Windsor Training: facebook

Showing posts with label facebook. Show all posts

Friday, 12 December 2014

Please #Like Me Today

How do we get someone to like what we are doing on social media? Is it the same in person as it is on social media or is there something else going on?

We all want to be liked, unless, of course, you are the Grinch or Kevin O’Leary on Shark Tank! But even they, or so we’d like to believe, use their abrasive and unlovable characters as a shield to the liking and approval that they really crave (yeh, right!).

The ‘like’ has become an important element of social media and it has evolved to signify, not just approval, but the fact that someone is viewing and engaging with our content, whether shared or authored. More importantly, it is a reasonable indicator that it is being read, whether fully or in part, and so it is also a useful metric as to whether your social media content is hitting the right audience.

Thumbs up

It is interesting that the iconography of liking is the ‘thumbs up’ symbol: it comes from the gladiatorial arena, where the thumbs down was considered to be the signal that the victor was being given the assent to dispatch the losing combatant. Some controversy surrounds the idea that the thumbs up, by default, meant that the loser was being granted life, but popular cinema has embraced that idea and so has wider society and particularly the world of social media.

In some non-Western societies, however, the thumbs up varies from being offensive to positively vulgar. Nevertheless, the thumbs up seems here to stay and represents the fact that I virtually like what you have done or shared, regardless of its real origin or meaning.

What does the giver get out of it?

Posts and articles that are somewhat controversial seem to get lots of views and generate plenty of comments, but encourage fewer likes. Slightly more upbeat and positive messages seem to be more likely to encourage the reader to hit ‘like’.

The passive act of liking

It is evident, however, that some followers will like your content without venturing further than the headline and the brief segment that appears on the timeline. It would seem that the motivation of the latter may be in generating attention to their own content and profile, which is another strategy altogether.

What does the receiver get?

Perhaps, to get slightly psychoanalytical for a moment - on the premise that ‘you are what you share’ on social media - so we also take it as personal validation and acceptance of who we are. Getting liked makes us feel good about ourselves and our place in this virtual world of social media amongst a global audience of connections and followers - the overwhelming majority of whom we will never meet in person. But I think I am getting too deep here and this is a post for another day.

"Likes bring attention to what we are sharing"

Ultimately, likes bring attention to what we are sharing. The author sees their viewings increase and this leads to an upward spiral of further likes and comments, which on LinkedIn will flag your content as interesting and relevant and should then see it picked up by the algorithms, from where we see it promoted more widely on Pulse and featured in various channels. This leads onto a virtuous upward spiral of likes, comments and shares, until that post, which was originally read by a few of your regular followers, has now circled the globe to a worldwide audience.

How do I get more likes?

These are my recommendations for getting more likes:

Stay away from controversy – write about things that make people feel good about themselves or that help them to achieve their goals. Controversial subjects may make for interesting reading and if it is comments you are after, you will probably generate more of these, rather than likes.
Give the reader a call to action – ask them a question and invite their views on what you have been talking about. Engagement spans the passive to the active and so the more they are encouraged to respond, the more they will probably give you a thumbs up.
Post regularly – if you develop a regular readership of followers, they will develop a predisposition to like and approve of your writing and your viewpoint. These fans will provide the early likes that will propel you up the virtuous cycle of likes, comments and shares.
Share-ability - does the content have currency in terms of addressing a topic that is currently hot, trending, and worthy of sharing with your fellow connections? Is it something that you might share with your followers if you chanced upon it in your timeline?
Tap into personal experience or expertise - followers like to feel that you are sharing something that has come from your personal experience or expertise, so if you can relate the points that you are making to anecdotes and stories, then the more your readers may relate to what you are saying and like the message.

Or failing that, try and post a desperate attention-grabbing headline asking for people to, "Please Like Me Today?"

Will Trevor is the Founder and Training Consultant at Windsor Training. Please click 'Follow' if you would like to hear more from Will in the future. Feel free to also connect via his Linkedin page, or via Twitter and Facebook or email: will.trevor@windsortraining.net

Why Do your Contacts Stop Following You on Social Media?

This article looks at 7 reasons why you might be losing followers on social media, such as LinkedIn, and asks whether you should be worried about it and what you can do about it if you are

Parents and psychologists will tell you that children can be seriously traumatized by being 'unfriended' on Facebook, or other social media, and the word has even passed into the dictionary to signify an abrupt cessation of friendship. Whilst as businesses we might not need counselling for our separation anxiety over the loss of a contact, we do need to consider how and why it is happening and whether we need to do something about it.

Sometimes you're up, sometimes your down

With a large number of connections and followers, I do notice that on a daily basis there can be some fluctuation in the numbers, most of the time it is in the upwards direction, but sometimes you spot that you've lost one. In Twitter it's easy to spot, because applications such as JustUnfollow allow you to track this, but it is less easy to identify on LinkedIn, unless you have a small number of contacts and you know who they are.

So what are the 7 reasons why we sometimes lose followers?

My focus here is on the individual LinkedIn or Twitter account, rather than the large corporate social media machine:

#1: 'Over-sharing'

This is the social media equivalent of "too much information"! 'We are what we share' and people will make judgements about us as a connection, by the type and quality of things that we 'like' and distribute on social media. Over-sharing has entered the lexicon as suggesting we are distributing too much stuff that is not relevant to all or some of our contacts. Some contacts will take exception to what they judge to be 'over-sharing' and unfollow you as a result.

#2: Inappropriate Sharing

Some of your contacts will have a fairly fixed perception that LinkedIn, for example, is a business social platform and if you share too many amusing pictures or you ask them too many times to 'solve this if you are a genius', then they may actually reciprocate by un-following you.

#3: Follow/Unfollow

This is specific to Twitter and it's a conscious strategy to build a large following by avoiding the platform's follower limits and encouraging contacts to follow them, by following you first and then un-following you later. It's a brutal, but sometimes effective strategy, for those who want to build a list of connections fast and they're not bothered how they do. You can often spot the follow-unfollow practitioners by the fact that they start following you and yet they have a disproportionately large number of followers compared to the number they themselves are following. Do you follow?

#4: Open/Closed Network Ethos

Open networkers tend to view social sharing as something that is beneficial with as large and diverse a group of contacts as possible. The trade-off is that you may receive postings and messages that aren't entirely relevant to you, but you accept that as part of the territory. Closed networkers, on the other hand, tend to view their social networks as part of their inner circle and they are less tolerant of accepting invites from people they don't know or receiving messages that they feel are irrelevant to them.

#5: "Spring Cleaning"

You may simply lose followers because they have closed their account, moved to another job and can't access their old profile, or they've passed away, or even ceased to see social media as relevant to them. It's inevitable, so I wouldn't worry about it.

#6: You've upset them somehow

You remember that guy from the office whose name you can't quite remember and who you ignored at the Christmas party, well now he's getting his own back in the only passive-aggressive way he he knows how. And, you know what, he secretly hopes you'll notice too! Don't worry about it.

#7: You're a Spammer!

Probably one of the most heinous and unforgivable crimes that anyone is capable of on the Internet: sending large volumes of unwanted and unrequested posts, messages, or emails, without the consent and permission of your contact. Expect to be unfollowed if you do this! However, what constitutes spamming, can be interpreted fairly broadly and you may find that one person's spammer is another's beneficial sharer.

Should you be worried?

If you are actually haemorrhaging followers, then you have got a serious problem and you need to do something drastic, but chances are that you might be engaged in #7, so you are getting what you deserve! The numbers you will lose from #5 'Spring Cleaning' and #6 'because you have upset someone' - unless you make a habit of it - should be mercifully small.

If you lose someone because they have more of a #4 'closed network ethos', then you may have overstepped the mark and they've unfollowed you as a result. On Twitter, #3 'follow/unfollow' practitioners can be spotted very easily by looking at the follower-following ratio and it's only a problem if you are particularly bothered by it.

The 'Sin of Over-sharing'

Finally, there is 'oversharing' and sharing inappropriate content. This, however, boils down to the basic truism of marketing: 'know your audience'. If you have a range of contacts with whom you are familiar and you know that they like the amusing stories and the pictures that you send, then there's no harm, unless you've judged it wrong and they're heading for the exit! 'Oversharing' is another subjective judgement and it's almost a polite way of saying that you think someone is a spammer. If they really are uninterested in the content that you are sharing and, providing it is appropriate and not excessive, then they may have very little relevance as a connection anyway and may not be such a great loss.

What can I do about it?

So if you are worried by it, here's 5 Golden Rules that might just save you from being 'Billy-no-Mates' on social media:

Know your audience and share what you and they like.
Don't treat it as a one-way street - engage with the content of your connections, as you would expect them to engage with yours.
Expect that you will lose some contacts, because it's inevitable, but don't become obsessed by trying to find out who they are or why they've done it, because you'll just go crazy!
Try and keep the amusing stuff, and the mathematical conundrums, to a minimum and largely for Facebook!
Accept that social media is about 'give and take' and use it to further your contacts, but remember to help others and you'll be surprised how willing others will be to help you, which is what networking is all about.

Tuesday, 7 October 2014

"As You Like It": Getting Liked on Social Media

How do we get someone to like what we are doing on social media? Is it the same in person as it is on social media or is there something else going on?

We all want to be liked, unless, of course, you are the Grinch or Kevin O’Leary on Shark Tank! But even they, or so we’d like to believe, use their abrasive and unlovable characters as a shield to the liking and approval that they really crave. The ‘like’ has become an important element of social media and it has evolved to signify, not just approval, but the fact that someone is viewing and engaging with our content, whether shared or authored. More importantly, it is a reasonable indicator that it is being read, whether fully or in part, and so it is also a useful metric as to whether your social media content is hitting the right audience.

Thumbs up

It is interesting that the iconography of liking is the ‘thumbs up’ symbol. It comes from the gladiatorial arena, where the thumbs down was considered to be the signal that the victor was being given the assent to dispatch the losing combatant. Some controversy surrounds the idea that the thumbs up, by default, meant that the loser was being granted life, but popular cinema has embraced that idea and so has wider society and particularly the world of social media. In some non-Western societies, however, the thumbs up varies from being offensive to positively vulgar. Nevertheless, the thumbs up seems here to stay and represents the fact that I virtually like what you have done or shared, regardless of its real origin or meaning.

What does the giver get out of it?

The giver, for want of a better term, is expressing their approval for the content that you produced or for something that you shared. It is also seems to be some form of agreement, because the giver is more likely to hit that ‘like’ button, if you have provided something that accords with their own pre-existing viewpoint or that they agreed with having read it. My evidence is anecdotal, albeit based upon my own experience, but posts and articles that are somewhat controversial seem to get lots of views and generate plenty of comments, but encourage fewer likes. Slightly more upbeat and positive messages seem to be more likely to encourage the reader to hit ‘like’.

The passive act of liking

Beyond just viewing the post on LinkedIn, liking is the most passive act in terms of responding to a post. Nevertheless, it does flag up on your timeline, and that of your connections and followers, and so it is a form of recommendation and in practice it plays a similar role to actually sharing the article. It is evident, however, that some followers will like your content without venturing further than the headline and the brief segment that appears on the timeline. It would seem that the motivation of the latter is in generating attention to their own content and profile, which is another strategy all together.

What does the receiver get?

Perhaps, to get slightly psychoanalytical for a moment - on the premise that ‘you are what you share’ on social media - we also take it as personal validation and acceptance of who we are. Getting liked makes us feel good about ourselves and our place in this virtual world of social media amongst a global audience of connections and followers, the vast majority of whom we will never meet in person. But I think I am getting too deep here and this is a post for another day.

"Likes bring attention to what we are sharing"

Likes bring attention to what we are sharing. The author sees their viewings increase and this leads to an upward spiral of likes and comments, which on LinkedIn will flag your content as interesting and relevant and should then see it picked up by the algorithms, from where we see it promoted more widely on Pulse. This leads onto a virtuous upward spiral of likes, comments and shares, until that post, which was originally read by a few of your regular followers, has now circled the globe to a worldwide audience.

How do I get more likes?

Mathematically it would be interesting to see what the correlation is between the number of views and the corresponding number of likes: logically the more views you get, the more likes! But that doesn’t help us. These are my recommendations for getting more likes:

Stay away from controversy – write about things that make people feel good about themselves or that help them to achieve their goals. Controversial subjects may make for interesting reading and if it is comments you are after, you will probably generate more of these, rather than likes.
Give the reader a call to action – ask them a question and invite their views on what you have been talking about. Engagement spans the passive to the active and so the more they are encouraged to respond, the more they will probably give you a thumbs up.
Post regularly – if you develop a regular readership of followers, they will develop a predisposition to like and approve of your writing and your viewpoint. These fans will provide the early likes that will propel you up the virtuous cycle of likes, comments and shares.
Share-ability - does the content have currency in terms of addressing a topic that is currently hot and worthy of sharing with your fellow connections. Is it something that you might share with your followers if you chanced upon it in your timeline?
Tap into personal experience or expertise - followers like to feel that you are sharing something that has come from your personal experience or expertise, so if you can relate the points that you are making to anecdotes and stories, then the more your readers may relate to what you are saying and like the message.

If you've liked what I have written, well, you know what to do! Otherwise, what is it that makes you like something that you have seen or read on LinkedIn?

Written by Will Trevor, Founder and Training Consultant for Windsor Training: will.trevor@windsortraining.net

Picture Credit: By Mark McArdle from Canada (Fernando Alonso) [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0) or CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Monday, 22 September 2014

5 Marketing Lessons of the Ice Bucket Challenge

Few could have predicted how swiftly the ALS Ice Bucket challenge would go viral. The way that it spread must have been beyond the wildest imaginings of the ALS marketing team. If you have checked your Twitter feed or your Facebook timeline over the summer, then you cannot fail to have noticed that many of your connections will have been sitting in their gardens, backyards, or workplaces and then having buckets of iced water unceremoniously tipped over their heads, as if some kind of mass mania had gripped the planet. The act was then shared via social media and some further unwitting friends are then nominated to pick up the baton.

A Marketing Phenomenon

For those of you who may have missed it, the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge has seen celebrities – from Bill Gates to Mark Zuckerberg - and individuals pouring buckets of ice over their heads for the sake of the ALS charity and then nominating others to take on the feat. analysed how the Challenge went viral and they calculated that between June 1 and August 17, over 28 million people joined the conversation and 2.4 million videos were shared on the social networking site alone related to the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. Within a matter of days, the phenomenon had gone global, with challenges witnessed in many countries other countries.

A Textbook Case

The campaign was intended to raise awareness of Amyothrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), which is otherwise known as “Lou Gehrig’s Disease” – a little-known disease that causes the deterioration of nerve cells, leading to paralysis and death. “Little-known”, that is, until now. Marketing textbooks are probably now being written, or even re-written, with the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge as a case study in the successful use of cause-related social media marketing campaign, but why has it been so successful and what can we learn from it?

"Emotion, challenge and social currency"

Wharton University's Professor of Marketing, Jonah Berger, has suggested that, “[w]ith its combination of emotion, challenge and social currency, the campaign has become something of a marketing phenomenon.” Berger is an expert on social media and he has written extensively on why things go viral and the effects of word-of-mouth. Berger also described the Challenge as a form of social contagion, “[p]eople don’t want to be left out. Anytime you’re at a cocktail party and someone is talking about something, whether it’s a brand or a new band, … you don’t want to be the only person in the group who has no idea what they’re talking about.” This taps into a basic human emotion and need for belonging. Berger also believes that it succeeded because it is representing a worthy cause, so there is little that people can object to in terms of its message and call to action.

5 Social Media Marketing Lessons from the Ice Bucket Challenge

What are the five lessons that we can take from the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge?

Timing – it came during the summer months, meaning that people had time to participate and lighter evenings enabled people to take part, whereas the nature of the challenge would have precluded participation during the cold winter months. Thus the planning and execution of the campaign was vital to ensure that the timetable allowed it to spread virally from early spring into summer.
Simple – there was no requirement for complicated equipment, instead it could be attempted by nothing more than someone with a bucket, some cold water, and a smartphone and friend in order to record the event for posting on social media.
Social – the challenge passed amongst friends and relatives in a genuinely word-of-mouth style, precisely because it was so personal. We associated with the people doing it and we also connected with their often personal reasons for doing it, both serious and frivolous. This is the 'social currency' that Berger is talking about.
Celebrity – the challenge has also passed amongst a number of high-profile celebrities, such as Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates, and this always helps to give a social media campaign velocity, particularly when they start spreading the challenge socially themselves, as was the case here.
Challenge – the Challenge tapped into the desire to have credibility in the eyes of your peers, but also the need to avoid shame, if you were not seen to take up the baton and take part when you had been nominated. People embraced the sense of challenge inherent in it.

Written by Will Trevor, Founder and Training Consultant at Windsor Training

Email: will.trevor@windsortraining.net

Picture Credit: By Rauglothgor (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Wednesday, 6 August 2014

"Follow, follow, follow the Yellow Brick Road ..."

Who are our social media followers?

Dorothy assembles her motley crew of
followers along the Yellow Brick Road

Just like Dorothy on her odyssey along the Yellow Brick Road, we all want to have followers, whether it is our Facebook page or our LinkedIn profile. Social media has spawned the age of the follower and the need for everyone to show that they have a large following in business or personally. Numerous blog posts and articles loudly proclaim ’10 Ways to increase your Twitter followers’ or ‘How to drastically increase your Twitter followers’, offering tips and techniques to increase your follower numbers. Most of the techniques are valid and usually ethical, but there are

plenty of sites and Twitter accounts out there that offer to increase your followers through less reputable means (see ‘Fake Followers’ below).

Some of the largest Twitter followings belong to celebrities, such as Katy Perry and Adele, whereas the brands that have some of the highest corporate following are the accounts of Starbucks and Samsung. Recently I was keen to add to the followers on my Twitter account for Windsor Training, @windsortrain and in the process I started to wonder about who followers are and what might their motivations be? I was intrigued why some people chose to follow me and why others chose not to and I wondered what this tells us about the anatomy of a follower and what we can expect from them as a result.

I chose the individuals and organisations that I wanted to follow, because they already seemed to be interested in business issues that might also suggest a pre-existing interest in the types of topic that I was blogging about and the sort of services that Windsor Training offers, covering a range of business and management subjects. I am talking here from the perspective of the small or medium sized business, rather than the large corporate. I am also going to consider followers to social media in general, rather than to any one service in particular.

From my reflections I came up with a typology, or anatomy, of the social media follower:

Category 1: Friends, family and business acquaintances

These tend to be the most loyal of your follower base – subject, that is, to divorce or the end of a business relationship. They know you personally and they have had some kind of relationship with you, either business, personal, or both. They follow you because they are genuinely interested in what you have to say and they can usually be relied upon to interact with you on a regular basis. Unless you have a large client base or family, they also tend to be small, so trying to build a large following from amongst Category 1 is unlikely.

Category 2: ‘Fan’ Followers

These are people who follow you because of some engagement they have had with you: perhaps they read a blog post that they agreed with or you responded to a tweet and they liked your comments. Perhaps they use your products or services and want to know more about what you offer or benefit from your expertise. These followers are the most valuable, because they have come to you because of some interaction with them, whether through social media or because of other online or offline marketing engagement.

Category 3: ‘Follow-me-back’ Followers

These are followers who are following you in the hope of some reciprocity: they expect that you will follow them back. They can be fickle and also short-lived. Some Twitter accounts with multiple thousands of followers can follow you, in the hope that you will follow back, only to rescind their following of you in a few days’ time when they hope you won’t notice. Building a following from amongst the ranks of the follow-me-back followers is unlikely to enable you to build a following of people who are genuinely interested in your message or the products or services that you offer. They are more interested in broadcasting their own message to you and with little interest in any interaction or dialogue.

Category 4: Fake Followers

Needless to say this is not the type of followership that you want to develop, although the larger your following, the greater the risk that, unwittingly, some of that number may well be fake. In 2012, Twitter reported that nearly 83 million accounts, which was roughly 10% of users at that time, were fake. They are usually created by a program that is intended to create fake identities and it scrapes data from Twitter and beyond, which is why their feed is often full of nonsense and non-sequiters. The only way to avoid them is to vet what your follow has tweeted or run your followers through any number of applications, such as JustUnfollow. There are scores of sites where you can buy these fake followers, but my advice is … don’t. Fake followers reflect badly upon your business and celebrities and politicians that have tried to buy followers have had scorn heaped upon them.

The object of this post is to consider the types of follower that we encounter on various social media, rather than to prescribe any techniques to increase that following (which is something that I will examine in subsequent articles). Of the types that I have categorised here, 1 is most likely to relate to the followership you develop when you first start out, because you will reach out to your friends, but in time your client base will increase and so will your followers of this type. 2 relates to followers who you have engaged with and they should be nurtured and interacted with on a regular basis, with interesting and relevant content. Finally, categories 3 and 4 are unavoidable, but basic precautions involving software and vigilance can help identify them.

If you would like to follow me on Twitter, then please do, @windsortrain and if you have any thoughts and comments, even better.

Written by Will Trevor, Founder and Training Consultant at Windsor Training

Email: will.trevor@windsortraining.net

Picture Credit: By CBS Television Network. [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons