The conversational nature of Twitter makes it an ideal marketing tool – but even the big brands can get it wrong sometimes. Here are three of the biggest Twitter fails of recent times, and what you can learn from them:

Waitrose

Waitrose’s seemingly innocent hashtag #waitrosereasons invited customers to relay their reasons for shopping at the supermarket chain. The brand’s PR team clearly hadn’t predicted responses such as “because Tesco doesn’t stock unicorn food” and “because I hate poor people”.

Lesson – If your company is going to rely on user generated recommendations, you need to allow for the negative as well as the positive. Weigh up the pros and cons, and if it seems too risky, don’t do it!

Celeb Boutique

UK fashion site Celeb Boutique gained fame for all the wrong reasons when they tweeted “#Aurora is trending, clearly about our Kim K inspired #Aurora dress” – on the day of the mass shooting in Aurora, Colorado.

Lesson – Keep up to date with current affairs, or you could end up posting a tweet that’s inappropriate or downright offensive, tarnishing your brand’s reputation in the process.

Susan Boyle

A promotion for Susan Boyle’s latest album launch went awry when her PR team came up with the truly hilarious hashtag #susanalbumparty.

Lesson –Always check your hashtags! Words that seem innocent separately can run together into something rather embarrassing.

If you’re starting out in social media marketing and want to side-step potential fails, check out NSDesign’s ‘Embrace the Space’ social media masterclasses.

When it comes to social media, Twitter is something of a double edged sword. Yes, it’s quick and easy to use, and allows you to communicate with hundreds of followers simultaneously, but it’s also a fast moving, real time medium and sometimes, it’s difficult a) to keep things interesting and b) to keep up with what’s happening! If you’re having trouble coming up with tweets that achieve and engage, check out these three ways to improve your Twitter strategy…

Start using Vine

Video is big news in the content marketing sphere, and more and more businesses are using the six second video clip app to their advantage. Many company timelines have become clogged up with nothing but text posts, so using Vine will give your audience some refreshing visual content to break up the monotony, and depending on your skills as a creative/camera person, could even make them laugh or teach them something new about your business.

Follow some new accounts

Twitter offers a great little function that suggests accounts you might be interested in following – and it’s often right! Adding just a couple of new accounts a week will deliver fresh content to your timelines (perfect for retweets!) and hopefully get you some of those precious follow backs in return. While you’re at it, this is also a great opportunity to delete those accounts whose tweets you always scroll straight past – social media is all about engagement, so it’s pointless following people you’re just going to ignore, or who aren’t interested in anything you have to say.

Invest in scheduling software

If it’s the real time aspect of Twitter that you find challenging, scheduling software might just be your social media lifesaver. Applications like Hootsuite and Tweetdeck allow you to schedule relevant tweets and updates in advance, so that even if you’re out of the office or in a big meeting for most of the day, your account won’t stay silent. Of course you’ll still need to log in from time to time to make sure you’re not missing any breaking stories, but scheduling software can free up your time and keep your Twitter profile active, even when you’re not.

Hashtags on Twitter are something of a conundrum for marketers. On one hand, they’re a great way to promote your products and services, but they need to be carefully thought through or they can bring more negative publicity than positive (we all remember Susan Boyle’s ill-fated album release hashtag, #susanalbumparty). However, a new survey from Radium One has shown that social media marketers can and should be using hashtags – here are some of the key stats.

• 43% of consumers said that they found hashtags useful
• 20% believe that hashtags are primarily useful for identifying information about a particular product or brand
• Consumers are already wise to the trend of hashtags on a personal level – 58% of people are already using them
• 70% of those people are posting them from mobile devices, meaning that they are using the tool even when they are on the go
• When questioned about their use of hashtags in relation to brands, 50% of participants said that they would use them more frequently than normal if they were linked to a discount
• 17% said that they would be willing to share the promotion on their social profile and follow the brand that the promotion came from, if they weren’t already

The lesson here for marketers is that consumers are willing to connect with your brand using hashtags – particularly when you’re willing to offer them an advantage in return. However, you don’t always have to lure consumers in with money off – hashtags are also a great way of indexing your tweets and making it easier for consumers to find content that interests them. Either way, consumers appear to have a positive perception of hashtags whatever the circumstance – it’s time to fire up your Twitter account and get hashtagging!

A new infographic from Browser Media has shown that many consumers have given up watching movies, reading books, going out and even sleeping to keep up with their social media updates.

Browser Media’s research revealed that 51% of all people now sacrifice ‘real life’ activities for social media, and that figure rises to a staggering 68% for users in the 18-24 age bracket.

Women are more likely to make these sacrifices – 73% of them use social networking sites and spend around 60 minutes a day on them, compared with 62% of men, who spend approximately 48 minutes a day browsing through social updates. The biggest users of social media in the UK are said to be young, female users from Sheffield, who dedicate around 72 minutes a day to these sites, but users across the country are catching up quickly.

Whilst it may seem like something of a shame that consumers are spending less time completing more social daily tasks, such as cooking, exercising, and spending time with their partners, it could actually be good news from a business perspective. The fact that users are investing more in social media and taking more time to interact gives you a much wider possibility of connecting with them and getting their attention. Make the most of your consumers increased online presence by posting frequent daily updates tailored to their interests – you might be surprised at the response you get!

It was announced earlier this week that Twitter will be shutting down their apps for TweetDeck – their removal from app stores will commence in early May, and any apps that have already been downloaded with cease to function shortly afterwards.

Explaining the situation in a blog post, the company wrote: “TweetDeck is the most powerful Twitter tool for tracking real-time conversations. Its flexibility and customizable layout let you keep up with what’s happening on Twitter across multiple topics and accounts in real time. To continue to offer a great product that addresses your unique needs, we’re going to focus our development efforts on our modern, web-based versions of TweetDeck.”

Twitter may see this as a progressive action, but where does this leave companies who want to keep up with their tweets whilst on the move? Well, Tweetdeck apps may be coming to an end, but there are still a few useful options in the app market:

• Hootsuite
  Popular social media management tool Hootsuite has an app function that puts ‘the dashboard in your hand’, allowing you to manage platforms as diverse as Facebook, Foursquare and WordPress from the comfort of your smartphone. 
• Bottlenose
  The self-proclaimed ‘secret weapon’ of social media – Bottlenose – is another option which allows you to control a variety of sites from one place, and is particularly useful for highlighting trends and compiling analytics. It’s one of the more creative options on the market, and even includes a function which allows you to view any stream as a real time newspaper! 
• TwitIQ
  One of the few options designed exclusively for Twitter monitoring, TwitIQ pitches itself as a ‘smarter Twitter client’. It allows you track and share tweets and provides insights into your follower base, whilst enhancing your Twitter experience and generating feedback for improvement.

A new infographic from Compete explores that way consumers behave when they access Twitter from their mobile phones – information that could affect the way your business uses Twitter to engage with your customer base.

Here are some of the key findings:

• 80% of UK users now access their Twitter account from their mobile devices
• 1 in 3 mobile Twitter users access their account on their commute to work
• 1 in 4 use it when they’re out shopping
• 67% of mobile users follow brands on Twitter
• A quarter of them follow an impressive 10+ brand accounts
• 50% of a brand’s followers are there to access customer service
• 45% of mobile users are likely to recommend a brand that they follow 

There are two key lessons your business can draw from this new social media data. The first is that the timing of your tweets is important: e.g. if you’re targeting people who work in offices, consider scheduling your tweets for the times of day when they’re going to be travelling to or from work.

The second is that even though consumers may initially follow you to access customer service, you can turn them into a brand advocate if you respond in a prompt and helpful way to all their queries. And as we all know, there’s no better marketing method than word of mouth endorsements.

By now, most businesses have grasped the basics of Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin, but more and more experts are now stressing the importance not only of social media, but of visual social media content. If you want to use visual content for your business, but aren’t sure how to get going, this helpful guide to the most popular sites is a good place to start.

Pinterest

Pinterest is essentially a virtual pinboard – it allows users to ‘pin’ images to a designated board, usually themed around a particular lifestyle topic such as food and drink, fashion or health and fitness. Uploading images of your e-commerce catalogue is a useful move for beginner accounts – once they start to get ‘repinned’, you’ll increase your brand awareness and drive additional traffic to your site. You can link to your pinned items from your Facebook page, as this provides much-needed pictorial content.

Instagram

Instagram is a photo sharing app for mobile users. You can either upload your images as they are, or add one of 17 different filters to add a fun vintage effect to your picture. Instagram is owned by Facebook, but your updates can be shared through your other sites too, making image sharing quicker and easier than ever.

Vine

A relative newcomer to the social media scene, Vine is another app based offering from the creators of Twitter which allows you to create 6 second video clips. This is a great option if you want to share an image or message that isn’t static – great examples from companies like Malibu are already online if you need inspiration!

All of these apps and sites are free to use, so it won’t cost you anything to create an account and have a go. Got a question? Leave us a comment or tweets us at @nsdesign and we’ll get back to you.

Twitter’s Vine app, which allows users to upload brief six second videos, was only launched at the end of January, but has already inspired a wealth of creative clips from big name brands like Gap, Malibu and ASOS. However, whilst some companies are clearly seeing Vine as a blessing for their business, overall it garnered a surprisingly mixed reception from critics, with some naysayers declaring that it’s more hassle than it’s worth.

Linda Boff, executive director of global brand marketing at General Electric, is a Vine advocate – her company was one of the first companies to jump on the Vine bandwagon. “Vine is a natural complement to Twitter – it’s creative storytelling driven by constraint,” she explained. “We’ve seen strong organic engagement and we love that it delivers on what the internet increasingly wants – mobile-first, stream-based, visual storytelling.”

Boff identifies on two key trends that the Vine experience has seized upon – firstly, the growing prevalence of mobile devices amongst consumers, and secondly, the rising demand for visual based content, as evidenced by other social media sites such as Pinterest and Instagram. However, those on the other side of the spectrum see Vine as an unwelcome addition to an already crowded marketplace. One digital marketing agency chief, who spoke anonymously to the Financial Times, said that Vine simply created “another headache, another cost” for brands that are struggling to cope with the vast range of digital marketing mediums that are already available.

Only time will tell how successful Vine will truly be, and for now, it seems the jury is out amongst industry experts too. What do you think – will you be adding Vine to your marketing mix immediately, or keeping an eye on it as it grows?

Digital marketing strategy these days is often centred on social media and SEO, in a frantic competition to get as many likes, shares, and retweets possible and climb to the top of the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). Whilst these modern methods are essential to an overall online marketing approach, it’s important that companies do not forget about an old faithful technique in the madness. Email marketing may have lost its sheen thanks to the real time buzz of Twitter and Facebook, but statistics from the last twelve months tell us not to discount it from your strategies for 2013.

Econsultancy’s Content Marketing Survey Report from October 2012 showed that 50% of marketers still champion email as one of their most effective types of content – an no other kind of content came out with a higher percentage. Plus, according to a 2012 survey from Silverpop, click through rates for email are still higher than online advertising.

A StrongMail survey carried out in December showed that 56% of marketers plan to increase their email marketing budget for 2013, and revealed that they plan to incorporate it into their social strategy rather than seeing social media as a replacement. 65% of those surveyed planned to integrate email marketing with social media, showing that although it’s an older marketing method, email can still work in harmony with the new.

These figures tell us that email marketing still a major player in the digital marketing sphere. After all, it’s is an easy, economical and effective method of reaching a wide audience simultaneously, so make sure you don’t ignore it!

It’s that time of year again! New Year’s resolutions aren’t just for the home – they can be a great motivational tool in the office as well. The beginning of January is the perfect time to make a fresh start with your digital marketing campaign, so here are a few ideas to get you started.

Give your website a makeover

Your website is the online shop front for your business, so it’s important to keep it looking fresh, innovative and up to date. 2012 was the year that mobile search took off, so your first port of call should be to make sure your site is equally appealing on all platforms (check out our blog piece about responsive web design to find out more!) Even if you had your website redesigned recently, there are still ways that you can improve it – for instance, you could consider adding a blog or Twitter feed to keep the page active and interesting.

Revamp your social media

If your Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn profile has looked the same for months on end, why not make a change? Something as simple as a new cover photo or sparky new ‘About’ section could give you the edge over competitors who leave their pages static. Whilst you’re at it, why not try a new social media site? Relative newcomers such as Pinterest and Instagram could have a big impact on the visual aspect of your marketing strategy – just make sure you set aside enough time to update them frequently.

Make a schedule

Speaking of organising your time, there’s no better way to keep on top of your updates than with a clear cut content schedule. Plan when you’re going to post social media statuses, tweets, blog articles etc and find a way to make it happen alongside your daily workload. Social signals are becoming increasingly important for SEO as well as brand awareness, so investing a small amount of time in your planning could lead to big rewards as the year goes on.