Sage Blog

Here’s a tough nut to crack for all you social media aficionados, how many tweets are considered ‘too many’? Most twitter users will have followed (and probably subsequently unfollowed) users who have crossed the line from a reasonable numbers of tweets, to spamming your stream.

If you run a Twitter feed, you have to work hard to build a loyal follower base and ideally you don’t want to start losing followers purely because of the volume of tweets you post. From a strictly mathematical stance your ideal volume of tweets could be worked out something like this:

According to recent research, on average every twitter account has 126 followers*. The majority of Twitter users either have a 1:1 following to follower ratio, or worse. If you assume that each of the accounts they follow tweets once per day then you can assume that their stream will receive a minimum of 126 tweets per day.

* http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2009/jun/29/twitter-users-average-api-traffic

Using this method to prevent your tweet volumes appearing spammy, I would advocate aiming to avoid having two of your tweets appear in the most recent display on Twitter when a user logs on. i.e.:

I’ve created a diagram here to show how that mathematical principle would work:

Personally speaking, I think that this kind of approach is a bit too formulaic. We’re talking about human social interaction, not engineering! After all, the reason we all use twitter is to follow people who say or discuss interesting things. I’m not going to stop following them just because they throw out a couple of extra messages a day.

It’s when a Twitter user is no longer producing interesting content that I would start to consider my options. Overall I would suggest that good content planning is more conducive to retaining followers than concerning yourself too much about a ‘golden’ number of tweets to deliver.

Try to think about your end user’s experience, review your twitter profile and read your stream. Are you adding value to your users by providing them with important content, or are you just retweeting other news sources? More often than not, you will find followers will decide to take their content from the horse’s mouth if you aren’t adding value to it.

My advice would be add your insight and comment to stories you share, that way you aren’t just aggregating other people’s content, you are creating your own.

Which after all is kind of the point!

Alex Walker, Sage Accountants’ Team @alexatsage

‘I don’t get Twitter, isn’t it just like status updates on Facebook?’

I think I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve had this conversation, and it amazes me every time that micro-blogging and following doesn’t translate to so many potential users.

To see Twitter simply as a broadcast media you miss out on one of the most significant elements of the platform, which is its ability to build multiple customised streams of data which relate to your interests and specialisms. Twitter allows you to keep abreast of the latest developments in virtually any field in real-time.

Take for instance, Ornithology.

Finding birds on Twitter!

Now I know nothing at all about birds, but if I was to suddenly take an interest, I could do a lot worse than use Twitter to find out about it. The first tool I would use is the search bar to research Ornithology.

The feed has a plethora of users posting images of birds they have seen, articles and websites all relating to Ornithology. I can also now see a number of popular #hashtags (searchable keywords) relating to Ornithology, such as #birding which gives me information about what types of birds Ornithologists have sighted, and where.

I can then refine my search further to #birding uk, which now tells me exactly where sightings have been made in the UK. I could use this information to plan out my trips to see these birds in the wild.

People results

Another useful tool for me would be the ‘People results’ which are listed on the right hand side, next to each search feed, these users all write content relevant to my search queries and so choosing to ‘Follow’ them will populate my ‘Home’ feed with lots of relevant information about my new hobby!

You could also browse through those user’s Followers to find other like-minded people; all of a sudden I’ve got a vast library of real-time content updating constantly about Birds, Birders, Birding and all things Ornithological.

Crowd-sourcing content

On the flip side though, Twitter is unbeatable as a focussed broadcast media, the ability to crowd-source content using #hashtags has fantastic potential for many fields.

Say for instance that you had spotted a particularly rare bird, for example a Montagu’s Harrier (Thank you Jeeves!) by creating a hashtag ( i.e. #montagusharrier) you and other users can search for the latest information about this bird.

By using the #montagusharrier tag, you could tell other Birders exactly where you saw the bird, and when. You could post images you might have taken, sound clips, video, blogs, the list is endless.

This information could be used to plot the bird’s movements, help other Birders and might even help to inform scientists about its behaviours!

An unusual example but one that shows the depth of information you can call from Twitter relating to any topic. I hope that this post may have provided some clarity about what Twitter does, and why it’s not ‘just like status updates’!

Alex Walker, Sage Accountants’ Team

If you’re reading this blog then you may be a regular visitor to the Sage Blog, or more likely you’ll have been directed here by a tweet.

My inspiration to write this blog came from reading an article in the BA Business Life magazine whilst I was flying last week. I read the statistic that 27% of UK SME’s use twitter. Doing a quick piece of math, 27% of 1.4 million businesses registered for VAT equals 460,000 SME businesses using twitter in the UK today…  and this number would rise to well over 1 million if you include businesses who are not VAT registered.

There is a readymade network out here that the SME can leverage, not only to share information about their business, but to set up trading network and build their brand. What’s more the buzz word in industry today is globalisation, more and more businesses are trading overseas and twitter plays to this as you’ll see in the example below, as it has no boundaries.

As a social networking tool Twitter has had a bit of a meteoric rise to fame with between 3 and 6 million users from all walks of life, with some very notable participants in the likes of Bill Gates and Barak Obama, although I’m not sure the latter writes his own tweets.

I have to admit when I tried it first time round, I was unimpressed… how can it possibly be of any use? How do I know who to follow? How do I get followers? What could I talk about? and how could I say it in only 140 characters?

Today, I’m a convert, I use twitter every day, it’s an excellent source of news and information on just about any topic. For me it allows me to keep my finger on the pulse of IT and Business information as well as to share information about Sage as well as my other passions with people who have chosen to follow me.

When I say share information with people who have chosen to follow me, the twitter network leverages the six degrees of separation principle well, so if one of my follower’s re-tweet’s my tweet, then all of their followers get to see my tweet, and so on.

To give you an example of how this works, I tweeted a link to my last blog on the secret to successful innovation then I watched what happened… even though I only have a few hundred followers myself, within the first hour, my original tweet had an audience of over 30,000 people. Within a couple of days my blog had gone around the world and turned up on other sites such as Innovation America,  it also stimulated others to reuse parts of my blog in their own innovation blog a way to keep the message alive and a complement indeed.

I was amazed by what had happened here… one piece of information, seen by a huge audience across the globe and recycled a second and third time, what’s more it increased network traffic on sage.co.uk and on average people looked at 8 pages in addition to the one they were directed to… and all from a single tweet… the power of social networking truly is amazing.

I would strongly encourage all of the SME’s reading this to think about how you might use the power of social/business networking to benefit your business. Twitter is just one part of what you need, it’s a tool to build your network, headline key information and lead people to your business. When they get there they need to find a website, or a blog with more meaningful and relevant information.

I don’t propose to tell you how to get going with twitter in this blog as it has been covered by many  people already… although you might find this link useful from CIO online and this link from Social SmallBiz who offer great advice to SME’s or our own guide to social media for small businesses.

Give it a try, other than a little of your time and effort, it’s free… and you might be as amazed with the results as I was.

Follow me on Twitter http://twitter.com/_stuartlynn

Written by Stuart Lynn, Head of R&D, Sage Mid Market Division

I had the pleasure of presenting at the StartUp show at Olympia yesterday talking about how to use social media to jump start relationships with your customers.

The blog you are reading is one of the ways that Sage is using this evolving area and combined with our twitter, facebook and youtube activity we were invited to share our thoughts to the people thinking of setting up a business in 2010.

Despite being the Digital Strategy Manager at Sage and having worked in digital for over 10 years now I still try to start my presentation planning using pen and paper. I find it slows down my brain and as a result makes me think a lot harder about what I am saying. The moment my fingers hit the keyboard I know that without that pre-planning I’ll waffle – and I think anyone who has given up time to listen to me deserves better than waffle.

Many years ago an old sales director of mine taught me a lesson. He took a sales presentation I was due to make and ripped it to pieces – each slide was trying to make multiple points, was full of text and required a lot of effort from the receiver to understand. He re-wrote it and killed 70% of the words and made sure every slide made one point and one point only. If someone who picked up the presentation could not tell what the slide meant without my explanation I had not been clear enough. Like all good lessons it hurt a little at the time but I am a better presenter for it.

Anyway the talk was very well attended, seem to be pitched at the right level and generated some great questions. The best question for me was “how do you deal with complaints and competitors moaning at you online?” At Sage we have a secret weapon (she’s called Cath) who listens out for issues and problems and then either talks directly to the person involved or directs it to the relevant part of the business. I explained that every business will have these issues – these conversations will take place – but it’s how you seek to address them that defines your commitment to your customers. We also discussed how labour intensive this area is and that its not something you can just dip in and out of – that point seemed generate a lot of head nodding.

What was most interesting for me was to see how start up businesses already have social media at the heart of their marketing planning. It’s something that a lot of very well established businesses have not even thought about. it makes me feel very positive about the future for social media.

Pete Wilson, Digital Strategy Manager