive in your email inbox.
Application settings control how much you – and your friends – see from
applications you and they use.
Privacy settings control who can see your information. Privacy settings for
pictures and for status updates are customizable right down to individual people
and lists.
“Ignore” and “Hide” help you filter information and choose both friends and
applications. You never offend anyone by ignoring or hiding.
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7. Arrange your home page so it works for you
The left-hand column helps you filter information by type, and by friend groups.
Put your most frequently-used functions at the top of the list. The rest will hide
themselves.
Facebook Pages: Interact with your “fans” –
without taking up your whole day
Edit Page: This is where you change settings and add, delete or edit applications
once your page is published.
Promote Page with an Ad: You can gain fans on Facebook by promoting your
page, or you can make an ad that links to your website. Either way, making an ad
deserves its own section. It’s useful, and can be quite cost-effective as well.
Add Fan Box to your site: This is a widget that gives people a preview of your
fan page on Facebook with a couple of options of how big and how much detail to
include. It comes with code you can embed on your page.
Send an update to your fans: Updates appear in your fan’s notifications tab,
and for some who have selected this option, it appears as an email in their inbox.
It’s a chance to broadcast some news to all who follow you, and have it appear as
more than just a blip in their “stream”. As such, save it for important
announcements (eg a grand opening, or a charity event), and use your status
updates for the more day-to-day stuff.
Suggest to friends: When you click on this, the friends you have collected as
your “profile” identity appear – not the fans you may already have. For this reason,
I suggest that you accept “business” friendships on Facebook, and spend some
time in the privacy settings, giving business contacts more limited access to your
personal profile. It’s ok having a lot of friends, so long as you categorize them
appropriately.
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8. Add to page favourites: It seems funny to add your own page as a favourite
page, but then again, why wouldn’t you? In a similar vein, “like” your own page.
You may be generous with “liking” other people’s pages as well – you can always
hide a stream if it gets too “noisy” for your taste. And be sure to include pages of
favourite suppliers, customers, strategic alliances, mentors etc. in your own page
favourites.
Subscribe by SMS: Unless you love receiving status updates by text message,
and incurring the texting costs, I see no reason to do this.
Remove from my favourite pages: You wouldn’t do this for your own page –
perhaps you might remove pages of businesses where you had a bad experience.
Nice to know there’s an exit route when you need one.
Adding Notes: The notes application is the “blog” side of Facebook. Some
people use it to blog within Facebook, but it’s more common in my experience to
blog on your own site, or somewhere else where you can retain intellectual
property, and then import the blog posts. You can always add notes from within
Facebook in addition to importing a blog.
Importing an external blog: This is one of the most difficult things to do on
Facebook, but it’s well worth doing. Here’s how:
1. Go to your Facebook Fan Page
2. Add the Notes application to your page – easiest way to do this so both
you and your fans can find it is to make it a tab. Press the plus sign on the
tabs at the top of your fan page and select Notes. Now it’s added!
3. On the left of the page, you’ll see a list of actions below your logo. Click
Edit Page. A list of settings and applications you use on the page will show
up.
4. Scroll down to Notes and click the “edit” pencil on the top right of the box.
A drop-down list will appear.
5. Click edit – a place to add a note will show up, and on its right is a dialogue
box with the top title: Notes Settings. It will say “You are not importing
notes from an external blog.
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9. Import a blog »” and give you a link so you can import your RSS feed into
the notes.
6. Click “Import a blog”. The next screen will give you some information
about importing your blog (you can only import one, and you can’t edit
imported posts from within Facebook).
7. Enter the URL and click the box saying you have permission to import the
blog.
8. Click the “start importing” button. Your notes should start importing
9. Facebook will give you a preview of the imported notes and ask if the feed
is correct. If it is, confirm. If not, check the URL you gave Facebook and
try again.
YouTube Channel: Your Business Video
Showcase
Quick Facts:
In February 2009, Canadians watched an average of 10 hours of YouTube videos
YouTube is the third most-visited site on the Internet, behind Yahoo and Google
You don’t have to have a registered account to view videos on YouTube – but you
do need one in order to upload videos, comment, share favourites and subcribe to
the channels of other people.
It is estimated that 20 hours of new videos are uploaded to the site every minute,
and that around three quarters of the material comes from outside the United
States.
Your Channel –
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10. Profile: Yet another place to put your company information online and link back to
your own website. You can customize the look of your channel page more than
you can with Facebook – you can even load a corporate image as a background.
Favourites: This is particularly useful if your suppliers, strategic partners, or even
happy customers have videos that you can link to. Gather favourites that apply to
the business you are highlighting.
Subscriptions: This gives your channel access to all the videos in another
channel – same logic as “favourites” applies
Subscribers: People can subscribe to your channel and then your videos will
appear in their channel
Friends: Unless you are of the demographic that lives on Instant Messaging, the
interface for inviting friends is not as easy as it is for other social networking sites.
I suggest you convert your contact list’s emails into a simple text document,
comma separated. Paste this into the “send email invitations” dialogue box, and
attach a custom message. I would choose YouTube friends carefully – perhaps
restrict it to people who are likely to be uploading videos of their own.
Uploading and Embedding
YouTube gives you three choices for uploading:
Upload a completed video from your browser
Record using a webcam
Upload directly from a mobile phone
Embedding video means that people can watch a YouTube-hosted video on your
own website. Most videos have a snippet of code on the right which you place in
the HTML of your page right where you want the video to nest.
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