Marketing on Twitter

I describe my own experience with marketing on Twitter as a blend of failing forward and learning by doing. I believed Twitter was an ideal platform for shamelessly self-promoting my own content, but in my early days online I had very little content of my own. I did the next best thing. I published sponsored tweets for an online ad agency. I could write the tweet content, and the tweets were automatically posted during times of high engagement. As pennies per click added up to hundreds of dollars, I learned valuable lessons about when to post and the best formats for tweets. Times have changed and Twitter's own sponsored tweet program has driven the agencies from the network. In fact, the appearance of the network is different. Instead of being a stream of text messages, timelines have become visual and tweets with images or video are most effective at capturing attention. I have learned to observe what others do to get ideas for my own projects.

Because big brands have marketing strategies that are not very relevant to small businesses, I have a tendency to visit their profiles, instead of following them, to look for information and promotions. Any business's well-managed social media profile is a place for sharing and discussing content (Ryan & Jones, 2009). However, the small businesses and organizations in my own timeline are a source of ideas and tactics I can model. It is especially beneficial for me to see their tweets in real time and in the context of online chatter. The most eye-catching tweets have "pictures worth 1000 words" and are crafted to complement the text of the tweet. I observe social listening practices to see how small brands engage users and see how hashtags are used for market targeting. Once again, I find myself failing forward and learning by doing as I promote my chicken sweater shop for an Etsy contest. With just one day into the project and just one brand image to promote, I am discovering that the more Twitter changes, the more it stays the same. It's going to take considerable work and patience to determine an actionable strategy to fit my purposes, but my belief that Twitter is a formidable marketing platform is still unwavering.

Reference

Ryan, D., & Jones, C. (2009). Understanding digital marketing: Marketing strategies for engaging    

     the digital generation. [Books24x7 version] Retrieved from

     http://common.books24x7.com.ezproxy.snhu.edu/toc.aspx?bookid=31037

My Moving Experience... Part I

The house where I had been living had a certain je ne sais quoi from before the time when I moved in more than two years ago. For more than twenty years, every resident who moved out filled up the dumpster on the way out. What a curiosity, right?

It didn't take long after moving in to begin to understand why. I've lived in old houses for most of my adult life and never had negative experiences. My luck completely changed. A variety of toxic conditions took a terrible toll on my health, including impacting my ability to walk.

Drastic action was required and I joined the ranks of former tenants who discarded significant worldly goods on the way to a healthier future. I snapped a quick pic of my first dumpster load from the kitchen window. It was too physically taxing at that point to even go outdoors and capture a better image. I filled the dumpster a second time. I only kept things that were well-protected from the environment in the building the whole time, which included my Etsy shop merchandise and supplies, art supplies and tools, my clothing, my kitchen equipment and tools, a couple of small pieces of furniture, and a few precious personal items.

I did have a plan in the beginning of the move and was as well-prepared as I possibly could be. Since I had lived in my neighborhood since 1989 and didn't have a good idea of where else I would want to live, I was going to live in a temporary place for awhile. However, at the last minute, my friend reneged on the room, leaving me the choice of living on the street or checking into a hotel.

To be perfectly fair to the person who was helping me move everything I had left from my life into storage, I let him choose the general location of the hotel for convenience, since there was more work to do after that apartment had been vacated. I made the final choice of hotel after seeing the selection on Shadeland Avenue. You have to understand that I have only spent a maximum of two hours total on Shadeland Avenue in the whole 35 years I have lived in Indianapolis.

Then, the most unexpected thing happened after I became isolated in an unfamiliar place. The person who was helping me with moving and transportation unexpectedly abandoned the responsibility. That left me stuck worse than I have ever been stuck as I helplessly watched the hotel room rate erode my moving fund.

I found irony in the situation, though. It was fascinating that a decision that I made to improve my overall situation put me in another precarious situation. It was a different sort of bad situation, because of the extreme financial instability. I was living the truth of that out-of-the-frying-pan-and-into-the-fire adage. On the other hand, almost immediately, after being in the clean environment of the hotel, my sleep and digestion patterns had become more normal after two years of disruption. My suspicions were being supported, but I still have a long way to go until I completely recover from living in a toxic place. And, to make matters worse, there is nowhere to call home.

[P]interest[ing] Observations

Having a short hiatus from my everyday life provides the opportunity to evaluate how I use social media for promoting my Etsy shops as well as how I share other elements of my personal brand. In the beginning,when the Internet was new to me, I believed I had to use all of the social media without really knowing much about social media at all. So, not surprisingly, I jumped at the opportunity to be a beta-tester for Pinterest. I created a profile, but didn't do much with it for years. More than one year ago, I discovered that the target market for my Etsy business closely mirrored the overall demographics of Pinterest. I, therefore, decided to explore that site with fresh eyes. Through the years I have experienced delightful personal engagement on a variety of social networking sites, but the interaction has done little to advance my personal projects or to be measurable in profit. To be effective for social business, engagement is essential to inspire collaboration between business and customers in a variety of combinations. So, as one of my social media marketing strategy course textbooks stated so well, I decided "to fish where fish are and not where I wish they were" (Evans, 2010).

Building an engaged network took longer than I had expected. The task involved creating boards that reflected my business and personal interests. I then found content that related exactly to my interests and pinned it to my boards. I kept calm and pinned on, day after day. I pinned dozens, and sometimes hundreds, of pieces of content every day. The idea was to aggregate content that would be interesting to my target market. That meant I had to be selective about the users I followed to make sure my choices for shareable content perfectly reflected my taste and creative aesthetic. As much as I might like a particular user or brand, I will only follow the account if the content relates to me. I can always visit profiles and individual boards for specific information. Avoiding clutter in my own feed reduced distraction and increased productivity. Minutes matter when there is massive pinning to do.

It's true. If you build it, they do come. Once my network was up and running like a well-oiled perpetual motion machine with 10,000 followers, I switched my personal account to a business account and began inserting my own content intermittently to gauge my followers' reactions. I now have more than 15,000 followers and that number increases daily.  Happily, my content has proven to be a good fit with my carefully nurtured followers who interact with it at the same rate as content from other sources. People click through to my shops and sales are made.

Once engagement is established, a Pinterest network grows effortlessly. Content is shared effortlessly, too. Pinned content has eternal life, never falling into oblivion at the depths of news feeds like other social networks. Pins circulate, whether or not I am actively pinning. It is simply magical.  The theory has been tested and proven, but there is still work to do. As I look forward to reopening my Etsy shops soon, the goal is to make content even more convenient for others to share. I am also exploring methods to create even more eye-catching promotional pins for my content for posting directly on Pinterest or to be shared to Pinterest from other social networks. The only disappointment is that Pinterest engagement doesn't enhance social influence scores. However, a better "social network fit" is leading to purchases and making online success finally measurable in profit.

Reference

Evans, D. (2010). Social media marketing: the next generation of business engagement. [Books24x7 

     version] Retrieved from

     http://common.books24x7.com.ezproxy.snhu.edu/toc.aspx?bookid=41104.