The #1 Mistake We're All Making on Twitter (Probably Not What You're Expecting)

This is how most companies tackle Twitter: start an account, follow a bunch of people, send a few Tweets about their business and hope for the best.

And in some ways there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. These steps are necessary to get up and running and learn the ropes on Twitter. But, the biggest mistake we’re all making is not using two extremely simple Twitter features to their full potential.

Replies and mentions.

Replies and mentions are two of Twitter’s most powerful features. They can help you build strong relationships, keep customers happy and even increase your bottom line.

In this post I’m happy to share some insights into the power of these features and how to get the most from them.

First off: What are replies and mentions

You can join conversations on Twitter by replying to others and by mentioning them in your own Tweets.

A reply is a response to another user’s Tweet that begins with the @username of the person you’re replying to. For example:

A reply like this  will appear in the notifications tab of the person mentioned. It’ll also only be seen in Twitter timelines of people who follow both you and the person you replied to (because the first character is an @ sign).

If you’d like a reply to be seen by everyone who follows you, you can add a full stop before the @ sign and it’ll then appear in your timeline as a normal Tweet.

A mention is a Tweet that contains another @username anywhere in the body of the Tweet (this also means that a mentions are technically replies, too) . For example:

This Tweet would appear in the timeline of anyone who follows me as it doesn’t start with an @usersname.

Why you should go big on Twitter replies and mentions

I’d love to tell you a quick story. It takes place around 1998. Football (soccer) was my life back then. If I wasn’t outside kicking a ball in the garden, I’d be watching it on TV or or playing football related video games.

My Dad and I had started going to watch our local professional team, Ipswich Town, and occasionally we’d go along to games extra early so we could see the players as they arrived ahead of kick-off.

As we waited by the entrance, some players would spot us; come over to say “hi”, and sign my autograph book. Meeting my on-pitch heroes would make my week — and no matter the result of the game, I’d head home with a massive smile on my face.

These interactions made the experience remarkable to me and are a big part of why I fell in love with the club. It’d take each player maybe 10 seconds to pop over and sign and autograph, but for me the memories will last a lifetime.

After my early experiences at Ipswich Town, I became a fan for life. And now, 16 years later, I still go to almost every match.

Anyone can provide remarkable experiences

Nowadays, Twitter gives us all a platform to provide amazing, remarkable experiences to our customers. No matter our industry.

You may question the ROI of jumping in and replying to people who mention you, your company or topics related to your brand. But human connection really, really matters.

Many companies wait for a crisis to jump into Twitter and try to contain the fire or only respond when a customer service issue pops up. However, getting the most from Twitter is about much more than that.

A quick mention, “thanks” or Like can go such a long way.

As Scott McLeod explains in a Medium post: “[It’s] not how many Tweets or Posts you can make with the right hashtags, but number of customers you’ve helped and how many of them stayed as customers.”

Here’s a real life example:

That time Gary Vaynerchuk mentioned me

I’ve followed Gary Vaynerchuk for years — his book, Crush It, was a huge inspiration for me, and in many ways set me up on my journey into blogging and the world of content creation.

In 2013 Gary was on tour promoting his new book and out of the blue I received a notification:

“Gary Vaynerchuk has mentioned you.”

I immediately opened up Twitter to see what he said:

It turned out Gary was coming to London as part of his book tour, and whoa, he’d personally reached out to invite me to his event!

I was sold.

That Tweet only took a few seconds to send, but it blew me away (and sold a ticket to Gary’s event!).

This isn’t a one off. Gary Vaynerchuk has built his businesses off the back of human connection and even today, if you check his Twitter timeline it’s rammed full of replies.

On the importance of these type of interactions Vaynerchuk explains:

People respond to effort. When a celebrity favorites your tweet, you’re excited. Someone you admire likes a photo of yours on Instagram, and it makes you feel good. Because it’s not about the 100th of a second it takes to double tap that photo. It’s about the fact that they looked at your profile. They chose a photo. They saw it. And then they liked. That interaction, which takes all of five or six seconds, really touches a lot of people.

The psychology of Twitter: Why we love to be mentioned

Our emotions are at play just as much in the digital world as they are in the physical world. And just as I’d wait at the gates of the football stadium in the hopes of meeting my heroes, many people now see social media, especially Twitter, as their best hope of engaging with their idols.

It’s not just mentions from our favorite celebrities that make us feel great though. Mentions from anyone – brand or individual – can go a long way to making us feel happy and appreciated.

Here are a couple of the reasons a mention on Twitter can make us feel so good:

We like to feel valued

In a Harvard Business review post, Tony Schwartz explains: “To feel valued (and valuable) is almost as compelling a need as food.”

It feels amazing to know that our favorite brands and personalities value our custom and support. And sometimes all it takes to show that is a personal response.

We love surprise 

We don’t expect a brand, or individual, to pop up from nowhere and make our day. When our favourite brand or personality directly responds to us that feeling sticks with us.

University of California psychology professor, Sonja Lyubomirsky explains the power of surprise in the New York Times: “Surprise is a potent force. When something novel occurs, we tend to pay attention, to appreciate the experience or circumstance, and to remember it.”

The impact of personal replies

A study by McKinsey & Company found that in today’s world, when it comes to customer experience, good is no longer good enough:

Average customer experience performance has been worth about 5 – 10 percent less in terms of key measures like ‘likelihood to remain/renew’, ‘to buy another product’ and ‘to recommend’ for companies each year in industries we have analyzed.  At the same time, however, improving customer experience from average to ‘wow’ is worth 30-50 percent more in those same industries.

This was visualized brilliantly in Gary Vaynerchuk’s Slideshare on community management:

Providing a unique, personal experience for as many customers as you can help you increase your ‘wow’ factor and in-turn keep your customers loyal and increase opportunities for positive word of mouth.

Finding opportunities for conversation

We’re not all in a position where we get hundreds or thousands of mentions each day. That doesn’t mean that people aren’t out there talking about your brand – or topics related to your brand.

Thankfully Twitter has amazing Advanced Search functionality that can help you keep an eye out for relevant Tweets.

Whether you want to find your next customers, keep tabs on brand keywords or measure the happiness of your current customers, Advanced Search is what you need.

Advanced Search allows you to keep tabs on a whole array of things. A few specific searches it may be good to take a look at include:

• Mentions of brand keywords: for example, @buffer, buffer and #buffer
• Monitor sentiment: using  or  after your search phrase allows to to filter positive or negative Tweets
• Find Tweets from your area: The ‘Places’ filter on Twitter’s Advanced search page allows you to filter Twitter by location. This is super handy if you’re looking to find people who are talking about your brand in a certain location.

When you’re looking at keywords and phrases to query here, think about how people talk to each other. Tweets tend to be a lot more conversational that Google search terms.

Setting up saved searches

If you’d like to regularly keep an eye on certain words or phrases, a saved search could be an amazing way to do this (and save you from manually searching all the time).

Twitter allows you to save up to 25 searches per account. To save a search, clickMore options at the top of your results page and then click Save this search.

Here’s an example of a saved search I have for the Buffer blog:

P.S. For a full list of Twitter Advanced Search hacks and trick, check out our Superhuman Guide to Twitter search.

4 top tips for replies and mentions

1. Try not to be too sales-y

Oftentimes, people on Twitter aren’t necessarily looking to make a purchase, but instead, to solve a problem. It could be a great approach to be more conversational that jumping right in for the sale at the first Tweet. To help with this I always try to visualize Twitter conversations as if they were happening in a coffee shop and ask ‘how would I approach this in person.’

2. Send timely responses to mentions

Research tells us that 42% of consumers expect a 60 minute response time on social media. Where possible, try to get back to people who mention you as soon as you can. This can make such a huge difference to customer happiness.

3. Add a personal touch

People like to connect with other people. Try to fit in some personality to your replies where you can, this a great way to bring business accounts to life and truly connect with the customer. Sometimes it can be as simple as signing off with your name or initials.

4. Follow up

It feels great to go the extra mile for a customer and Twitter provides the perfect platform to do this. A simple “How is everything?” Tweet is an amazing way to show you can and ensure the customer’s issue is truly sorted.

Over to you

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this topic! What do you feel is the biggest mistake most of us make on Twitter? How often do you respond to your mentions? Any tips on handling replies?

Super excited to hear your thoughts below in the comments.

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Marketing Analysis: Unlocking The Power Of Descriptive Statistics

Let me be up front: this post will contain statistics. Not the fun, pithy kind like “60 percent of statistics are made up on the spot,” but actual cold, hard statistical practices.

Joking aside, I’m going to run through some fairly high-level statistical analysis practices that you can employ every day to help make sense of your marketing data, allowing better strategic decisions. And it won’t be painful at all, I promise.

“But I do this already. I’m always analysing my data!” I hear you say incredulously.

This is probably very true — most users of web analytics (Google Analytics, Omniture, et al.) instinctively apply what would formally be known as “descriptive statistics.”

For example, you readily identify a spike or a drop in your daily traffic by “eyeballing” a chart; you use averages to quickly assess performance; and you do all sorts of comparisons that help you understand what is happening (and importantly, what you need to do next).

Although a loose adherence to the general principles is fine and workable, I strongly believe that an element of rigour can help take your analysis to the next level. Below, I’ll run through a couple of concepts tied to real-world examples that will hopefully convince you that this is an approach you should be considering.

Variance & Standard Deviation

Every set of data has a number of “characteristics” which, when understood, tell you lots about what has happened and what behavior you can expect in the future. One of the major characteristics is the dispersion of data points (i.e., how spread out and different from one another the measurements tend to be).

The formal measure of this is standard deviation (SD), which is derived from its partner metric, variance (σ2). As you’d guess from the names, informally these just represent how much that data can be expected to deviate, and how much it varies. But by utilizing the exact nature of the formal properties, you can do all sorts of fun useful stuff.

The SD is calculated by taking the square root of the variance. To calculate the variance, we just:

Work out the average (mean) of your set of results.
For each measurement you have, subtract the average worked out in step 1, then square the resulting figure. Note each one down.

Add all the numbers you noted when carrying out step two, and voila! The result is your variance.

To get the SD, just take the square root of your calculated variance. So the whole calculation looks like below:

In finance, SD is a key measure of risk or volatility — it’s incredibly useful to know how stable a portfolio of stocks is before investing. A portfolio may have a high average yield and offer great returns, but if it has a high standard deviation, it could be a risky bet that may make you more averse to committing your money to it.

To think of this within the realm of marketing, consider you are allocating monthly budgets across some campaigns. You have these two, which have potential to spend as much of your budget as you’d like:

With the pure ROI data, it’s simple: spend everything we can on “Snow Shoes,” and put whatever is left towards the “Mammoth Fleece Coats.” (We’ve had the first snow of the year here today, hence the inspired choice of fake campaigns.)

However, if we crunch the numbers and look at the historical deviations, we’ll get some extra context which, depending on our goals, can allow more strategic thinking:

Now, the “Snow Shoes” campaign is still an attractive option; however, the element of risk/volatility needs to be considered. Is a blended strategy (more of a “balanced portfolio” approach) going to ensure more sensible use of your or your client’s budget? It’s entirely dependent on the situation, but this additional data puts you in a much better position to make sound, informed decisions.

Another action upon seeing this data would be to look into the variance. What is the root cause? Are there actions you can take to lower the SD and maintain high performance?

Standard Deviation & Expectations

In my introduction, I mentioned that it’s highly likely that you’ve identified upward and downward trends by looking at the time-series charts of your chosen analytics package.

Following through with the formal approach, we can use SD to provide the context around these trends and make really informed decisions by sticking to principles.

In distributed data, we can use the number of standard deviations as a benchmark of how “expected” a certain measurement is — e.g., if we simplify and assume daily transaction data is normally distributed (it probably isn’t, but it’s convenient for me to make this assumption here) then 68 percent of all measurements should fall within one standard deviation, whilst 95 percent should fall within two standard deviations.

What’s the purpose of knowing this? With limited time on our hands as marketers, we need to pick our battles. Using these expectations as yardsticks allows us to categorize spikes and dips as either “business as usual” or “hmm, that’s interesting, I should probably invest time looking into this one.”

Coming full circle and applying this new context to a time series results in what you see below — firstly, a simple standard deviation calculated across the given period, and secondly, a rolling calculation that ensures ongoing updates of the mean and standard deviation.
 

In our first chart, the end of October shows a consistent dip into the “2 Standard Deviations” zone, so we should be looking into why this is the case. Also, we need to know what happened at the end of August — what can we learn here?

Statistical Significance: How Confident Are You?

A familiar one to the conversion optimizers out there, Statistical Significance is a handy method to inform us if a result we are looking at is caused by some definite relationship, rather than just a quirk of randomness within the data.

For example, when A/B testing and making changes aimed at improving a site conversion rate, you need to be certain* that any measured improvements are attributable to your changes and that the perceived result is not just the data pulling the wool over your eyes.

*Certainty is also a defined measure. You can rarely be 100 percent certain, but you may set your goal to be 95 percent certain that improvements are a result of your awesome site redesign and be happy with that.

Following are the key components that affect how significant a result is:

Sample Size: If you’ve measured something lots and lots of times, you can be more certain about your results. Consider if you have two SEOs and a basketball player in a room, your sample size of three leaves you with very little confidence about the average height of a person. If you measure the height of 1,000 people at random, you’ll be much more certain about how true your estimate of average height is. (It’s not been skewed by the unexplained presence of a Chicago Bull attending your SEO meeting.)

Standard Deviation: I hope I’ve succeeded above in conveying what this is. However, the raw SD is not the end of the story. Combining it with the number of measurements (sample size) allows us to calculate the “standard error of the mean (SE).”

The detail of this calculation isn’t important here and now. What I want you to take away from this is that many of the results you are looking at can have a degree of certainty (or uncertainty, if you are a pessimist) and that this uncertainty is reliant on how many times you’ve measured something and how varied the results are when you measure them.

This is relevant, for example, when reviewing:

     Paid search or programmatic display ad performance.

     The success of an email marketing campaign.

     Social engagement rates with different types of content.

The bottom line is that before making decisions based on data, you should understand your level of certainty and how much you can rely on the figures you are looking at.

Conclusion

I hope this has been useful to those who have not encountered these concepts before, and that you’d agree with me that these extra steps and practices are relevant to our work in search marketing.

I’d consider this to be the tip of the iceberg in what I consider to be an exciting, ongoing challenge: making the data tell a story.

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Use This Stupid-Simple Secret Ingredient to Boost Social Engagement

Every day, for hours on end, social media teams across the country — around the world, even — toil away in poorly lit rooms, snacking periodically on stale donuts and swilling hours-old cold coffee, trying to come up with new ways to solve one huge, gaping problem plaguing marketers of all stripes:

No one cares about our social content enough to give it a like, a retweet, a comment, or even a share.

All is not lost. I’ve stumbled upon a stupid-simple way to dramatically increase your social engagement, and it’s actually a lot of fun. Ready for it? It’s emojis!

An Emoji Is Worth A Thousand Words

Emojis are super-powerful because they allow us to communicate so much more than we could with words alone. People are apt to respond positively to your messages when you form an emotional connection, however brief.

That’s a fist-bump emoji, in case it’s not clear.

Think of the sheer volume of words people sift through in a day, especially online across media, websites, email and text messages.

People are overwhelmed with words.

We know that people process visuals 60,000 times faster than plain text, and emojis are a great way to tap into that image power in your social posts, where space is at a premium.

Using Emojis Without Being A Total Cheeseball

Emojis only get a bad name when people abuse their emoji powers. I’ve pretty much memorized the entire emoji character set and try to introduce them in conversations wherever it makes sense.

There are so many opportunities. And there’s so much more to a smart emoji strategy than just throwing in a smiley face.

Just do a Google search and check out which emojis are available on your device or operating system:

Instead of throwing around emojis haphazardly, consider contextual relevancy. If you’re talking about junk food, you can use a donut. A conversation about an event in a specific country allows you to insert an emoji of the flag.

Social Networks & Operating Systems Know the Power of Emojis

Emojis are so impactful that Facebook has spent an inordinate amount of time and resources developing and testing a set of six additional emoji-like “reactions” to join the thumbs-up button.

Image source: Facebook

Right now, they’re being tested only in Spain and Ireland, but they may eventually roll out to all users worldwide.

Apple released a slate of new and updated emojis for iOS 9.1 last month, adding a burrito, a middle finger, a robot and even a unicorn to the mix.

Image source: Apple

If you look at my Twitter and Facebook feeds, I never do an update without at least one emoji, and often I’ll do replies and updates completely lacking in words, with just emojis.

Seriously, with such a selection across platforms, who needs words? Think about it — how weird would it be in real life to have a conversation with someone without showing any emotion at all? Emojis help solve a major problem in online communications: the missing context of emotion.

Posts With Emojis Increase Social Engagement

The key to doing both paid and organic social is to get those engagement rates up. In organic social, this helps your content get more exposure.

Unfortunately, when it comes to organic social media marketing, it’s super-hard to figure out which update does better or worse because there are so many different variables at play.

However, in paid social, it’s super-easy to do a split test of the same promoted post with and without emojis to the same targeting group at the same time.

Here’s just one small example, between this tweet with no emoji and the same image and message plus emojis:

As you can see, the emoji version has 25.4 percent higher engagement (11.06 percent vs. 8.82 percent) and a 22.2 percent lower cost per engagement ($0.18 vs. $0.14). Remember: Twitter Quality Score rewards higher post engagement with lower CPEs. So using emojis will not only increase engagement, it will decrease your costs, too.

Like I said, we’re seeing this as a trend consistently across tests (Sometimes the emoji variant beats out the non-emoji promoted post by as much 3x), but I’ve noticed that it’s key that your emojis are relevant to the update.

Test it out for yourself!

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A 3-Step Plan For Easier Email Marketing

Since 1970, the recycle triangle, or what’s more formally known as the universal recycling symbol, has been the little reminder that we should recycle, reuse and reduce waste.

If you want to rev up your email marketing and create great emails without having to spend too much time rethinking them, there are three comparable Rs you need to follow.

To keep a presence in your customer’s inbox and continuously drive traffic from your subscriber base, just remember to Regiment, Repurpose and Recycle.

Regiment

As a foundation for easily creating quality emails without too much hassle, one needs to be able to draw upon a solid base of rich content and written content. That rich content can include any combination of videos, webinars, podcasts or interviews, and your written content can, as the name implies, include blog articles, guest posts and white papers or guides.

Obviously, it will vary based on your business, but to build a solid base of content, it’s important to establish a firm regimen of content creation. If your rich content and written content regimens are on point, then you’ve already taken the biggest step to creating great emails.

Conversely, if your content is unorganized, featuring only an irregular blog post here or a podcast there, your email marketing will likely be just as unorganized.

Starting that regimen is easy. As an example, let’s say we’re running a CPA firm focusing on small businesses. For our purposes, our content creation regimen might start with a video once a week that lays out tips on how to save on taxes or a weekly blog detailing changes in the tax code.

The frequency doesn’t matter, but the point is to find a content creation cadence that’s right for your business and then stick with it, as doing so is the first step to creating great emails.

So, with a content creation regimen in place for our accounting firm, we can now move forward to the next step and start repurposing that content.

Repurpose

With a weekly supply of blog posts, videos or webinars at the ready, it’s easy to take that material and repurpose it into more content for your emails. As an example, let’s go back to our tax firm that’s been pumping out videos or webinars on a weekly basis.

Once we’ve got a video up, it’s easy to repurpose it as a blog article. In fact, we can literally take the transcript of the video, focus on the highlights and easily spin it into a blog or guest post article.

If time to write it up or throw it together is an issue, we can even pay someone a modest sum to take the video or webinar content and “translate” it into a blog article.

Now that we’ve repurposed our initial content into other types of content, we can keep on repurposing. The goal here is to take solid educational content and drive it across multiple channels.

To do that, we can take different sections from a blog post and create a newsletter article. (Content Marketing also offers tips on turning a blog into an email.)

Or we can collect a selection of blog articles and repurpose them into a larger newsletter. Furthermore, we can take the high points of a podcast and truncate that into a newsletter article or email feature.

The key to all this repurposing is to ensure that the cadence for our rich content correlates with our written content. And when we do this a few times, we’ll have plenty of content to repurpose into email content, while we simultaneously double the benefit of both.

Then we can move onto the next step: recycling all this content into an email.

Recycle

Now that our tax advisory business has a stockpile of content available, creating emails without the need to think up new content is a snap. In fact, we could even delegate someone to put together the emails from our content without the need to train them or have that person be a content expert.

At this point, creating an email for our theoretical accounting company is just a matter of picking and choosing from our existing content base.

One email could feature an existing blog post. Another email could offer a newsletter comprising summaries of, and links to, existing blog posts. Turn the highlight of an instructional video or podcast into another email.

On top of all that, we can also recycle the images we use in our content for use in emails. The jpeg that accompanied a blog post can just as easily go into an email featuring that blog post.

If we’re sending out an email with a newsletter, the photos used with each post that comprise that newsletter can be included as part of the synopsis of each article. A screenshot from a video or webinar is another easy way to recycle existing content into email content.

Now that we’re easily generating regular emails without the hassle of creating new content for each one, assess your own email marketing: Are you following a regular rich and written content creation regimen?

If so, is it being repurposed into even more content? Finally, are you recycling all that content into emails that will inform your customers while driving more traffic to your website?

As we’ve shown, if you need to create compelling email content for your business, it doesn’t require excessive rethinking on your part. Instead, just remember the three R’s: Establish a regular rich and written content creation regimen, repurpose that content to create even more content, then recyclethat content into engaging, and easy, emails.

Now, sit back and watch those emails create another “R”… results!

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