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Tash
Don’t distract with a misplaced capital
Do you find the use of capital letters bewildering or frustrating?
Distractions made it hard to read – and poor grammar can be a distraction
Some people struggle with the questions ‘does this word need a capital letter?’ and others use so many unnecessary capital letters that just frustrate readers – excess capital letters actually make text harder to read (and more time-consuming to write, too!)
Poor capitalisation distracts
Some competition terms I recently read confused me because of a poor capital letter use. By adding a capital letter mid-sentence, I thought it was missing a full stop and a new sentence had started – but reading it as a new sentence didn’t make sense.
Entry is open to all Client bookings made with…
What do you think – did the capital C for client distract you?
In my mind, if you have to reread a sentence to understand it, the writing has failed. Good writing is easy to read and lets the reader focus on the message, not the words. {Obviously it’s different if you reread it because you can’t understand a difficult concept!}
Presumably, lack of clarity in something like competition terms or a contract has potential legal implications.
* Photo courtesy of 123RF
Social media – quality or quantity?
Quality vs quantity – this question comes up many times in life, and the answer can vary between situations.
So what do you think is important for social media?
Some of my thoughts about quantity vs quality of social media followers
Quantity…
Is it a matter of ‘she with the most social media followers wins’?
How far can you go to get new followers – should there be boundaries or just get as many as possible?
Quality…
Or is it better to nurture a smaller number of followers who actually are interested in what you have to say?
Quality followers, to my thinking, are those who will read my updates, maybe respond or follow through on links, and hopefully share my comments and/or links.
You can give a quality audience a hands-on approach
Quality followers are the ones worth building a relationship with – and that’s easier with a smaller number, too.
Choosing a strategy
I don’t think you can get quantity and quality.
That is, you can get a lot of quality followers and growing your base is not a bad thing in itself. But if you focus on getting many followers the odds are many will not be quality followers and are just there because they were paid or get some other benefit from it.
Like anyone, I like to see my followers increase in number (there’s a bit of that school yard popularity desire in us all I think!) but I don’t make it my priority. I prefer to gain followers who genuinely want to hear from me.
Which strategy do you prefer?
Do you think it varies with different purposes of a social following?
Building quality followers
The obvious technique is to provide quality content on your social media platforms.
I won’t follow anyone (no matter how popular they are or how important others tell me they are) if their social media pages are full of boring chatter or self-promotion. If I’m going to invest my time reading their updates, I want them to be worth reading. So I assume my followers (and potential followers) feel the same way.
Not every update will be awesome, and some chatting is also good, but the bulk of the updates need to provide some sort of value – even if I can see the value despite it not applying to me at that time.
Requesting followers
Asking people to connect with you in social media is fine – to a point.
On platforms like LinkedIn or Facebook, you can only connect with an individual (as distinct from a company page) by inviting them to be a contact. But I resent getting invitations from complete strangers who don’t even bother to add a note to the invitation. A friend can get away with that, as I know who they are, but why I should I connect with a stranger? Especially a stranger who is giving the impression that spamming is ok – I don’t want connections who will bombard me with nonsense.
My advice – if inviting someone on LinkedIn, add a few words to show you are a real person asking and that you know who you are asking. For best results, show how you can give them some value for connecting.
Gary Loper recently tweeted “Begging people 4 a RT is sitting on a corner begging 4 change. Let peeps RT u naturally”. And I have to agree – I don’t like tweets that ask to be retweeted and have never retweeted one – including some that I was inclined to retweet until I saw the request (yes, I can be stubborn!) If someone likes my tweet, they’ll share it anyway is my thought. Asking is like young children asking ‘will you be my friend?’ or asking a stranger to pay for your lunch.
Yet I have heard statistics suggesting asking for a retweet increases the chances of being retweeted. I don’t understand it, but there you go!
How do you build your social media followers? Are you focusing on relationships or numbers of followers?
* Images courtesy of Word Constructions and 123rf
Email list or social media followers – which is best?
paraphrased from Scott Stratten, author of The book of business awesome and Unmarketing. top marketing and start engaging[/
Yesterday, I heard Scott Stratten talk about business awesomeness in a webinar run by the Australian Businesswomen’s Network (ABN) and the above statement stuck in my mind.
Traditional or modern?
For many years, building a list was the key to online success according to many marketers and people worked hard to get more email addresses.
Now, the list isn’t mentioned as much but there is much talk of being on social media – and some will certainly imply or say that the more followers the better.
Is it just a sign of the times that social media is taking over from email lists and html newsletters?
Fractional reaction and social media
Scott uses the term fractional reaction to show how limited social media exposure can be.
Let’s say you have 100 Twitter followers and you tweet something important at 1o am. How many of those followers will be watching their Twitter feed at 10am? If they are not looking, there’s a very good chance they won’t see your tweet. How often do you go back very far in your social media feeds to check you haven’t missed something?
Email lists
On the other hand, if you send an email at 10am and I’m offline, it will still be in my inbox when I get online.
Email or social media, I may ignore your message because there are too many things to choose between or because it doesn’t interest me. But Scott is saying more will at least see your email. And your email has more chance of being opened if you have built a reputation of sending emails worth reading.
Of course, the other advantage of an email list is that it is yours.
And thus you have control over contacting those people to build your relationship and business.
So which give the best results?
If you have tried both email marketing and social media marketing, which has given you the best results?
Here are some of my thoughts…
It really isn’t easy to put a (return on investment) ROI on social media as some it is based on relationship building, gaining credibility as a thought leader, exposure and learning as well as direct marketing – social media doesn’t work just as a marketing tool.
Social media can take a lot of time to make regular posts, although often in short bursts, whereas writing emails tends to take bigger blocks of time.
With the use of automated emails, the same email can be used over and over in a way that just can’t apply to social media.
If you leave a social media platform or it stops, you lose those followers. Likewise if the platform changes rules, you may find it harder to stay in front of your followers – for example, if they start charging.
I hadn’t really thought about comparing the two options before hearing Scott yesterday. Yet I can see a lot of wisdom in his words.
Of course, there is no reason to not build both an email list and a social media following but which is worth more time and effort? Is a social media following worth pursuing at the expense of your email list?
I know I have put less effort into building an email list than I used to – and now I am rethinking that. Something to consider at my next working on my business session!
Is this a new perspective for you, too?
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Managing and turning off new tools like online chat
We need down time, even from our favourite things.
Like a young child playing with new toys, we all like to play with our new tools and gadgets. Are we also like young children that we need a rest from our toys/tools?
Having done the research into online chat, I was introducing it to some of my client’s employees the other day.
One of the employees – let’s call him Simon for simplicity – liked the idea of offering it to their customers but asked some really good questions.
Won’t we need a dedicated person to manage the online chat? None of us have time to take that on.
What happens if the online chat person is on the phone or something when someone wants to chat?
Managing a new feature
There’s no doubt that adding a new feature or tool can create extra work in the short-term. It takes time to set up and learn how to use it, and you may have to explain it to a number of people before it becomes fully effective.
I don’t think adding online chat means getting an extra person into the workplace. Even in a busy customer service business, the online chat should reduce the number of phone calls and emails which would free up the time needed to answer chats.
For Simon, I was able to explain that a little pop up window will show to all relevant staff when someone wanted to chat so any available staff member could answer.
Ability to turn the feature off
Another reassurance for Simon and his team was that online chat doesn’t have to be on all the time.
While there are variations between online chat systems, my client will have a choice between making the chat feature invisible or showing as offline to collect an email address when staff are unable to accept chats.
I think that’s important.
So many great new tools are offered to businesses but we need down time – to do our work, to undergoing training, to have a break and so on. Whether it is joining social media, online chat, a eShop or other tool, we need to be able to turn it off in some way.
How often do you turn off social media, emails and similar communication tools?
What if you had online chat on your site – would you turn it to offline even if you are physically present? Turn it off out of business hours, even if you can use it while mobile?
* Image courtesy of 123RF
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