Author: Nancy McCord

Nancy McCord is the President and resident blogger for McCord Web Services LLC. She has been providing global web services since 2001. She is a web designer, search engine marketing professional, and search engine and blog expert. She lives in Maryland just south of the Washington DC metro area.
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Growing Your Twitter Following Base Update

This past Friday I published a blog post about how to grow your Twitter following base. Here’s an update on our project. First, I prewrote that article on Saturday February 6th. On that day we had five people following AskKeebler. Our fan base grew all last week and as of today (when I am writing this – Saturday 2-19), AskKeebler has 60 followers.

Our plan this week to additionally grow our spokesdog account is to interact with followers and retweet their updates this upcoming week.

This is what I do personally, and it works to grow an account. Using HootSuite on a daily basis, I will review my home stream, they I will review the status updates of my followers. I will additionally review the stream of those I follow who are not necessarily following Keebler. Then I will choose pertinent updates to comment to, choose those updates that are funny, cute or informative to retweet, and click in to various Twitter accounts to find out more about people who had good updates. I will use the scheduling function in HootSuite to spread these interactions out over the day.

If someone had a good update, I will click in and either send a direct message or @ message (depending on if they are following me) with a question or to thank them for the information they have posted. I will also be looking to share pictures of Keebler doing some funny things this week and browsing for doggie videos on YouTube to share.

The bottom line is that I am looking to connect! Last week I asked a number of dog trainers for some help with Keebler’s incessant running around the kitchen table (God lover her), and got some great suggestions. I will go back to those people and report what I did and am trying, to say thank you.

When you look to connect more than vomit out spam about you and your services on Twitter, others respond by following you. I find that it is hard to initially build  a good following base. There simply is no short cut, but you can end up with a rich interactive community that makes your time spent on Twitter really fun.

If you haven’t followed our Spokesdog on Twitter yet, what are you waiting for? Our goal for this month is 150 followers. Click and and just follow AskKeebler to join the fun!

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How Do You Grow Your Twitter Fan Base? Watch Me

I have set up about two weeks ago a Twitter account for our spokesdog. On its own, linked from our website, and promoted in our e-newsletter, her Twitter follower base has grown to a whooping five followers. Two of which are my Twitter accounts.

I am going to teach you and you can watch my efforts, how to grow a Twitter following in the next 30 days. Remember our starting point is 5 followers.

Here are the steps I am taking and I will give you regular updates over the next 30 days.

  1. Set up an account at Social Oomph (they pay me lunch at McDonald’s if you click this link and buy). Add your Twitter account information there and then set up an auto responder and auto follow function for your account. This means if someone follows you on Twitter you automatically follow them.  Twitter is a reciprocal universe. It is not until you are big with over 1,000 followers that you should consider vetting followers or screening who you follow. You can do this on Social Oomph as well. But at this phase we want to BUILD a following fairly quickly. Don’t follow anyone yet!
  2. Now that the automation part is set up start by making sure you are logged in to your Twitter account and start doing searches of people to follow on Twitter. In most cases these people will follow you back. My guideline for new accounts is to select people in your industry or news that your particular followers will find interesting. So for Keebler, we should follow her food supplier – IAMS, her pet toy store – PetSmart, her vet – if he has a Twitter profile (he doesn’t and so really should see me!), and other pet related Twitter sites. I try to find about 75 people to follow to get going.
  3. Now sit back and watch your Twitter Feed using HootSuite or TweetDeck and interact with the people you are following. (Remember HootSuite pays me if you upgrade to Pro when you click this link – but a pittance.) Interaction is key, retweet interesting updates, ask questions, in other words have fun connecting. As you retweet and interact more people will join in the fun.

It is very important to understand that putting your Twitter icon on your website and blog are simply not enough, you must work the system for your Twitter account to grow and it takes time. You don’t want to fill your follower list with spammers, so be thoughtful about who you follow. Think about what other people want to read when they come to your Twitter home page there should be a match between your focus and who you follow.

Now watch www.Twitter.com/askkeebler to see how I am growing this account in action in the next 30 days. Oh by the way if you are on Twitter, come on follow me now help me get Keebler going!

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Facebook Changes Fan or Business Page Look Again

In an effort to blur the difference between fan or business pages and personal profiles even more, Facebook this past week changed how business pages look. The basic behind the scenes control panel for business pages has not changed, but the look and feel has changed significantly.

First, I have to say that I don’t like the new look. Before Business pages had tabs across the top; allowing you good control over helping to focus your user on things that were important to you. Now tabs have gone away, imitating the look of a personal profile, and links to pages have moved to a lower left sidebar. For me, the issue was, if we created a Giveaway tab now this tab is hidden under the “show more options” in the left sidebar and so is not featured as in the old business page look. The end user may miss our giveaway or have to hunt to find it.

One thing I do like is the option to select entities from which you post. Now when you post updates to someone else’s wall, you have the option to choose to be posting from your personal profile or your business page profile. Actually, that is a good thing as when I post on other Business’ walls, my icon and link was to my personal profile. Not my choice but Facebook’s default. Now I can choose. By choosing to post as my business entity, my icon and link matches my Facebook business page and so drives traffic to my page not my locked down, family only, personal profile.

What do you think about Facebook’s new look for Business pages. Click comments and let me know.

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HootSuite Introduces Bulk Upload Option for Pro Accounts

If you have the HootSuite Pro version then you may have already tried this option. If you are using HootSuite Free then this may be the reason to upgrade, and if you are not using HootSuite at all, this may be the reason you take a look.

HootSuite is an online Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, FourSquare, and Facebook Page update and status scheduling tool. I have used it for team management and self management of small accounts. Just this last week I checked out the Pro account version Bulk Upload of status update features.

First although HootSuite offers a sample .csv file to review and to use for your own updates, I found that Excel kept changing the date format and did not offer the date format they wanted for load, and so I moved to Notepad to do my list creation.

This is the format to use:

09/02/2011 09:00,”Check out our blog writing prices and blog clients on this page.”,”http://ow.ly/3S5ru”

Note that the date format is day first, then month, then year followed by time on a 24 hour clock. The update must be wrapped in quotes, and then the URL wrapped in quotes. Each of these three fields is separated by a comma.  You may be able to leave your URL as pointing to your own domain, but to be safe, I shrunk my URL ahead of time.

Of important note is that HootSuite will not allow duplicate updates. So you can not load more than one version. Additionally the Bulk Upload feature allows for 50 unique updates to be loaded maximum at a time. I found that the load creation was time consuming, but was able to be used on multiple accounts and as I saved the document, will allow me to use and re-use this load anytime I go on vacation for coverage.

When you go to upload your text file, you will put your select your social network from the icon list, then put your cursor in the message field. The box opens and allows you (for Pro accounts only) the option to bulk upload. Browse to your upload file then click Okay. You will then see all your updates appear in the pending stream column.

I think this is a great new feature for HootSuite. Social Oomph offers this same feature for Professional accounts as well but without duplication restriction. Please note that if you click the links in this post and purchase either Professional level accounts from these suppliers that they will pay me a commission which will allow me to buy lunch at McDonald’s. Thanks for your support and try out these two applications they may end up being big time savers for you too.