Digital Marketing

Don’t be terrified of Twitter

by Rob Osborne | Oct 16, 2016 | Digital Marketing, Social Media, Twitter

I hadn’t really warmed to Twitter until recently. Yes, I tweeted some content and followed people who followed me, but I wasn’t really focusing on Twitter as a social media channel for promoting Red Knight Solutions and my following was fairly small.

However, I was asked to do a session on Twitter at an Elite Digital Mastermind group recently so in preparation for that session I have been working on my Twitter presence and have been pleasantly surprised to see my Twitter follower count jump from 400 to over 515 in a week, which is a rise of over 25%, so I thought I’d share some details of what I have been doing so you can consider doing it too.

Changing my use of Twitter

The first change in practice I’ve made is Tweeting to people who follow me as I follow them back, rather than just pressing the follow button and leaving it at that. I had already used Crowdfire to send a message to each person as they followed me, but I now I type a quick thank you tweet to them. I’m spending quite a lot of time on trains at the moment so I normally do this whilst travelling – mobile signal permitting, of course.

I’ve also started using Social Jukebox to set up regular tweets. This comes with a jukebox full of quotes which I have left running and a jukebox that I am using to quote links to my site and other relevant digital marketing material – a link to this blog will be added very soon. I have also done some tweaking to the quotes jukebox, creating pictures for some of the quotes and adding them to the quotes in the jukebox and this will be an ongoing activity as I quite like the idea. I have also added some additional quotes from other sources – my next challenge is to make some quotes of my own that I think are worthy of sharing.

I am continuing to also tweet interesting and relevant links from digital marketing articles I find and have become more conscious of ensuring that I include Twitter as one of the places to share information, whereas before I mainly focused on Facebook.

These actions mean that the number of tweets I am making has increased considerably, which has also lead to more interaction with my followers.

Along with increased activity on Twitter, I have spent some time updating some of the company profile. I have updated the profile picture to use our new logo and I have also updated the header photo to include a picture of me. One thing I learnt when updating the profile picture was to ensure that you have the minimum height and width to 400 pixels. I was getting very frustrated initially as the logo picture I was using was 400 pixels wide but not that high and Twitter kept shrinking it. Once I set the background to be 400 x 400 pixels it all worked fine.

Learning Twitter the hard way

It’s not all been plain sailing though, as I experimented with linking Twitter to my personal Facebook page and on through to the Red Knight Solutions Facebook page and for a few days I was getting regular posts on my Facebook page from Tweet Jukebox. The good news was that some my friends had conversations about some of the quotes that were posted, but it didn’t feel right to me so I have turned that feature off.

Twitter Tools

A really useful tool within Twitter that I have just learnt about is the creation and use of lists. One of my biggest frustrations with Twitter has been that as the number of people you follow and who follow you grows, your timeline becomes really noisy. However, if you create lists of people you are really looking to keep a close eye on, such as clients, potential clients or major influencers in your field, you can use them to see just those you are interested in. This allows you to start using the tools on Twitter, such as likes, retweets and quoting tweets, focusing on those you have added to your lists.

I have mentioned a number of tools I have started using and the world of Twitter seems to have an abundance of tools and add-ons that you can use to make your Twitter experience better. Whilst doing research about Twitter tools I did come across this blog which lists over 90 useful Twitter tools. Please feel free to research them further and if you find any of them are useful please let me know.

If you would like help getting more out of Twitter or any other social media channel please get in contact with Red Knight Solutions by calling 02392 265725 and we would be happy to help you develop your digital marketing strategy and ensure it is making good use of Twitter.

Expressing your business – Digital marketing on the radio

by Rob Osborne | Aug 26, 2016 | Digital Marketing, Strategy

This week I appeared as a guest on the Business Express show on Express FM. I initially accepted the invitation out of curiosity, taking the opportunity to see behind the scenes of a radio station and getting experience of being in a radio studio. I have got so many benefits out of participating that I thought they would make a good blog post.

The first benefit has obviously been to satisfy my curiosity about how a radio show works and is produced. It was really interesting to see how it all works and as a bit of a techie geek at heart I was fascinated by all the equipment and how it’s all managed digitally.

The second and probably biggest benefit has been using the preparation for the show as an opportunity to really think about what I am doing and how I wanted to present this to listeners. It is very easy to lose sight of what you want to achieve in your business, but as part of the preparation was to provide some questions to help guide the show I was able to spend some time contemplating what I wanted to say and more importantly how and why. The only downside to this was that I forgot to get off the train at the station where I had left my car!!

The third benefit was that it took me outside of my comfort zone, as I wasn’t sure I would be able to speak for an hour about digital marketing or if there was a danger that I would waffle incoherently. I’m pleased to say that I have had some very good feedback from people who have listened to the show, so I want to say thank you to the Miles Henson who hosts the show as his very informative briefing before the show and off-air comments during the show were very helpful. This has helped me to stop procrastinating about an on-line mentoring service I have been planning to launch for a while, so keep watching this website or sign up to our newsletter for more information.

The fourth benefit has been that it has driven me to take some action on updating Red Knight Solutions website and it’s content, as I have sadly neglected it over the last few months and fallen into the trap of do as I say and not as I do. I have spent time updating content, adding new pages and planning my future blog posts, starting with this one. Although it’s not crammed with information about digital marketing it is a good place to start and I am now going to write a blog at least every two weeks. I will be monitoring how this helps with search engine optimisation and I am looking forward seeing an improvement in my search engine rankings.

Additional benefits are that participating in the show has boosted my confidence, raised Red Knight Solution’s profile on social media through posting about the show on Facebook and Twitter both before and after the show. The number of likes of the Red Knight Solutions Facebook page and the number of Twitter followers of Red Knight Solutions has increased and Google analytics shows that listeners were visiting our website after the show too.

Finally, I have been toying with the idea of writing a book about digital marketing for a while. I have signed up to Karen Williams 10,000 word challenge during August but haven’t got as far as I wanted, but as I announced on the show that I was writing a book and have now written it on this blog post I am now referring to myself as an author and will write my book.