Question Roundup

May 21st, 2010

We’re breaking our format a little bit with this post. In the course of writing articles for the blog on our main site, we end up answering a lot of questions that are probably also of interest to our readers over here. So below are some of the questions that we answer over there:

What’s the difference between a fan page and a group on Facebook?
The answer is it depends on your needs, but in most cases there’s a clear favorite.

What do I put on my Facebook page for my business?
There’s a lot you can do, and we break it down into easily digestible pieces.

How do I get people to read my blog?
Here are some basic tips for building a following.

How do I get my picture to show up next to my comment on a blog?
One word: Gravatar.

How can I use Twitter to increase sales?
If you’re new to Twitter, this short post will help you wrap your brain around it.

How can I use Flickr to grow my business?
Flickr does not allow sales pitches on their site, but there are things you can do that are win-wins for you and Flickr.

How can I use LinkedIn for my business?
LinkedIn is more than just a network of online resumes, and here’s how you can tap into it.

Where does social media fit into my overall marketing strategy?
If you’re a visual person, you’ll like these slides from a presentation on that very topic.

Have a question related to social media or blogging that we didn’t cover here? Fire away.

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What is the best time of day to tweet?

June 26th, 2009

What is the best time of day to tweet?
- automotive sales

When you post a message on Twitter will have a lot to do with how many people see it.  Post at midnight, and not many people are on their computers.  By the time they get on the next morning, your tweet has been buried by all the new messages that have been added since then.

Anecdotally, I find the best times to be first thing in the morning, around lunch, and right before the end of the day.  In the morning people are checking their email, RSS feeds, and social media before they get started for the day.  Lunch is a breaking point in the workday where people can stop what they are working on and check back in to see what’s happening on Twitter.  At the end of the day, there’s often few minutes to kill where it doesn’t make sense to start some new block of work that you won’t get very far into.  What’s great for killing a few minutes?  Twitter!

None of that is based on numbers, though.  ClarityWEB over in the UK did a little research on tweeting at different times of day.  The results show that globally the most traffic occurs around lunchtime in the U.S.  Based on that information you could decide that is when most people are on Twitter, and that’s when you should Tweet.  That’s not a bad approach.  I would point out, though, that some people may log in and read their Twitter account without posting a tweet themselves.  I don’t think that activity is figured into the data from ClarityWEB.

In short, there’s no authoritative answer, but I would recommend tweeting during the work day.  That’s when the largest number of people are on their computer or movile devices and can easily check Twitter.

If you’re curious, here’s a graphic showing when @SilverSquare is tweeting created with a tool by Xefer:

Time of Day on Twitter for Raquel

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How can Twitter help in the promotional products industry?

June 18th, 2009

Can you provide suggestions on how Twitter could help in my industry with promotional products/branded merchandise?
- promotional products

There’s a couple good uses for Twitter that come to mind.  The first two are good for anybody, but the third suggestion below should be particularly useful for your industry.

1.) Run specials.  People are always looking for a deal.  Twitter is a channel that makes it very easy for your customers to get notice about time-sensitive discounts.  When your suppliers run a special on a particular item (or maybe even when they don’t) send an offer for that item to your followers on Twitter.  You’ll need to do this with some frequency so you can train your followers to look for these deals.

2.) Talk about key topics.  People do searches for tweets that talk abou the topics that interest them.  So talk about golf and golf courses.  The people finding your tweets will be people who are more likely to want branded golf supplies.

3.) Follow conferences.  South by South West is a huge music, movie, and tech conference that encourages people attending and talking about the conference on Twitter to include #sxsw in their tweets so that a simple search will return all of the dialogue about this conference.  Other conferences are following suit with their own unique versions of #sxsw.  Seek these out and follow the conversations about who had the best (and more importantly worst!) swag.  That’s a prospect list.

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