Twitter

The 4 Stages of Twitter Adoption (Infographic)

Are you guilty of these Twitter turn-offs?

This handy infographic designed by DK New Media presents data supplied by eConsultance from a ‘TwitPoll’ about why Twitter users opt out of wanting to know news and views from other Twitter users.

The number one reason people unfollow accounts on Twitter is too much tweeting, followed by too much self-promotion. Other turn-offs include infrequent/ no tweets from an account, boring tweets, or too much repetition.

Tweet For A Cause: How To Fundraise with Twitter

PayPal meets Twitter with Chirpify, Twitter’s commerce platform.

Designed for small businesses and musicians to sell their products, Chirpify also has good potential for non profits to raise funds. Here’s how it works:

Tweet a request for donations via Chirpify.com.
Followers reply to your Tweet or Retweets with the word “donate.”
Donors and your organization receive receipts via email and DM (direct message)

The main advantages I can see to using this service for fundraising are its speed and ease of use (Twitter users can donate to your organization, cause or campaign with one simple “@” reply); your ability to schedule tweets at different times of day using a platform like Hootsuite or Buffer (do advance research into best times to tweet) and the social aspect of Twitter (users more likely to retweet your call for donations, and/or that they donated to your cause).

Twitter users are often on-the-go, accessing their account from mobile devices. You can see the advantage of being able to act on your fundraising request, with one simple click, without having to leave the Twitter app and go through a multiple step sign-up process. As an added advantage, they will receive an instant DM to acknowledge their donation.

Immediate and secure payment

Chirpify transforms your Tweets into transactions. When someone donates to you on Twitter, Chirpify automatically triggers a PayPal transaction between your account and the donors. Your donation appears in your account immediately.

As Chirpify is integrated with the PayPal platform, you have the guarantee of PayPal protection and a process for resolving payment problems.

How much does it cost?

For fundraising accounts there is a flat 4% commission fee which also gives you unlimited tweets and your own fundraising page.
Full details at http://chirpify.com

How to leverage yourself as an expert with social media (infographic)

The business consultant network Zintro pulled research from more than a dozen sources including Mashable, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google and Quantcast to put together this infographic, which will help you figure out which social network is best suited to your social media strategy.

Although a lot of this information may not be new to you, I love the at-a-glance way of seeing the different ways in which social media platforms function. I also see it as a great presentation tool to introduce new clients to the wonderful world of social media.

How to bring your on and off line audience together

2011 has been a great year for conferences. I’ve attended more meetings this year than I have done in the past few years combined and it’s all thanks to social media. Some of these meetings, I’ve been physically present at, but equally I’ve been able to take part virtually through using social media tools.

Not all of your target audience can physically attend your events – it might be logistically awkward for them, or work and family commitments may prevent them from going along. But that’s no reason for them to miss out, nor is it a reason for you to miss their input. Here are two ways to bring your on and off-line supporters together at your next event.

1. Twitter

Set up a twitter hashtag for your event and encourage attendees to tweet live from the event. I see this working to great effect when I attend conferences – people love to tweet highlights of talks, photos of those present, the room, the speakers, everything they can. It creates a dynamic feel to your event. Your off-line audience get to follow along with the talks and the conversation and they can join in too by tweeting their own questions and comments (using the same hashtag). They can also join in at anytime online by doing a twitter hashtag search. Assign someone from your event management team to curate the twitter conversation using a tool such as storify, which makes no distinction between who is attending in-person and who is there virtually.

2. Live Streaming

Using UStream or another live streaming site you can stream your event live and even let off-line viewers take part with their questions and comments. At the recent Bloggers International forum which I took part in, the organisers used UStream to great effect. Also at this event, organisers ran spot prizes specifically for off-line viewers and those following along on Twitter. They were asked a question and tweeted their answer and the correct answer won a prize. This could easily be adapted for an online auction for your next charity fundraising event.

Do you attend events off-line? What works for you if you do? Can you suggest other ways of bringing on and off-line audiences together?

10 Social Media Conference Tips Every Business Needs To Grow

How To Apply Social To Conferences

What is an octothorpe and why should you care?

And now for your starter for ten.

What is an octothorpe?

The following definition comes from the World Wide Words website

Octothorpe is just one of a plethora of names for the symbol # In the US it’s often called the pound key, because it has long been used to mark numbers related to weight, or for similar reasons the number sign, which is also one of its internationally agreed names. Elsewhere it is commonly called hash, a term dating from the 1970s that may have been a popular misunderstanding of hatch.

So now you know if this question ever comes up in a pub quiz!

But more immediately why should you care about octothorpes or in Twitter parlance, hashtags?

A hashtag is a keyword marked by the # symbol in front of it. When you click on the hashtag it is hyperlinked to all other tweets using that tag, so it is a handy way to categorize tags and connect with others interested in the same topic.

Here is one on my own Twitter timeline for #bcsm (breast cancer social media) which represents an ongoing conversation on Twitter within the breast cancer community.Twitter really comes into its own when it draws interested parties together in a real-time virtual conversation this way and hashtags facilitate the conversation.

I also use hashtags to curate an event, either by building a story on storify (more about that in an upcoming post) or to look back after the event on what people have been tweeting. It is also a useful tool during the event to see who is there that you might like to network with – simply search the hashtags to see who is present and tweeting from the event. This has worked very well for me at several recent events. Furthermore if I can’t attend an event in person, I can follow along on the conversation through the hashtags. It is also a great way to connect on and off line attendees and create a buzz around your event offline.

This is just a simple overview of hashtags for Twitter newbies, and I hope it has demystified the octothorpe for you. So now, get tweeting and don’t forget those hashtags – who knows you may even start to trend if enough people tweet with your tags.

Happy Tweeting!

The what, why and when of the Irish internet user

The results are in

According to a new poll from Bacardi, the average Irish internet user spends 8 hours a week on social media, while those in the 18-24 bracket are spending 11 hours weekly on sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Of the 1,470 adults surveyed, nearly a quarter of all social media users (23pc) spend between 10-24 hours on social networks each week followed by 12pc, who spend more than 25 hours a week.

When is the best time to target these users?

The Bacardi Together Poll finds that 50pc of internet users check emails, text messages or social media sites last thing at night and 49pc do so first thing in the morning.

Why do they go online?

Of those who are using social media, 66pc said they do so to keep up-to-date with what is happening with their friends and acquaintances. And 90pc of 18-24-year-olds said they use social media for co-ordinating social events.

Why do they not go online?

The top reason is privacy, with 66pc of those who don’t use social media saying “it doesn’t offer privacy, I don’t want to share myself online”.

Fifty-nine per cent of those who don’t use social networking sites said “there is no replacement for face-to-face meetings”

41pc said they consider social media to be a waste of time.

Source: Businessandleadership.com

The digital transformation of healthcare

In recent years, social networking services like Facebook and Twitter have affected many sectors of the global healthcare industry, from doctor-patient communication to medical research to hospital management. I have just registered for a webinar which will explore the implications of social networking technology for the future of medicine

Topics will include

How patients are using social networks to learn more about their conditions and seek treatment information
Crowdsourcing medical research: how social networks can facilitate data collection.
The networked care center: how social media is changing hospital management.
How healthcare professionals can manage social media risk.

You can register online for this webinar at HealthWorks Collective

A simple guide to online marketing terms

Have you ever found yourself at a meeting in the company of tech savvy colleagues who are speaking a language you do not understand? Every industry has its jargon but perhaps you felt you would appear foolish if you asked what the terms that were bandied about meant.

In their book The Nonprofit Marketing Guide: High-Impact, Low-Cost Ways to Build Support for Your Good Cause, authors, Miller and Andresen provide a helpful glossary of common marketing terms, explained in simple plain language.

And here are some of those terms explained in plain English – so no more wondering what is being talked about anymore.

Your simple guide to online marketing terms

Analytics. Statistics generated about visitors to a website or readers of an email. Analytics can help track what pages visitors look at, what links they click on, and how they found the site.

Anchor Text. Also called link text. The text on a website or in an email that when clicked on, takes you to another place on that page or on the Internet. Anchor text is usually underlined.

Domain Registrar. A company that manages the registration of Internet domain names. Your domain registrar and web host may or may not be the same company.

HTML. Stands for Hyper Text Markup Language. It is made up of various codes that are surrounded by angle brackets < >.Web browsers (like Internet Explorer or Firefox) read HTML and then display it as web pages. The same code is used to create HTML emails (emails with colors, fonts, images, etc.).

Keywords. The specific terms (single words and phrases) used by someone searching for something on the Internet. By knowing the keywords that best describe your organization and its work, you can track mentions of those words on the Internet. You can also use those words on your own website, so that search engines will associate your website with those topics.

Long-tail, Long-tail keywords. Typically phrases with three or more words that are much more specific versions of your keywords. For example, if one of your keywords is “homeless shelter” then “homeless shelter for families” and “homeless shelter New York City” would be examples of long-tail keywords.

Microsites. Mini-websites, with their own domain names, that are often created for specific campaigns. They can be independent websites or part of a larger site.

Permalinks. A direct link to a specific blog post or forum entry.

Redirect. When someone types in one website address and is automatically taken to another website address. For example, you can redirect someone who types “yoursite.com” to “yoursite.org” if you own both domain names and your main site is the .org.

Retweet. Forwarding someone else’s tweet (an update on Twitter) to your own Twitter followers.

RSS. “Real Simple Syndication” is a way for websites that are updated frequently such as blogs or news sites to send new content automatically to subscribers. Readers of these types of sites subscribe and then receive updates to their RSS reader or email box, instead of having to check all the different sites all the time.

Search Engine Optimization. Improving the quality of your website so that search engines rank it highly on their search engine results pages when people search on your keywords.

Search Engine Rankings. How results of a web search are ordered. The most relevant websites should appear toward the top of the list. Sites are ranked according to a complex formula that includes how keywords are used on the site and how many other related websites link to the site.

Tags. Descriptive keywords used to categorize an article, such as a blog entry. Tagging can help the entry be found more easily by both people and search engines.

URL. A web page’s address. Stands for Uniform Resource Locator. http://www.nonprofitmarketingguide.com is a URL.

Web 2.0. The second generation of the World Wide Web, which includes many more tools for online conversation and collaboration (social media).

Web Hosting. The storing of the pages of your website on a computer server owned by the hosting company. The web host then makes the pages available to Internet users. Your web host and your domain registrar may or may not be the same company.

I hope you find this list helpful and please do let me know in the comments if you would like any of these terms or other online terms explained in more depth in future posts.

Social Media Marketing for Non-Profits