The charity helps incurably ill people stay in their own home by providing tailored support for people and their families with a range of services and help.

Firstly we talked about using an appropriate tone on social media, based on their existing style from their website. We also discussed language, in particular using the word ‘dying’ and whether or not to talk about death.

Tweets and retweets

I passed on some tips on how to write good tweets and how to encourage retweets. In the same vein we also looked at words and types of tweets that were less likely to get retweeted. We looked at the range and purpose of tweets – some are to give information, some are to start/respond to conversations and some tweets are building blocks to give an insight to the inner workings of the charity.

Then we looked at Facebook and discussed how to make the most of it – again focusing on tone, engagement and timing.

Jessica Ennis' recipe for Jerk Chicken

The charity has just produced a lovely calendar featuring lots of Britain’s top athletes sharing their favourite recipes. It’s the perfect thing to share on Facebook! We had a think about how to spread the message on Twitter too, including asking the featured sportspeople to retweet the link, sending it to foodie tweeters like @GuardianFood, @Channel4Food and including hashtags to tweets when food programmes are on e.g. #jamiesgreatbritain.

Incidentally, I bought one and can’t wait to try Jess Ennis’ jerk chicken, go on – get one!

This was my first engagement as a Media Trust volunteer. Media Trust matches volunteers in the media industry to charities who need support.

Related links:

• Helen’s Trust website
• Follow Helen’s Trust on Twitter @helenstrust
• Helen’s Trust on Facebook
• The Media Trust

The Viadeo team have a go at re-writing some existing blog post titles, then coming up with tweets to promote them

We’re fresh from our latest Sweet Retweets training session – given to the team at Viadeo who write blog posts for their website.

Viadeo is a social network for professionals with over 35 million members worldwide. They blog in four languages (English, French, Spanish and Italian) and sponsor many events in the social media arena.

To help them write better blog titles, tweets and Facebook posts we gave them a tailored half-day workshop.

The purpose of the workshop is to learn how to write to get tweets retweeted, Facebook posts Liked and persuade people to share your content.

What did the session cover?

• Twitter: How to get your tweets retweeted
• Facebook: Getting Likes and upping engagement
• Coming up with great titles for blog posts
• Layout and formatting: Best practice tips
• Top dos and don’ts for social media.

Feedback from the session

The participants were asked: What did you find useful?

“Getting the most out of Twitter and lots of tips and advice on how to write good blog titles and blog posts.”

“The most useful part was the importance of titles. I feel like I haven’t spent enough time thinking about mine.”

“The content-specific stuff – writing titles, layout, format and content for attractive retweets.”

“Top tips and technical stuff.”

“Revising information I’ve gathered and know about social media, so I’m sure I’m doing the right things and what I should do more.”

“Tips, statistics, advice for Twitter, Facebook and blogs.”

Find out more about our writing for social media workshops and how to book one.

Fashion house Paul Smith was launching a new fragrance called Optimistic and wanted to appeal to the 18-30 demographic using social media.

Facebook was perfect: Incentive > connect with the brand > share

Competitions

To promote the fragrance we ran two competitions on Facebook:

1. Users uploaded a photo and shared it with friends to get it Liked – the top 50 photos won entry into a Paul Smith Optimistic party.
2. A weekly Q&A competition – prizes included VIP gig tickets and the chance to meet Paul Smith in his office over a cup of tea.

Ellie Goulding at the Paul Smith Optimistic party

Incentives

The Facebook page offered plenty of incentives to encourage Likes and sharing.

The main competition was about sharing your photo with your friends on Facebook. In turn, your friends could also Like the page to enter the competitions.

An advantage of running the weekly competition was that there was a reason for users to come back regularly. The new prizes kept interest levels up and the updates reminded users to share their photo to get more Likes.

Getting Likes

The Paul Smith Optimistic Facebook page was supported by the Paul Smith Facebook page – they posted and promoted the competitions regularly and the spike in Likes was always immediate. By monitoring mentions a weekly surge on Monday was noted, which corresponded with the weekly ‘Optimistic Mondays’ competitions. We also had support from bloggers and competition websites linking to the page.

Seeding content

We handpicked fashion, beauty lifestyle and music bloggers and asked them to post on the subject of ‘being optimistic’ (some of the lucky ones even got to meet Paul Smith). We left the brief open so each blogger could write about what inspired them and include anything they liked into the post including photos, audio and video.

We had some lovely posts:

• My Top 5 Optimistic Songs from Musicals by Stuart Wood
• Magic Moments by Peter Davies

By involving the community and encouraging to be part of the launch, we found that most of the online mentions of the brand in the early stages came from blogs.

Tweeting

The social activity was supported by Twitter – we primarily used it to drive traffic to the Facebook page. By including trending topics in tweets where relevant we were able to reach a higher number of followers. The campaign was just six weeks long and we found our numbers of Twitter followers were much lower than our Facebook Likes. This would be less of an issue on a longer campaign.

Conclusion

The success of this campaign was helped by great planning and buy-in from relevant stakeholders, including Boots who promoted the Facebook page from their website. I spent a lot of time developing the right tone so that it matched the established Paul Smith one and posting updates that fitted the brand. The support from the bloggers was excellent and the PR around the campaign generated articles that appeared in featured in magazines including as Psychologies, Shout and Bliss, and newspapers including the Daily Mail and the Telegraph.

Relevant links:

• Paul Smith Optimistic on Facebook and on Twitter
• See the winning 50 images (or watch the slideshow)
• Watch the video of the Paul Smith Optimistic Party
• Listen to the Paul Smith Optimistic playlist on Spotify

Want your content to be shared, liked and retweeted?

I’m running an event as part of Social Media Week London with my colleague Sue Keogh from Sookio. We’ve worked together at Yahoo!, Aol and the DCSF and between us we’ve worked for the BBC, ITV and Bauer Media (formerly Emap).

We’ll be running a workshop aimed at  brand managers, journalists and bloggers with practical advice on:

• writing enticing blog titles
• crafting headlines that people will want to share
• getting your tweets retweeted
• social media dos and don’ts
• what words works on Facebook and other platforms
• working with text and images
• avoiding typos and double entendres.

Find all the information on our page: Sweet Retweets (or How to Write For Social Media).

Hope to see you on Tuesday 8 February at 3pm at AOL UK, Shropshire House, 11-20 Capper Street, WC1E 6JA.

*Please note this event is now sold out*

I’ve helped set up social media channels for a Bauer Media brand and a few smaller companies, including an estate agent and wedding dress designer. The difference between communicating as a smaller company and a large one is a blog for another day; what I’m interested in exploring today is how a small-to-medium size business can use social media channels to best effect.

A ‘social media strategy’? Seriously?

You need to ask yourself a few questions before you head on into that there social media circus. Start with the following:

• What is our aim of using social media?
• What will we measure?
• Who will we target?
• What are our key messages?
• How much time will we allow?

Answering these questions means that you’ll have to think about why you’ll use social media. Although it’s free to use in terms of money, there is a huge time investment before there is a tangible payoff. But done right, this payoff could be huge; increasing your customer base, influence and reputation.

Got any tips you can share on doing it right?

Using my experience of using social both as a small business and for other small businesses, I’ve picked up a few things along the way. I’ve also been generously helped out by several people via Twitter. I’d love to hear your tips too – send via the form at the bottom of the post.

• Interaction is more important than how many ‘friends’ you have

Do people follow you back? Are you responding to what people say? Social media is perfect for responding to comments – go on, don’t be shy! Make friends first – you’re building a network of connections, not giving it the hard sell. So listen and join in when you’re ready.

• Choose your platform

Sue Keogh recommends you pick your platform wisely: “Are you more suited to a chatty Twitter feed, a Facebook page with lots of images and competitions or a Foursquare campaign getting people to check in to your coffee shop?”

• Don’t just talk about what you’re doing

One of the great things about social media is that you can talk to people about different subjects. Twitter’s a great place to make a comment on a story you saw in the news, or respond to someone else’s thoughts on a book they read. As long as you keep your tone consistent, you can vary your updates to include more friendly or personal thoughts.

• Give back more than you take

Sarah Pettegree says: “It isn’t a one-way street, to be effective on Twitter you need followers (and to follow people) and, as I often say, it isn’t The Yellow Pages. If you just use it as a medium for advertising your wares then no one will be interested, or impressed, and they won’t follow. It’s about being interested in other people’s lives and businesses, talking to them and wanting to help them as much as they help you.”

• Be open and honest, but don’t share your whole life

• Watch the clock

Once you start connecting with people, it’s easy to spend hours and hours doing it. Beware of spending too much time on social media, at the expense of your other activities. Make it part of your marketing activity, not all of it. Noreen suggests having allocated times to check your accounts, remember to consider what your intended audience might be doing at that time. No point sending special offers out at midnight on Saturday, for example.

• Learn from mistakes and successes

I’m a copywriter but occasionally the odd typo creeps through. It happens when I’m rushing so I try to take my time when tweeting and avoid doing it from my phone (damn autocorrect). Sue advises you check out the competition and learn by their mistakes, as well as your own. Whose tweets do you enjoy? Could you be more like them? What’s been your most replied-to tweet? Do more of those.

• Measure what’s working

If you know what you need social media to do for you (e.g. referrals, exposure, sales, increased engagement), you need to make sure you have ways of measuring that success. If nothing’s happening think about what advice you could take from this list, or maybe you need to give it a bit more time.

How do I calculate my return on investment?

There’s a great post here with loads of information on how to calculate the ROI from social media marketing.

Huge thanks to the following contributors:

Sarah Pettegree @brays_cottage
Sue Keogh @sookio
Annette Naudin @annettenaudin
Hollie-Anne Brooks @HollieAnneB
Noreen Blanluet @beamazingtoday
Jorgen Sundberg @JorgenSundberg

Only half the UGC hub was up and running on July 7th 2005.

They received 10-15,000 emails from all over London telling the BBC what was happening. They didn’t have the capacity to deal with all the information, but looking back they had credible information about every single bomb that morning.

Users spend on average:

• 1 minute/day on the BBC
• 11 minutes/day on Facebook

Social media strategy

• social newsgatherring
• social production (collaborative journalism)
• sharing content more widely

Matt asks: Where do you get your news?

Replies include: news websites, Facebook and Twitter.

The BBC is using social media to push news out and also to bring content in.

Listen to Matt: “If it’s that important the news will find me.”

Matt shows several examples of when photographs were used but weren’t ‘real’ e.g. that fire was not in Hampshire, the photo of a flood was not the same one. Users must be able to trust UGC (user generated content).

Twitter is faster for news than the traditional ‘wires’ so you have to know how to use it.

User generated content includes:

• Eyewitness ‘accidental journalism’
• Eyewitness testimoney
• Breaking news
• Case studies
• Stories
• Comment or opinion

Matt says you have to be able to use Google before you use social media.

Most people don’t contribute material to a news organisation. Why not?

Think about your calls to action

Is it obvious how to do it? Is it as easy as possible to do? Is it clear how to contribute? Is there are good reason to contribute? What will happen to the content?

The way you phrase your request or call to action is extremely important. Don’t decide what you want the story to be and then ask people to fit into that – listen to what they want to say.

Breaking news on Twitter

Matt gives some examples of news stories that broke on Twitter including the Hudson river plane crash and Claire Rayner’s death (broken by her son Jay).

The BBC uses Twitter in different ways – from accounts for breaking news to @jiminthemorning who engages with his breakfast show followers and chats and replies to people.

Should BBC journalists be allowed to tweet personal opinions? Phil Lavelle got in trouble for a tweet about a Welsh-language channel.

You’re not tweeting to your mates – you’re sharing your thoughts with the whole world! Count to ten before you press the send button.

Tools of social media

You should make it clear why you’re on social media – is it to gather content? To share?

• Audioboo
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Open source maps

Get out and talk to people

Social media helps you get back in touch with people – think of it as a return to ‘old-fashioned’ journalism.

Great content provokes a reaction. The most-shared videos are:

• Funny
• Shocking
• Sexy
• Spectacular
• Random
• Illuminating
• Uplifting
• Celebrity-orientated
• Topical
• Controversial

Think how you felt when you saw the OMG Cat – if you laughed out loud or even ROFLOLd then you know what I’m talking about.

Users are already telling you what they like

People now expect these amazing pieces of content from you regularly. And what’s more, they expect you to post it to them, because goddammit, they haven’t got time to go out and find it.

Think of all the places you can find users. They’ve got a Facebook account, they use apps on their iPhone, they even link their Twitter to their FourSquare so it’s not as though they’re hiding from you.

Now you know where they are, spend a bit of time looking at the information users share. People spend ages clicking on tiny thumbs-up buttons to tell you (and all their friends) what they like. Maybe they’ve joined a fan page on Facebook for a programme on TV or a particular radio station. They might be on Twitter shouting about how fantastic their local takeaway was last night. Go, look and listen.

Recommendations are crucial for success

Pay more attention to recommendations: users are five times more likely to respond to a marketing message if they see their friend ‘likes’ the brand.

How could you encourage users to like you? What’s in it for them? Could you offer a discount voucher to people who have mentioned you?

Context is the new buzzword

Once you’ve found some people who are open about their likes you can now start to plan what content you’ll deliver to them and where. Users like content that is:

• Relevant
• New
• Useful

and it needs to be:

• in a place
• at a time

that they find useful. Otherwise they view your marketing message as an interruption.

Examples. With one last cat

E.g. I tell Facebook that I’m married. I like cats and I recently ran a half-marathon.

A hint on my husband’s profile to buy me a personalised cat running shirt two weeks before my birthday would be fantastic. Especially using the picture I posted on my wall of my cat licking his nose.

If you sell football shirts, personalise your Facebook adverts to display in team colours – showing blue ones to Chelsea and Everton supporters and red ones to Manchester United fans.

Search Twitter for your brand or product name and use Social Mention to see if you’re being talked about in blogs. Then all you have to do is join in the conversation. Finding your fans in their online space shows you’re listening. And by offering relevant content (e.g. offers, news, videos), you’re showing that you understand their needs, which is a great basis for a relationship.

I wrote this post after attending Social media advertising: Ads, apps & incentives – some of the information in this post was noted down during presentations, in particular:

Sarah Wood at Unruly Media
Chase McMichael at Infinigraph

I also use Linkedin to look for contacts and to see who I could work with. So far, so normal.

What I don’t understand is why whoever responsible came up with the label “social networking”. Since when has networking been a solitary activity?

A quick definition of networking:

“An extended group of people with similar interests or concerns who
interact and remain in informal contact for mutual assistance or
support.”

Even if you don’t like the people you’re networking with – be it for business or pleasure, you still have to engage in social activity with them.

So please, less of the tautology… and more of the status updates.

(In case you’ve been trapped under something heavy in your home for the last couple of years, this cute vid explains social networking in plain English)

My Linkedin profile

This post was originally published by Christine on Wed, 02/20/2008