Does your affiliate have a Twitter account?
Good. Does your affiliate use it?
Social media continues to be an undeniable force of the CrossFit movement that began with the spread of blogs, then Facebook Pages (or back when it was Facebook Fan profiles), but now Twitter plays a vital role as well. Twitter is one of the social media big guns necessary to build and get your affiliate’s brand noticed by your clients, potential clients and other affiliates. It’s all in how you use it and how often you use it.
We want to provide you with some handy tips in what to do and what not to do, but in this first part 1, we’ll give you a quick guide:
Twitter Bootcamp
Twitter describes itself as a service for friends, family, and co-workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing? A bit vague, but to the point. Not sure what to post about? Then ask yourself that very question, “What am I [or my company] doing?”
Here is a quick video explaining Twitter in a nutshell:
Twitter in Plain English Video
So, what is it that you can do with Twitter?
You can post updates [limited to 140 characters or less], follow others and view their updates in your feed, send a public reply or a private direct message. That is the bare minimum basics of the world of Tweeting. It all has evolved to include sharing links, photos, videos, and popular topic discussions via use of the famous hashtag [#]. The famous hashtag is also used for real-time events such as concerts, sporting events, conventions and even natural disaster.
Speaking of, the discussions and posts during the 2011 CrossFit Games by CrossFit HQ, Reebok CrossFit, affiliates, athletes, fans that were there, fans that wished they were and watched the livestream online needless to say, epic. Beyond just posting updates, people were tweeting @ each other at the games, using it to meet up and network. I personally met and networked with many fellow CrossFitters from all walks.
Now, the nitty gritty: Who sees what and how they see it; Twitter users who they do and do not follow. They have complete control of what news they receive in their “feed” [homepage].
Some tips:
- Anything you post will be seen by anyone who follows you on their feed.
- If someone you do not follow posts something at you, you will not see it in your main feed, but rather in your @mentions tab and if they put your username at beginning of their post, it will not show up on their followers’ feed either.
- Putting another person’s username at the beginning of a post, it limits who sees it on their feeds. People who follow both the poster and the person mentioned will see it in their feed.
- Putting another person’s username inside the post will be seen by all your followers and that person will see it in their @mentions tab [tip: if you DO want to share with all your followers, you can also add a period as the first character so the username is considered to be “inside” the post].
- Direct Messages are private tweets to other Twitter users that are exchanged between two users that follow each other. They are unsearchable on Twitter.
- Retweeting or RT’ing is when you want to re-post a tweet that someone else said to your followers. Thankfully, Twitter has a native Retweet feature making this easy to use. You can also copy / paste someone else’s tweet, and put RT @username in front of it. This lets your followers know that you are quoting someone else’s words.
- Hashtags are a way to label tweets so that other users can see tweets on the same topic. Hashtags have no spacing or punctuations and begin with the # symbol. Lately, hashtags have also been used to punctuate statements or jokes on twitter, such as some users making sentence-long hashtags for comedic effect. #themoreyouknow
In the second part of this post, I will share some of the Do’s and Don’ts of using Twitter!
Does your affiliate use Twitter to help grow your brand and build your community?
If so, how have you found Twitter to be effective?
