Talking on Twitter: One Business' Experiences

Sterling sat down with Erica at Imagine Graphics to talk about how she uses Twitter to connect with customers.
Sterling: All the most successful Twitters for these big business all have that singular personal voice no matter where it’s from. Glad to hear you do that as well. Do you have any kind of editorial calendar? I know you said about trying to get businesses to give permission to post their work on Twitter. Is there any other structure that you follow day to day that determines what you post?
Erica: No. It’s really like a sort of seat of the pants thing. And, you know, there’s some days when I think of a lot of things to-- that seem worth tweeting about and other days when I really don’t think of hardly anything or nothing, you know. There-- sometimes there are days that go by where I’m too busy or I just am not working on projects that seem relevant to other people, and I go through phases where sometimes I’ll tweet about things that are not about my business, you know, like politics or like something interesting that I saw out in the world. I do that-- I keep that to a minimum but I find that it lends a different dimension to the relationship if I do that at least a little bit. You know, or sometimes I’ll say something like the-- it was a beautiful sky this morning. I try to be human and to not be boring but to keep it, you know, maybe 75% of the content is directly related to what we do as a business while not being too salesy. I mean I rarely do anything that’s salesy.
Sterling: When you get an interaction from anyone in the Twitterverse, is it mostly in response to the tweets about Imagine Graphics or do you get more interaction with your personal tweets, the 25% that are more about you. Do you see any strong difference in the amount of interaction you receive for both those dimensions?
Erica: The main way that I notice the people are taking notice is by using the bitlink tracking and seeing who’s clicking on my links. I don’t get a whole lot of mentions or replies and I’m-- that’s fine with me. A few of those is fun to do but if it becomes-- if the account were to become a whole lot of back and forth with individuals I think it would be really boring to the other followers, you know. There’s some people that do that a lot and I just-- I don’t even read those tweets because I feel like I don’t know what they’re responding to. I don’t know who the person is that they’re talking to. So I just sort of scan right by those.
And I would prefer not to have my twitter feed that I put out there be something that people just want to scan over. I want them to like actually read it. So I’m happy to not have very many of those, but I’m very interested in seeing what links that I post are followed and how astronomically those clicks- click through rates can rise if what you say gets retweeted by other people. It’s like exponential. It’s amazing. And so far I’ve never had that kind of exponential effect happen with anything that’s related to our particular business but on the-- some occasions when I’ve tweeted about an article that’s of a wider interest, you know, a political thing or whatever, it goes from my normal, you know, tweets about-- with a photo of something we’ve done, which is maybe like 12 to 20 click throughs. And I did this one article and it was like 2000 or something and I was just like wow, the power of that, of the sort of viral, the network, is so untapped by anything that I probably will ever do in this realm that is related to business. But it just is astounding to me.
Sterling: The exponential growth is just absolutely incredible.
Erica: Yeah, we’re gonna start tracking our numbers, basically, just to see how it changes over time, how many followers we have, how many retweets we’ve gotten, how many mentions, and also how many leads and sales have been made from Twitter. And it’s just sort of nice to have some statistics to look at.
Sterling: ROI is very difficult to do as social media. Have you noticed any kind of difference that you can attribute to social media in terms of more leads or sales?
Erica: Well I’d say we’ve gotten two jobs from Twitter, two good size jobs, and we definitely have more awareness, more brand awareness, among people that follow us.
But it’s pretty limited how many people follow us compared to our client base and our potential client base. It’s very limited really. I mean we have a mailing list of 1500 active clients and we have maybe less than 300 followers and at least a third of those are people that are not even potential clients, that are like people from far away who are trying to, you know, solicit me to follow them or people that are interested in what we do but would never be a client. So I mean even to say that half of our followers are potential clients is probably a generous estimate.
So we’re reaching a very small number of potential clients but we’re reaching them in a high intensity way that doesn’t offend or bother them. I mean if I sent that many postcards, for instance, or emails to a select group of clients, they would like get off my mailing list right away or they’d be really annoyed. So this is a really nice way to connect with people that doesn’t bother them.

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