y ar t en m y i pl op C m Co
December 2013
Home Decorating & Remodels Hot looks and trends to consider now
THE $10,000 BACHELOR’S DEGREE High quality without the high cost
Three lessons to help grow a business
Growing a business can be compared to growing a plant
OCIATION O ASS FH AL
ILDERS E BU OM
NATI ON
Home Builders Association of Berks County
BESTIN PUBLI -NATION CATIO N
features
THE ULTIMATE TWITTER PRIMER By Christian D. Malesic, MBA, IOM
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y name is Christian and I am a Twitter-aholic (you respond: "Hi, Christian"). Like most people on Twitter, I check it multiple times a day - usually 6-12. Mostly, I do fly-bys, spending only a few moments with my device, tablet, or desktop screen. Other times I spend 5-10 minutes. I get most of my news by starting on Twitter then following the links to read articles or watch video clips of the longer story. I follow the companies, brands, people, and organizations that I like the most.
BTW (By the Way - for those that do not know the lingo yet), did I tell you...I am a Generation Xer. Want to reach me? 12
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Or, those in my age demographic (and younger)? Get our attention on Twitter
Sorting thru “The Noise” I have created special "lists" of the other folks on Twitter that I like the most. I have an associations list, news list, politics list, quotes / inspirational thoughts list, entertainment list, business list, and Builders Assn’s (NAHB) list. I make only the last one public. All of the others are private for me alone. I tweak each list occasionally adding those Tweeps (means: people on Twitter) I want to try and deleting those of which I have grown tired. These lists keep
me from sorting thru all of the noise, allowing me to see the content and read only the opinions of those I have come to trust or enjoy. Not all of us Tweeps use lists - only the real die-hards. But, a lot of people are on Twitter
Change or Die We have read in our business magazines and heard at seminars that we must change or die. We must include the Gen X and Gen Y (and sometime soon, the Gen Z) or our businesses will slowly shrink and then perish as the Boomers retire. The Xs, Ys, and Zs are on Twitter! The "next great thing" may change all
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that in a year, or a decade; but, right now: they are on Twitter.
The “next great thing”...well...that is Twitter. On November 7th, Twitter had its Initial Public Offering (IPO) on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). With the initial sales price set for $26 a share, the demand for the stock was so large that the first trade debuted at 10:09 am at $45.10 a share. To give you perspective, at $45 a share Twitter is valued as a $24.4 billion company and has made 1,600 new millionaires out of rank and file Twitter employees.
will quickly lose interest. Your potential customers and lifetime clients alike care about themselves, simplification, their family, the neighborhood, trends, maybe a little about Washington or the State Capitol, new products, gee whiz funfilled facts, etc. Fill your timeline with as much of that as you can. Get their attention. Make them want to come back to read your next Tweet. Once you have their attention, you can drop an advertisement on them. Your ratio should be at least 4 ‘useables’ for every 1 ad.
Save Money, Invest Time
You are Not Alone
We are all trying to cut costs and squeeze pennies. The biggest nonproduct business costs are: people, advertising, and postage. Twitter helps with the latter two. It costs you nothing in hard money. Only time. Everything you currently mail, fax, email, or carrier pigeon can be put on Twitter... as long as you can say it in 140 characters (spaces & punctuation count).
Where do you get the ‘useable’ Tweets? Tweet things you read in a good book, hear on the radio, observe in real life, or from your manufacturers and suppliers. ReTweet Tweets from other businesses in your area or industry, the news, and from trade associations. Ensure that these Tweets are relevant to who your clients are currently or who you want to help them be eventually.
At the HBA of Berks County, our business is a little different from yours. Our mission is to help our business Members grow their businesses. There are a lot a ways we do that, such as this magazine.
It would be a drastic over-simplification that belittles HBA Membership to do so; but, one could make an argument that we are in the meetings and events business since those are two of our deliverables. The HBA increased attendance at every single event last year (with one small exception, and that one was close) after we got our social media campaign fully up and running. Though not always true, that means we made more money on each event in income; but, we also spent less in expenses attacking the profit equation from both ends.
What to Tweet? It's all about the tweets. Of course, you are doing this to increase interest in your business and its products & services; but, if your timeline is filled with you selling things from your offerings - they
You do not need to do all of the work! We are all scouring the web for content. Find Twitter accounts, like @HBAberks, that are doing the same thing. If you ReTweet or favorite one of our Tweets we will be most appreciative. And, if you do it often, we will begin to think of you as a Tweepi (friend on Twitter). Tweepi’s help Tweepi’s; meaning: “you scratch our back and we’ll scratch yours.” Thus, unless you are a Member who wants to stay active in the HBA, you are going to ignore all of our Tweets on our meetings & events and ReTweet only that stuff that is relevant to YOUR clients.
How Do They Know You Exist? This is the hardest part. If you build it... they won't necessarily come. From our point of view, you get three kinds of Tweeps. At first blush, you might think you only care about the first type; but, think again: clients, non-customer locals, non-customer non-locals. Clients - The obvious group we want to reach. This is our target market and why we do what we do. We want them
to know what we are up to; so, they can be a part of it making their relationship with us more valuable.
Non-Customer Locals - This category has two subsets: those who are potential customers and those that are not ever going to be potentials. In the first group is the potential customer who just started their business, the business who never tried us before, and the one that used our product or services before and didn't come back (maybe they loved us and just didn’t need us again yet). The second subset is the group that will never use your product / services by virtue of what they do and who they are. Chances are extremely high that they will never even consider you. For example, the US Postal Service will probably never use your service if you are a local printer; however, the individual carrier may if you are a local accountant. These subsets change for each one of us reading this article – you have to do your own analysis.
Should you market... er, I mean, Tweet to them? Absolutely! You WANT the local public to follow you EVEN IF they are not a potential customer. They have friends, family, neighbors… oh, and they change jobs, sometimes, too.
Non-Customer Non-Locals - Why do you care if someone from Napa Valley, CA follows you? Or, from Paris? Or, South Whales? You do! It is more complicated and beyond the scope of this article; but, I'll give you the elevator version: it comes down to reach & influence as measured by metrics such as the Klout Score. The greater your reach, the higher you will rank in searches by search engines. If you tie your Twitter account to your web site, Facebook posts, YouTube, etc. your status will elevate as people do Google searches causing your information to come up as the best solution to the user's inquiry. Isn't this also important as we emphasize that the buying public should buy from us? In fact, might this even be one of the very definitions of the word “advertising”?
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the ultimate twitter primer
Gain Followers When HBA Berks does our printed Membership Directory each year, we send out a form to each member to ensure we have the proper names, phone, email, etc. We added social media accounts to this form to allow us to expand our social reach. You can do this with your clients. How cool do you think a client will think YOU ARE if you ReTweet them on occasion?
We also put our linkable social media icons on each page of our web site and on our email signature block. It is not an accident that they are on our business cards, flyers, and letterhead. We publicize our accounts in each issue of our publicfocused magazine with a circulation of 3,000 (At Home in Berks), put up a large vertical banner at every association event, and push Social Media at our Home Show and Parade of Homes. As if that wasn't enough, we go searching each Social Media platforms for new accounts in those rare moments when we have a few minutes to do so. Even after all that, we wish our follower count would be larger; but, it is growing... steadily.
Cross-utilize Twitter Everything we post on Facebook also posts to Twitter (and visa-versa). When we put up a new YouTube video, it goes to Twitter. LinkedIn and Pinterest are a little trickier. Thus, we are crosspopulating various social media accounts with one staff action.
Some "experts" are arguing now that this is bad. Facebookers are different than Tweeps, they argue, and posts should be presented differently. In a college classroom, I'll agree with that theory all day long. The pragmatist in me, however, argues two points to the contrary: (1) Most people prefer one or two social media accounts over the others. I tried FB, for example. I tried, I really tried. My high school friends are all into it big time. It wasn't me. I now check my personal FB account once or twice a month. So, as businesses, we need to be on more than one type of Social Media
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platform to expand our reach to our clients and our future customers alike. (2) I don't have the time or the staff to log on to each Social Media platform to customize the same message over and over to make it specific for that platform. Do you? When I get two or three more staff, maybe I will add that to the task list.
Make Your Website Current Our web site went from “sucks” to “the pride of our family” over the last year. We did a lot to make that happen, the most significant of which was to post the most current, cutting-edge topics to our home page the moment they happen. Our events appear on our web home page. Our awards appear. Latest breaking news in the construction industry appears. And, the Best Part?... we don't do any of it from the web page or by programming it or calling our IT guy, etc. We do nothing to make this happen. That’s right… zero staff action, zero expenditure of time or money. In one action a year ago, we set up a Twitter "widget" on our home page. Twitter did all the work and HTML coding for us. We went to Twitter settings and copied the code to our web page... again... we did this ONE TIME in ONE ACTION a year ago. Now, every time we post to Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube the information goes on Twitter (as a Tweet) and then to our home page of our website. It is a beautiful thing.
Check out HBAberks.org Do it on YOUR Schedule. We do most of our Tweets for the month at one sitting. Wait? What, you say? Oh... you thought Twitter was only used live. You thought that, like an email, when I hit send it goes to you to read. NOPE. It CAN be used like that. We use it like that to ReTweet and for live content. For example: who won an award, did the Members pass a dues increase at the
national Board meeting (unfortunately, they did), did Senator Pat Toomey address us at a state Board meeting in Hershey (he did).
For all of our events and "advertisements" we schedule the Tweet. Before writing this, I wrote and scheduled all of my tweets for December. I can set the date, time, and verbiage. Up until the moment they go live, I can edit any of those three areas or delete the Tweet entirely. A little known fact is...I can even delete a Tweet after it goes live. I cannot as easily, however, delete it from all of the places it cross-posted. I like using HootSuite for all of this. (It also allows me to view those lists I spoke of in a form I prefer). Before HootSuite, I used TweetDeck, which was purchased by Twitter and is now theirs. There are others. Google or Tweet the question to the world if you don't like either of those two. Your Tweepi’s will reply to you. They have opinions. If you learn nothing else when you start using Twitter...you learn that everyone has opinions.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Christian D. Malesic, MBA, IOM is the Executive Officer of the Home Builders Association of Berks County. He provides insight on construction issues, business operations, marketing, personal finance, and occasionally, on political philosophy/history. Contact Christian at Christian@HBAberks.org or follow him on Twitter @CDMalesic.