And by favorites, I mean the tweets that I’ve “starred” on Twitter during Social Media Week Chicago’s #SMWChicago feed to reference later because they sparked some sort of reaction from me – which brings me to my first favorite.
(1) Just like any well-planned event (or promotion, campaign, etc .), it needs to have it’s own memorable and simple hashtag to accompany it. The panel suggested to not use acronyms or locations in the hashtag (which technically would make #SMWChicago a bust) but let’s keep that on a basis-by-basis rule. Acronyms have worked fine in many instances, like this one, or #RHWOA, or #SBXLVIII. Locations also work well if the event is happening in multiple locations where a person following the feed would only be interested in seeing tweets from their particular location. An example of this would possibly be a marathon race happening in multiple locations or again, this event that is happening globally right now.
(2) Yes, I favorited my own tweet. Shameless about it, too. The speaker during this particular session talked about how to optimize your social and online PR efforts for search and this little stat frankly blew my mind – mainly because it confirms that we have become an instant society. If it’s not instant, we’re not interested. Lesson learned: make sure your sites are clean, simple and quick-to-load, or you can say goodbye to much of your audience and that higher listing in Google that you were hoping for.
(3) Staying on the topic of SEO, I found this a little obvious but also really good reminder, too. Everyone wants to be at the top of Google’s list. Therefore, we tend to get caught up in that goal and fill online content with keywords, links, images, etc. to simply please Google. REMINDER: the customer comes first. Write your content to be valuable and interesting to your audience, and then optimize what you can for Google – not the other way around.
(4) Since I do have the option of using more than 140 characters here – I’m going to add a little to this user’s tweet –
“To be successful when managing a social community, find out what type of content encourages different behavior across platforms – and then be there.”
Social media, or maybe a particular social media channel, has become one of those necessary, maybe exciting things that businesses know they should be on. However, the biggest mistake we often see are businesses that see this shiny new object and start using it before reading the manual. To maximize your ROI on these channels, your business must be using the channels correctly, regularly and efficiently. Not every business should be on every channel, so determine which channel(s) you should be on and then regularly serve your audience valuable, catered content for them.
(5) Favorited this for two reasons – 1. It’s a picture of me. 2. It’s a great example of using real-time live social to optimize the value of your event. The content is valuable to me (because I’m so honored to have a picture with Stone Ward’s Kelly Wagner) and it was tweeted to me within 20 minutes after arriving at the opening night event. Bravo, @RockitRanch.
