Twitter. Why do you want more followers?

A tweet appeared on my timeline recently "I need more followers" and I wondered why. I guess that tweeting away if nobody is reading is akin to talking to oneself but surely the followers will follow if there is a reason to do so.

So, why do you need or want more followers? Perhaps the ones you have don't interact - do you interact with them?

To find tweeters with some common ground, search for your local town or the football club you support, look at their profiles or follow them for a while (you can always un-follow - and don't worry if you lose some followers along the way).

Why do you need more followers? For business marketing purposes, this is understandable - it's a measure of the popularity of your brand and an opportunity to market to a wider audience. It's also an opportunity to interact with your customers and potential customers or provide them with a service. You may be interested in How to Increase Your Twitter Followers.

Some people are obsessed with increasing their number of followers on a personal level. In order to do this, many who are not wittily original or otherwise interesting (or famous) often use the strategy of following as many people as possible in the hope that they will be followed back. What's the point? These are value-less followers because people who are following numerous accounts are clearly not interested in reading all the tweets.

Of course, the canny ones who follow thousands will create a list or lists of tweeters that they are really interested in so that they can easily be read, and the other tweets ignored.

Whenever someone follows my twitter account, I do them the courtesy of checking them out and deciding whether I want to follow them back. Usually, if I find their tweets interesting, informative, relative, I'll follow back but I will un-follow if they tweet too many times a day or just keep plugging the same thing: boring! There are several people who followed me then stopped following me, reasons unknown, but it doesn't matter - in the same way that not everyone I meet becomes a friend.

I like to feel some connection with people I follow and therefore my main disappointment is that I don't get much interaction. For example, if I'm interesting enough to follow, why not respond or retweet?

You can follow The BPc at twitter.com/BPcUK.

Comments/responses are welcome ... 

Is Branding More Important than Customers' Needs?

During the process of designing and creating a Brand for products, many other factors take priority over what the customer would like.

For example, if a global company sells a range of beauty products, they would have to put specific information on the packaging for various countries, which means that the packaging may be larger and incur additional costs when multiplied by millions - what normally happens is that the font size used is as small as they can realistically manage. This makes choosing a new product off the shelf a very difficult task for people over middle-age, unless they are used to wearing their glasses on shopping trips.

Additionally, a super-chic brand likes to keep packaging uniform so that the brand is identifiable at a glance. If branding dictates that a box should be pink with red, white and blue polka-dots, customers can easily spot it amongst all the other brands.

However, when you take home your spotty boxes and throw them away, you are often left with identical product containers inside, with just the 8pt font to indicate whether it is night cream or day cream, eye make up remover or nail varnish remover.

Some companies get it right and consider the more mature client who uses the bathroom sans reading glasses - a dark blue label for night cream and a sunny yellow label for day cream with SPF 75 (possibly lobster red labelling for day cream with a low SPF? Haha!) These companies probably have a staff with mature ladies in positions of influence - even if it is the boss's wife!

0845 'phone numbers

I have long avoided calling 0845 numbers. They are a total rip-off and it makes me angry that we are forced to PAY to WAIT for service - it's like paying for every second we queue for tellers at a bank or check-outs at a supermarket! You can't help wondering if revenue-generating waiting times are deliberately longer.

Even the government's HMRC condones, in fact uses, 0845 numbers. I can see that the original concept was to cover costs of the service but it is an unfair system when there is no alternative. With no choice, the caller has no control over the amount he/she will spend - how long in the queue, the quality of the response at the call centre, etc. - or if it will be value-for-money and time well spent.

So... a plea to businesses: don't sign up for these services because you will lose customers. Dave Millet of the Branduin Business Support team seems to be the person who can help small businesses with their telecoms decisions (no, he's not paying me for this but he has helped a couple of our clients).

New Year's Resolution

Well, we've been paying for the new site for more than two years now and haven't progressed. It really needs to move upwards on the 'to do' list.

We started to develop it in WordPress and probably set out to accomplish too much all at once. Perhaps if we just put up a two-page site for now, we could build it modularly. In other words, follow our own advice to our clients who feel overwhelmed at the prospect of pulling everything together.

In our case, we rarely have more than a couple of hours available before a client requires our attention - and the clients must be our first priority for, without them, we really would need a spectacular website in order to attract new clients!

Resolution for 2013: Publish the new website.

Meanwhile, feel free to read our blogs:

• Tips for social media, blogging, SEO and website design
• News about some of our clients

... and definitely Follow BPcUK on Twitter. Thank you!

Season's Greetings

Best wishes for the coming year

Oh the Irony... SEO

Someone called this morning to tell me that search results for our web site were not good (we know this). She continued to say that what we needed was some SEO then launched into an explanation of the benefits of SEO.

In the original post on this blog, in 2010, I mentioned that our website had been in need of redevelopment for four years (make that six now!). This is particularly embarrassing because we develop websites for clients and have started work on a new website design more than once, in fact, whenever there's a dull moment - but there's always another client requirement to fulfil. Obviously, I'm not complaining about that!

Our main source of revenue is SEO! So, yes, I actually know what it means and why it's important but there are two reasons it's not currently applied to our website: our website needs a total revamp and most of our business is by referral.

Surely, if the caller had bothered to look at our website, she would at least have had a clue that we know a bit about about SEO? Well, actually, no... the site was created around 2002 and last revamped (cough) more than seven years ago when terminology was different - we used words such as 'optimisation' and 'e-marketing'.

So, ironically, as the cobbler's children needed shoes, the design and marketing company needs to put its website in order. The one thing we don't need is a caller from an unknown agency who won't stop talking long enough for a polite refusal. I had to talk over her to say goodbye as I hung up.

(Note to self: New Year's Resolution - website revamp!)

Business Adviser or Business Advisor?

This advisor/adviser explanation makes sense but how can you trust someone's English when they write alternate instead of alternative?
viz:

"Advisor" is usually listed as an alternate spelling of "adviser"

(Oh well, OK in the USA, I suppose.)

However, if you want to make up your own mind from a wealth of opinions and references, read this 'English rules writing guide' including the comments about different ways of spelling certain words.