Social Media Update

Last week was really busy, between printing and sales calls and social media work.

I’m spending about 30 minutes a day building, pruning and tuning our Twitter account. We’re around 1225 followers now, with about an 85% relevant following. We seem to be adding around 100 new followers a day and There are still about 15% in scam and spam folks, but my tuning of the filter system is really starting to shrink those numbers.

Originally, I started using TweetAdder to look for relevant followers. The cost is $55 for a single user license, and I could search by followers and following of particular profiles, but I kept getting large numbers of spammers in my follower list. I switched to TweetSpinner about three weeks ago, and now I can apply a strict filter to who I follow and who I unfollow; at what ratio I add new friends; and the activity level of my friends and followers to weed out dead or inactive accounts. While having a massive list with 100,000 followers might be cool, it’s about quality, not quantity of the base.

I use a free service called TwitterStats to track my stats. As you can see from the chart below, I did a mass unfollow of spammers in early February and then started applying filters to prevent them from building up on my base. Initially, it took my base down significantly, but as you can see from the chart we are moving back up. By the end of March, our base should be around 3,000 followers.

I also did my first tweet offer on printing this morning, with a 20% off coupon for four-color envelopes if you use a QR code on your envelope design. We can supply the QR code if needed from Qreate & Track at no extra cost. I’ll update you on how well this did in a few weeks after the offer expires. The link for it was at our Printelope website, and the discount code is QRCODE at the time of checkout. Offer expires March 10th, 2010.

For other social media and marketing:

Facebook - doubling our fans every week so far, but we are only in the double digits this month so it shouldn’t be hard to keep that progress up. I’ve spent almost no time on Facebook.

LinkedIn - Mostly just maintenance, a little group participation, but not much progress there to report.

Text Messaging – PRINT to 41411 – This service was a bust, only 11 signups after a month.  I canceled that this morning.

Blogs & News Media – I did two interviews last week with a major newspaper; and one early-morning interview with Pat Henry at WhatTheyThink.com’s Printing Office.

So far, social media has not had a huge impact on our business, but I think we’re still in our infancy on reaching out to people through it. Plus, we’re still building some of the infrastructure needed for the company to meet it’s lofty goals. This last week we investigated some other new tools for the company, and I’ll have more of a report on those in the next day or two. We are making progress, it just seems a little slow this week.

Related posts:

1. Summer Update