Twitter, Serendipity and School Food Matters

Twitter is a funny thing.   I went to an interesting networking event last Wednesday where three very erudite women were asked to talk about their passions.  One of the women presenting, Stephanie Wood - gave an excellent, concise and impassioned talk on her charity -  School Food Matters.

School Food Matters is a small charity that has picked up the baton that Jamie Oliver so obviously held and waved when doing his series of TV programmes about school meals.  The aim of the charity is to engage schools and school children in food - the food that is cooked at school, how it is cooked, where it is grown and to give the school the tools and impetus to improve the quality of the food presented from the kitchen.  The other aim of the charity is to encourage the children/schools to grow some of their own food - to reconnect children with the cycle of life. Plant, water, grow, harvest, cook and eat (and if there is a surplus, sell at the local Waitrose).

Now serendipity -  I get to spend and hour with Stephanie in a little coffee shop in Sheen talking about Twitter - nothing to do with food - because somehow, somewhere along the line people have found that I know stuff about Twitter and that I can teach them things that they don't know, and that is what I have just done - an hour and a half lesson in Twitter and hopefully Stephanie will be a more effective Twitterer!

Who would have thought 10 months ago when I started this twitter adventure I would be doing this!  Life is an interesting adventure and twitter can make it so much more so!

To follow Stephanie on Twitter @sfmtweets

Twitter - what advice would I give - 5 pointers for beginners

I wouldn't class myself as a beginner on Twitter after 8 month of active use.  So, what advice would the now more proficient and able twitter me give a beginner?

1.     Always have a profile picture and bio - people do look at it and often visit the website given too.  It's a first port of call and therefore essential that it gives a flavour of who you are and what you do.

2.    Don't go hell for leather trying to get followers or even follow people.  Try out twitter, see how comfortable you feel with it and select the people you follow carefully.  If you are doing it properly it is not a numbers game.  People who interact with you and are interesting may not be the obvious ones.

3.     Think hard about why you are on twitter and what you want to do with it:

• To promote yourself and your services, a book, shop, product or idea: - Promoting yourself and your services - you have to make sure that you are promoting to people who can either use your services, or know people who might be interested.  Twitter does give you a profile on social media that other platforms don't but as to how effective a selling medium it is I don't know. Perhaps others could let me know.

• Keeping up to date within your chosen field of interest - that has proved to be one of the best aspects of Twitter for me.  I have been amazed at how much information there is out there and how readily people share

• For the laugh and to 'meet' interesting people - that definitely is possible, lots of laughs and facinating people, but beware Twitter is and can be a huge time waster.  Monitor your time carefully.

• Celebrity chasing - you only follow 'influential' people - Celebrity chasing - well what can I say, it does it for some people.

• To chat with your friends why do that on Twitter I can do that in other ways.  For me Twitter has proved to be a network of interesting people that I would not normally have made contact with - so why just chat with your friends?  Get out and tweet new people. 

4.   Interact with people - if you see a tweet that you find interesting - comment and get a dialogue going.  It does rather feel like butting in on a conversation but sometime they can be the most interesting interactions. 

5.    Don't worry about who is following you - or who unfollows you.  It is not a numbers game and to follow or not is their choice - it's not personal (hopefully).

The most important thing I have learnt about being on Twitter is

 (drum roll) 
Be yourself!

Six, now seven, of the best websites to make it easier to manage your social media life!

Listed below are a number of websites that were recommended at the Social Media seminar I went to given by Keren Lerner of Top Left Design and Alicia Cowen - to make managing your social media life easier.

I am still working my way through all of them - some proving more useful for me than others. 

Mashable : Social Media news blog covering cool new websites and social networks: Facebook, Google, Twitter, MySpace and YouTube

Tweetdeck :is your personal browser for staying in touch with what's happening now, connecting you with your contacts across Twitter, Facebook, MySpace

Tapatalk : More engagement and participation - Mobile solution for online communities, empowering discussion forums with mobile access since 2009.

Google Reader : constantly checks your favourite news sites and blogs for new articles and information.

Buffer: makes it super easy to share any page you're reading. Keep your Buffer topped up and we automagically share posts for you through the day.

Bitly: Wonderful site that shortens the URL's of sites that you think are interesting so that you don't use up all of your 140 characters when sending a tweet. 

Hootsuite:  Helps you manage your Twitter account, scheduling tweets, seeing whats come in that you need to respond to and allowing you to sort out your twitter feed into manageable columns of data.

There were many others but I think that these were some of the most useful. 

Having  spent a couple of weeks sorting myself out the top two of the above websites that I would recommend for the beginner are: BITLY and HOOTSUITE

How to start in social media - Linkedin, Twitter, Blogging: advice given, lists and musings

My first post on this blog and it's not going to be about Interior Design but Social Media and how to do it!

Keren Lerner of Top Left Design and Alicia Cowen from Absolute Alicia (social media gurus - bow down in acknowledgment) gave an excellent seminar on Social Media and the hows, whys and wherefores of it all.  Between the two of them and some excellent graphics the intricacies and effectiveness of this new(ish) medium were explained to the dinosaurs in the room.

Advice Given:

Lots!  But of the many snippets of information one of the phases that most struck home was that "this kind of marketing is an effective online means of getting more people to know, like and trust you".

1. Have a plan
2. Decide how you want to be viewed and carry it across all media
3. Have a good 'landing page' - which should have an intro, great content and if possible a 'call to action' get people to do something so that they are 'engaged'.
4. Be informative
5. Optimize
6. Make sure your labels, tags, thumbnails hold key words to increase your SEO (see below)
7. Share interesting videos, facts and pictures.
8. Use google +

Linkedin

1. Join Linkedin - and ensure that this is a business orientated profile (although some people use it differently)
2. Be strategic about which groups you join on Linkedin.
3. Complete your profile
4. Don't link it to your twitter feed.
5. Do link it to your blog if you blog is business orientated and informative.

Twitter

1. If you join Twitter - remember to Twit!
2. Create lists of people that you are following.
3. It's good to follow competitors.
4. Remember to retweet - and credit the people you are retweeting.
5. A good ratio to work to is 80 others retweeting content and 20 your own.

Blog

1. Get your personality across
2. Put key words in your headline
3. Plan your content ahead of time.
4. There are many different blog hosts they mentioned wordpress, I personally use Blogger which I find easier to navigate.
5. Remember to put good words into your blog that are search engine friendly, also the title should be SEO (search engine optimized - and yes I was the one who asked what that was)!
6. Think of good, punchy, effective titles to you blogs.
7. Lists are good
8. Photo's to illustrate your blogs are also essential - and remember to credit people where necessary. 
9. Lots of white space ie don't make it to busy.  People read blogs differently than books, papers - they scan blogs.
10. Short sentences - punchy information
11. Be consistent about blogging.
12. A blog can be as good as probably better than a static website - it is an effective sales and marketing medium - use it well and it will repay you fourfold.

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So here I am trying to implement all that I learnt and at the beginning of my foray into Social Media.  Please do let me know what you think of my first blog and hopefully eventually, with the help of my dinosaur I will get onto Interior Design!