Social Director: Enhancing the Value of Twitter for 2012

Topics: Epic Poker League, Social Director, Twitter

It is a natural process at the beginning of each year to reflect on the year that just passed and make some goals and adjustments moving forward. The Social Director suggests you do the same with your involvement on Twitter. Twitter continues to grow in importance and popularity. For instance, New Year’s Eve saw a 160% increase over last year, from 6,266 posts per second to 16,197 posts per second. How did you find your Twitter experience in 2011? If your Twitter experience wasn’t a positive or satisfactory one, maybe it’s time to make some adjustments moving forward.

Quality over quantity - Although it’s highly likely that your overall followers are up significantly where they were at this time last year, it may be time to cull the herd some. Manageflitter or Friendorfollow are two programs that help you examine your followers to see who is following you, influenced by you, or interacting with you. You can find out who isn’t following your back or who are inactive. Despite the outer appearance of a higher number of followers, in the end analysis, you would rather have fewer followers who are actively engaged than a bunch of dead spamming porn follows.

Have your voice heard - I’m not telling you to whine and complain about every little issue you encounter in your life, but constructive venting has its merits. Companies are learning to fear your wrath more when you have reach than when you individually write in to complain. For instance, GoDaddy.com and Verizon have both recently changed company directions as a result of social-media influenced customer frustration with their policies. In the poker world, PokerStars reversed course on a proposed move to shift rake caps at their cash tables when customers voiced their displeasure on Twitter and on poker forums. Including a relevant #hashtag that some customer service individual might search can speed your complaint to the right individual who can respond.

Specials - More companies are using Twitter to offer special short-term promotions. I’ve noticed a few in the poker and sports fantasy world using their feeds to offers special entries to tournaments. Even if you aren’t actively tweeting, following your stream can reward your time investment by offering you specials and promotions you won’t find elsewhere.

Inform, don’t sell - We all get it, you would like to use your Twitter feed to promote yourself or various projects you care about. But the reality is your followers are very sensitive about the hard sell. If your feed doesn’t regularly offer things of value to them, they will not pay attention when you go about promoting yourself. Look to inform rather than directly sell.

Timing is everything - This is one I have difficulty with in that I tend to tweet impulsively. I may not be on for many hours then pop on and tweet a few times in a few minutes. If my followers aren’t all on at that same time they effectively miss all my tweeting output. If you schedule your tweets through a program like BufferApp, you can spread out your tweets throughout the day, factoring in the times when your followers are most likely to view them. The one downside is that you may not be online at that time to respond quickly if you do get responses.

Pics and links trump text - While Twitter is a 140-character text exchange forum, the most popular tweets typically contain links to pictures you share or to interesting content. Invest some time in taking some interesting photos on your smart phone, upload them via TweetDeck or some other program to share with your followers. The more valuable and interesting content you share, the more loyal your followers will become and the more rapidly they will engage with you.

Keep it fresh - My last recommendation to improve your 2012 Twitter experience is to keep it fresh. I took a few minutes the other day to unfollow a few people whose contributions felt stale or unimportant to me. I have some different priorities and interests moving forward in 2012 and I found some new feeds to follow to give my timeline a fresher mix.

If your time spent on Twitter isn’t contributing to your life in some meaningful fashion, then make some adjustments so that it does. Twitter is growing as a social media and communications platform, so adapt your interaction so you can find value in the time you do spend on it. Twitter can contribute something different to each person, so find what you value and create your own community of feeds that contribute to your passions.