Denise Ruttan Communications

Freelance writing, editing, web content, social media solutions

Denise Ruttan Communications - Freelance writing, editing, web content, social media solutions

Six easy tips to become a Twitter ninja

I can get pretty far in convincing people of the value of Twitter. I think of it like a social bookmarking site in which I find articles that are interesting to me based on recommendations from people who have similar passions. Sort of like subscribing to magazines. It’s also a good marketing tool. Even if people are still mistakenly convinced that Twitter isn’t good for anything but posting pictures of random lunches, I can sell it as an excellent media relations device, since most journalists are Twitter ninjas these days.

But the roadblock that many Twitter newbies can’t get past is how to cut through all the white noise to broadcast a useful signal.

You follow people based on interests, not personal connections, so you amass many more followers than Facebook. On Facebook, 150-250 “friends” is average. On Twitter, it is easy to collect 1,000 followers in a few months.

Each of those followers also post much more frequently than on Facebook, adding even more to the white noise.

The fact is that you’ll miss stuff on Twitter. It’s impossible to keep up with thousands of tweets from thousands of people even if you do nothing but maintain a Twitter account all day, constantly glued to your phone. You don’t even get everyone’s tweets since promoted posts get mixed in with the mass.

But there are steps you can take to make life easier on yourself.

I’ll start with how to hone in on the signals that are interesting to you among the noise.

1. Utilize lists.

Twitter has a feature where you can create lists of subject areas in which you can organize your followers. Use lists strategically. If you don’t want to miss tweets from a few friends, create a list for 10 friends. If you want to be sure to interact with particular journalists, create a list for “Local Journalists,” say, or “Science Journalists.”

2. Be selective about whom you follow back.

Don’t follow every Russian punk band and Miami pole dancer that follows you. The nature of Twitter is designed to encourage you to build more followers, at any cost, but you don’t have to follow everyone back and those followers can still see your tweets since everything is public. It just means you won’t see their tweets in your news feed, and you can filter it down to specific interests.

3. Don’t tweet about everything.

Become an expert in specific niche topics and tweet about those. For example, love college football? Tweet about nothing but college football. Maybe throw in college basketball or NFL tweets, too. Then you will build an audience of people who are interested in college football who are more likely to add you to their college football lists and thus see your tweets.

4. Use a third-party monitoring tool like Hootsuite.

Use such monitoring tools as Hootsuite, a browser-based tool that lets you organize specific hashtags or search keywords into lists to easier follow topics of interest. You can also group followers into lists. Twitter caps the number of people you can follow at 2,000 (though no limit on the people who can follow you), so Hootsuite lets you keep track of an unlimited number of Tweeters. Another advantage: Auto-schedule your tweets for certain dates and times using these tools, rather than having to be on Twitter at all times of the day. Others include Tweetdeck and Buffer – as well as a whole host of similar services, some free, some “freemium,” many paid.

5. Follow hashtags.

A hashtag is not a person or a website. It’s a phrase or keyword that functions as a search term to find topics of interest. The number sign converts it into a hyperlink that you can click on to find more tweets from people who are talking about that topic area. Find a few hashtags that many people in your market are interacting with. For example, for gardening, the big one is #gardenchat. Then track discussions using such tools as Hootsuite. You can attract new followers based on your use of that hashtag, and make sure what you’re posting is still relevant to your audience.

6. Monitor your own use of social media.

Once you appreciate the value of such services as Twitter and get into it, it can be all too easy to get overwhelmed by all the information it offers, to let it become a so-called “time sucking black hole” on your day.

Set up a schedule for your use of social media. Use autoschedulers to post on Facebook and Twitter. Manage your social media presence for an hour or two each morning when you check your email, or at the end of the day; whatever works best with your flow. Respond to client interactions in a timely manner and understand the peak hours for different social media services. But going back to my original point: Even if you do nothing but monitor Twitter 24 hours a day, you will miss out on tweets that might have interested you. Don’t allow yourself to get discouraged by that.

Instead use that baseline as an opportunity to think strategically about your Twitter use.

Only then will you be on your way to becoming a true Twitter ninja.

Make it best practice to review your Facebook privacy settings

Should you separate your personal and professional social media identities? Should you add coworkers, your boss, sources, business partners, vendors, to your social media lists? Should you need a safe space online where you can be free to express your beliefs without fear of offending business partners?

Whatever you decide, remember that nothing on the Internet is private, even if this sounds like an obvious sentiment. This is especially true for Facebook now that people can hit the “share” button on your images and links, regardless of whether you’ve posted it to a custom list. You should weigh the pros and cons carefully when deciding how much to open up your social media profiles, whether to create two different profiles, to craft a false identity for “private” social media use or whether to simply divide up friends into custom lists.

Regardless of what you decide, it’s best practice to regularly review your Facebook privacy settings on all your social media profiles. The guidelines change so often on Facebook that it’s important to make sure your data is still as private as you thought every three to six months.

1. Look for your audience settings on your individual inline posts.

You can select which audience sees your posts any time you type into the “What’s on your mind?” dialogue box.

In the bottom right-hand corner of the dialogue box, the audience that sees your post is defined by which icon shows up.

Click on the drop-down tab by “Friends” to change the audience.

Here’s another view, on your home page/news feed:

Note the pull-down tab at the bottom right-hand corner of the “What’s on your mind?” box for audience setting. You can change which audience sees your post by changing the icon.

2. Which audience?

You can change the audience to “Public,” “Friends,” “Friends of Friends,” or “Custom.” Each audience has its own icon. Public posts are viewed by anyone on the Internet, regardless of whether they are friends with you. If you select “Friends of Friends,” any mutual friends can see whatever you post. So if your coworker is following your boss, your boss could see everything you post to “friends of friends” even if you are not following your boss if your boss clicks on your profile.

Here’s what the icons look like:

3. Here’s where you check your default privacy settings, versus the privacy settings on each individual post.

Click on “Privacy settings.” Regularly review this default page, since guidelines change often and without notice on Facebook.

4. Create a custom list

You can create lists on Facebook to take another privacy measure. Custom lists are groups of friends that you select from all your friends. You could create a list that excludes coworkers, for example, without taking the coworker off your friends list.

Click on “More” near “Friends”:

Then click on the “create list” button and drag and drop the profile picture icons of friends in a new list.

5. Reviewing your friends’ privacy settings

On your news feed, posts from friends will appear like this:

Find the icon on the right-hand bottom corner that tells you which audience can see the post. This time, the setting for the Fine Cooking post is “public,” meaning anyone can see activity on that post – activity involves comments, likes, public shares.

Be aware that if you comment or like a post that is set to “public,” your friends could see your activity in their news feed. If your friends have a small friends list, they see more of your activity. They see less of your activity the larger their friends list. If you like or comment on a post marked “friends of friends,” it’s similar. Not quite completely public, but more people than you might expect can see your activity.

Keep in mind these tips when regularly reviewing your Facebook privacy settings. Also remember to check these steps when you’re posting from your mobile phone.

You can’t completely control your data on the Internet these days, but reviewing your privacy settings and deciding on best practices gives you another level of security.

Starting to see the beginnings of media success

Here’s a brief sampling of some of my work at the new job so far.

A news release about a holiday food safety hotline (here), copyright 2012 by Oregon State University, was published on the OSU Extension website and distributed to dozens of media outlets on Nov. 12. It’s been picked up by the Eugene-based radio station KLCC and the newspapers the Lebanon Express, Corvallis Gazette-Times and the Bend Bulletin.

A news release about an agritourism summit, copyright 2012 by Oregon State University, was published on the OSU Extension website and distributed to dozens of media outlets. So far the story has been reported on by KLCC and the Capital Press. The conference is set for Nov. 30.

One more release might still get some notice, just published on the Extension website and distributed today: Oregon 4-H students travel to Atlanta for national meeting. Copyright 2012 by Oregon State University.

My first gardening story is also available, Spruce up your Christmas tree with these tips, also copyright 2012 by Oregon State University.

Market your brand with Pinterest by pinpointing your audience

You’ve heard of Pinterest. It’s the third fastest growing social network behind Facebook and Twitter. It boasted 10.4 million users in June of this year.

You might be wondering whether it’s worth it for your organization. It’s a big social network with lots of users who could be prospects. But users simply steal others’ pretty pictures and recycle them over and over again. You don’t quite get its appeal.

Here’s some more stats to fuel your interest. Eighty percent of its users are women, 50 percent of its users have kids, 20 percent of its users are men and 30 percent of its users are between 24 and 34 years old, according to Pinterestingly Enough.

Pinterest is great at keeping its users hooked. It’s all about pretty pictures and appealing to people who are more engaged by visual communication. You get a positive feedback loop when a picture you “pin” on one of your interest boards goes viral. Most popular topics include food and drink, home decor, weddings, DIY, recipes and inspirational quotes.

One Pinterest business that does it right is Whole Foods Market. It’s been generating a lot of buzz for its brilliance at the concept (What Marketers Can Learn From Whole Foods’ Organic Approach to Pinterest).

Pinterest is not about blatant self-promotion. Although you should talk with your team about your strategy and the image you wish to portray with your posts, it’s Pinterest etiquette not to post from only one website or only one brand. It’s not considered stealing, but re-pinning, and best practice involves giving credit. Re-pinning is the basis of Pinterest’s engagement model, much like retweeting on Twitter builds your Klout. It’s not your original content, but it gets your name out there, and your taste and style in front of a niche audience of largely women.

Going back to Whole Foods, its Pinterest account is a study in doing it right. Its boards are divided into such categories as “How does your garden grow?” “Eat your veggies” “Edible Celebrations” and “Plant Based Diet Recipes.” If you surf its boards, its pins are largely repins and not original content promoting its products.

Instead, here is what I imagine Whole Foods did. The firm, I believe, thought of one person who represented its ideal customer base. The company thought of what that person would like to eat, drink, decorate his or her home with, travel, read, his or her dream wedding, his or her health plan. Then Whole Foods portrayed the tastes of its ideal audience by promoting other users’ content that fit that ideal image.

The success of the concept is in the numbers. Whole Foods boasts 78,545 followers and it’s growing. That’s an audience that feels personally connected to the Whole Foods brand in today’s increasingly visual world. Those are future shoppers.

Getting a Pinterest account is free. To sign up as a business, all you need is a Twitter account or an email account. Pinterest just debuted new business pages as well. After first discussing your strategy and your ideal audience with your team, there are few reasons not to jump on board.

Happy pinning!

Promote your conference by using Twitter live

It was once seen as a sign of disrespect: keeping your cell phone on during a conference.

But given the popularity of mobile devices, conference organizers are increasingly asking attendees to pull out their smart phone and tweet during lectures and presentations.

It’s called “live-tweeting,” or giving the blow-by-blow each minute of a live event that’s happening right now.

The drawbacks: Live tweeting generates an enormous amount of activity; some followers could be turned off by the number of tweets. There’s also a potential for inaccurate reporting among “citizen journalists.”

But there are so many benefits. If you’re not attending a conference in New York but you’re in Oregon, you can follow along the highlights and learn from afar. It’s also a great way of publicizing the conference to a wider audience. It engages attendees who might not be able to juggle multiple seminars at once.

To start, agree on a hashtag and publicize it widely. For example, at a recent academic conference I attended called “Training Days” for employees, the hashtag was #OSUTD12. See if your chosen hashtag is being used for anything else by searching at twitter.com/search.

Don’t just tweet anything the presenter says. Pick big ideas and intriguing quotes. Think of catchy phrases or interesting info that people might retweet. Also ask questions and make observations. Just remember that your comment must fit into 140 charcaters or less.

Coming from a reporting background, I have experience in live-tweeting from breaking news or events like graduations and funerals. So I took key things I learned from that experience. Focus on what people need to know utilizing the speed and uniqueness of the given medium. You wouldn’t use Twitter for the same things that you would a web article in which you can say more and readers would have longer attention spans. Keep it concise and useful; think relevance.

Here’s an example of my tweets in action from a presentation called “Drupal Mobilized.”

tweets from conference

Location-based social media as a tool for nonprofits

Foursquare teamed up with Starbucks to promote a 10-day fundraising and AIDS awareness campaign: http://venturebeat.com/2012/05/31/red-rush-to-zero.

How it works: From June 1 to 10, Starbucks donated $1 to the Global Fund, the recipient of (RED) money, for every Foursquare check-in at any of its locations in the U.S. and Canada. It had a goal of raising $250,000. (RED) is the non-profit founded by Bono and Bobby Shriver in 2006 to raise money for the Global Fund and fight AIDS in Africa.

It was Foursquare’s largest check-in campaign to date.

Success rate: The campaign hit its goal of $250,000 two days early.

Why it works: The “gamification” element adds fun to the campaign by inspiring people to check in to donate funds to a worthy cause. People didn’t have to open their own pocketbooks, but rather, their check-ins prompted matching funds from Starbucks, a win-win scenario. Starbucks benefited from the added presence on Foursquare. The campaign was also short and promoted by a wide variety of platforms, between the nonprofit, Foursquare itself and Starbucks.