Maryland Social Media

Social Media Monday (Vol. 6, No. 2)

November 2, 2015

The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step. ~ Lao Tzu

That first step is behind us and we are moving ahead with our Social Media Monday (SMM) blog. Since we are looking to encourage feedback, comments, and general engagement you will notice that you are able to comment this week. All comments, if determined to be beneficial to the group, will be posted to allow the SMM blog to become truly collaborative.

Now that you can comment please start sharing your thoughts and feedback. Let’s make this blog a tool from which we can all benefit!

Top Story

As we said last week over the next few weeks we will be breaking down social media platforms to provide tips and strategies on how to get the most out of your account. This week we are taking a deeper look into Twitter.

With every tweet the reader develops an opinion about your agency and furthermore the entire State. As an attempt to drive that opinion in a positive direction you should be aware of what resonates with your followers to ensure that you are nurturing a strong following and an engaged community.

Twitter Facts:

Facts about Twitter
1. Over 300 billion tweets have been sent since Twitter started in 2006
2. Tweets with image are 5 times more likely to get a re-tweet or favorite
3. Over 241 million monthly active Twitter users
4. 75% of the monthly active users are using mobile
5. Number of employees at Twitter has increased to 2000+
6. 170 minutes – Average time per month users spend on Twitter
7. 63% of brands have multiple Twitter accounts
8. YouTube is the most followed brand with over 40 million followers
9. Average number of followers per twitter user is 208
10. Largest used social media tool by Maryland agencies – 95 accounts

Demographics (% online adults using Twitter)
Men	24%
Women	21%
White, Non- Hispanic	21%
Black, Non- Hispanic	27%
Hispanic	25%
18-29	37%
30-64	36%
65+	10%
High school or less	16%
College+	30%

Pew Research Center’s Internet Research

Get the Picture?

As you can see from the numbers above adding images to a post drastically improves the overall response from any tweet. Many of the State managed accounts have few “Favorites” or “Re-tweets” which could be resolved by adding pictures.

You can easily leverage pictures for telling a story, or trailing a major event — Governor Hogan (@LarryHogan) did this after he shared his plan for the Baltimore transit system. Pictures can help celebrate or easily communicate news from your agency and help you connect with your followers.

Looking at the Governor’s Twitter account further you will see that about half of his posts are accompanied by a picture. Consider that along with having the highest percentage of favorites out of any State account and the facts are hard to argue.

Add pictures to your tweets to increase engagement and show your involvement in the State. This will help followers become and remain interested in your agency.

Stop Feeding Twitter!

Automatic feed tools like Twitterfeed do make our lives easier, but at what cost? We believe that pushing endless posts to social media hurts more than it helps. Usually this comes across as a stream of endless noise from third party pages that are only there to keep posts current. This belief is becoming more prevalent in social media circles. There are multiple examples of public and private sector companies increasing engagement and followers by simply removing auto-feeding tools.

We do think scheduled tweets for when you’re followers are more likely to be online is a great idea, but write them yourself. The upside of being a social media czar is that we get to have fun at work. So be creative and have fun with the headlines or tweets that will get the users to “read the blog” or “re-tweet” that image to show we can connect with our followers.

If Natural Resources has a video about stray cats they might post …

Shortage of pop-tarts leads to increased cat population, less rainbows and more results demanded #nyancat https://youtu.be/QH2-TGUlwu

Versus what the auto feed tool might say …

Nyan Cat [original] https://youtu.be/QH2-TGUlwu4 via @YouTube

Remember that scheduling is not only good, it’s great. However, limit the use of automatic posting tools- show that we are not cyborgs, but rather creative people.

Be Consistent!

One of the biggest issues facing most State agencies is the lack of consistency in their social media behavior. Many people try to determine what the correct number of posts are for Twitter per day. Some say you need to do at least 1 -3 tweets per day and some do as many as 10+ between 9 am and midnight. Regardless of what works for you be consistent. Once a day is fine if you get engagement from your followers, and trying 3 might get more but even in testing be consistent. Don’t try 3 today and none tomorrow and one next week.

Social Bakers studied Twitter, and took a random sample of 11,000 tweets from top brands and determined that three tweets per day is the point where brands start seeing big engagement. They go on to say that some companies tweet as many as 20 times a day with complicated policies on when and how to tweet. We are not suggesting that if you are going to have Twitter you need to tweet 3 times a day every day, but whatever you do you need to be consistent.

It’s easy to see the value of tweeting more and some agencies have found the balance between too much and not enough and that is fantastic. The issue with consistency for most agencies is the “not enough” side of the coin. Over tweeting can become annoying to followers quickly and then every tweet becomes noise, but not enough might be even worse. Not enough means you’re not truly engaged with the community and in this case the community is Twitter. Not enough can make it seem as though you’re “out of business” or at the very least not paying attention.

The bottom line is that Twitter, and all social media, is a conversation. If you and your agency cannot keep a consistent flow of tweets, posts, or snaps to social media then eliminate that platform from your media calendar.

Hash it out!

Currently, 1 in every 8 tweets includes a hashtag.

As many of you know a hashtag is a type of label used on social media to make it easier to find posts around a specific content. The benefit is that followers can immediately connect to topics and conversations that they want to join or follow to learn more.

Creating a hashtag is advantageous because your information can be easily found and you will get more followers engaging in the conversation. Having engaged participants will help you convert a majority of those people into active users and increase your community size. If you don’t want to create a hashtag then feel free to use ones that already exist in order to add your voice into the conversation.

#hoganstrong has had over 280 tweets over the last 30 days . Of course several of these are tweets from the Governor and other agencies, but in the last 30 days that hashtag has been used by the news, universities, politicians and individuals. These are all users wanting to leverage the Governor’s following online and join their conversations around a given topic.

Hash out a Hashtag plan and find relevant hashtags to your agency.

Tips for Leveraging Social Media

We are sure many of you use Google Analytics to track your website performance. But do you look at the analytics in your social media accounts? Twitter has a pretty robust analytics platform that can provide great insight. To see if you are meeting your goals you need to determine why you are using social media. These tools will then let you see if you’re meeting the goals you’ve set.

How many of you are using Twitter’s analytics?