Tour de France Geraint Thomas — #weeklycartoon — Michael&Josh
A case of mistaken @Twitter identity. Geraint Thomas (Lecturer in Visual Effects at University of South Wales), became overnight famous when @GeraintThomas86 won the Tour de France 2018. He started a #hashtag campaign #imnotacyclist and the whole story inspired our latest cartoon.
Because filling ourselves up with followers makes us feel less lonely, right?
When Social Media first lifted it’s ugly head (we didn’t think so at the time) we followed as many folks as we could on Twitter, because it was almost a dead-cert that they would follow you back and they did, stupidly!
There was an unspoken etiquette. I follow you and you follow me back, we didn’t have to ask for it, most of us just did it. Fast forward to 2018 and whenever we now follow someone on Twitter, we definitely do not get a follow back.
Then when we realised it was all going pear shaped, we didn’t follow people back and they didn’t follow us back, our follower and following tally became out of sync. Twitter limited our ability to follow, I think the number was more than 2000 twits, it then blocked us from following anymore until we ourselves got some followers back. To get the whole thing into balance.
The etiquette no longer exists, everyone is out for themselves and we want our stuff to be seen, never mind about the people we follow, we’re not even bothering to look at them.
It doesn’t matter the other way around. You can have hundreds of thousands of followers and you don’t have to follow any of them back. Roll on the celebrity in that case.
Twitter has become the home of celebrities who need social proof that they are loved and even compare the amount of followers they have with each other, like a real-time popularity contest. I’ve even heard Simon Cowell talk about this with his judging team on Britain’s Got Talent.
Happy tweeting!
Rex Tillerson was sacked via Twitter. Rex is a dog’s name right? He was such a loyal dog to Donald Trump. But as the saying goes every dog has his day and unfortunately it was Rex’s time. He inspired our latest cartoon.
It really is a new dawn in the era of social media and hiring and firing of people, thanks to the President of the USA.
Daniel Pink has a new book: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing.
I watched his RSA talk on YouTube, where he explained why timing for us humans matters.
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbicgT4KrWc[/embed]
He mentioned some studies that analysed words from a large set of date using LIWC. The way that the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) program works is fairly simple. Basically, it reads a given text and counts the percentage of words that reflect different emotions, thinking styles, social concerns, and even parts of speech.
One of those studies they analysed 500 million tweets over 2.4 million users in 84 countries to learn about their emotional content. What was very evident that the mood of the tweets vary across the time of day. Better at the start, then it dipped (the trough) and then recovered by the end of the day.
His premise after a number of other studies, like investor earning calls, students pass rates at exams, is that we all perform differently depending the time of day.
He suggest we can all work out our chronotype by calculating when we go to bed and when we get up during a non-working day, he calls it ‘free day’. Determine the mid point of the no of hours sleep and if it’s before 3.30am we are a lark and after 5.30am we are an owl. Anything else, we are a 3rd bird.
Do your deep thinking work at your best time, your admin in the trough and have insights late in the evening.
Guess what time I’m writing this on a train back from Birmingham? 10pm! It’s remarkable easy to write at this time.
Happy sleeping!
I embraced Social Media massively, studied many hours to become an expert in it and learnt from the best in the world.
Then at a business networking meeting at least 5 years ago, when I introduced myself as a Social Media trainer, the response was oh really not another one?
It made me think, I was already overwhelmed with all the networks I had to master, so I decided to specialise in LinkedIn only, I’ve always enjoyed B2B.
I came across the image below on @therealbanksy twitter and for me it really sums up the world of Social Media we live in today.
And last month (December 2017) 5 years after I became a LinkedIn trainer I stopped.
Why?
I am no longer as passionate about Social Media as I once was and I also believe it is a massive time grabber, which affects millions of us as it did for me.
99.9% of the posts that are being put out there get virtually no engagement or are never seen. I call it the ‘falling tree syndrome’. Millions of trees fall over and nobody is there to witness it. Just like your latest social media post.
Twitter has given us all a brilliant gift.
Twitter direct messages is very under-used I feel. The only way Twitter users are utilising it is by auto-messages when you follow them. I’m sorry but that’s a massive turn off for me. It’s not personal, it’s not intimate and it’s not engaging. I have stopped responding to those, because I know there was no real individual involved in sending those.
If you are a business, no matter how small or large, you must be on Twitter and you must have a direct message button on your website. In my experience, I have sent countless customer service tweets to companies, which have resulted in a fantastic response and outcome. I really value it when companies respond to me using Twitter, it’s way better than the email, way better than the voice-automated call routing and usually far more personal.
And now that we can add a direct message button it means the customer doesn’t have to send those bitter tweets publicly, they can message you direct without all that embarrassment.
Right then some instructions on how to do this, because it took me a while to figure it out. Twitter’s instructions are not that crystal clear.
Go to your Twitter account. Desktop only. Click on your profile photo top right and from the drop down, select ‘Settings’.
Select ‘Security and privacy’ from the left hand menu.
Scroll down in the right column and at the very bottom of the ‘Privacy’ section, there is an item titled ‘Direct Messages’. Select by ticking the box next to ‘Receive Direct Messages from anyone’.
Stay inside the same screen (Settings) and select from the left hand menu, one from last on the list ‘Your Twitter data’. Underneath Account history is your Username and User ID (I have blanked mine). You already know your own username and please make a note of your User ID. You will need both.
Visit https://publish.twitter.com/#. Enter your Twitter handle in the box below ‘What would you like to embed?’ Click the arrow or press enter.
Next you will scroll down to 4 options for embedding Twitter code on your website. Please select ‘Twitter Buttons’.
This will generate a pop-up with 5 options. Please select option 5 ‘Message Button’.
This will generate a second pop-up. Please enter your Twitter Handle and User ID from item 5 and click ‘Preview’.
Next are some customisation options, for example you can pre-fill some initial text and decide whether you’re like a large button. Click Update and a preview will be displayed below, together with the HTML code that is needed to supply to your webmaster or you can copy yourself and add to your website, maybe on the contact page.
Now it's your turn, go to your Twitter account and start grabbing the information you need from there and then head to https://publish.twitter.com/#
And if you enjoyed this tutorial and it worked for you, please send me a DM via Twitter. Success!
Top left: Brynne, Top right: Michael, Bottom left Ted, Bottom right Bob
We (Michael de Groot, Bob Woods, Brynne Tillman and Ted Prodromou) hold a weekly Blab on the subject of Social Selling and LinkedIn. You can join us and get your questions answered. To join the Blab you will need a Twitter account.
Just visit SocialSellingWednesday.com to subscribe to the next upcoming episode.
Takes place weekly at 8am PST, 11am EST, 4pm BST (3pm GMT), 5pm CET
In the meantime you can always catch the previous episodes below as a YouTube video replay or a Mixcloud audio podcast.
For more in-depth discussion and free information;
Social Selling Wednesday Replay Playlist on YouTube
Social Selling Wednesday Replay Podcast on MixCloud