12 days of Christmas season poll ideas for Twitter

By Paula Wethington

Have you tried out the Twitter poll feature?

I wrote a just for fun poll for Halloween and another one for Thanksgiving on a newspaper account that I manage, and we had good responses on both. Specifically: there were 77 replies for Halloween and 143 for Thanksgiving on an account that has about 12,500 followers.

Beyond simply interacting with the audience, it became a user generated content tactic because I reported on the results of our polls in the newspaper and on our Twitter feed.

The older “Twitter voting” tactics are still valid. Specifically, I expect that you’ll continue to see “fav for … RT for …” conversations from certain brands because those social media managers know the retweets result in a boost in organic views and traffic from fans.

But Twitter polls are easy to create. In addition, the features  include results in real time for you, and a reply to the participants at the end of the poll so they can see the final counts.

The tricks to creating a successful Twitter poll include:

• Pick a topic that has a general interest among your active followers.
• Keep the question and replies short.
• Launch the poll when you know your followers are likely to see and respond in real time. You’ll get the first responses in a matter of minutes; and the cutoff time is 24 hours.
• Avoid topics that are sensitive or nuanced. You can address those topics in other ways.
• Ask “this or that,” avoid using “other” as a reply.
• Don’t use a poll to criticize or call out your competition.
• Consider retweeting the poll on your secondary or partner accounts  after launch.
• Consider “pinning” the poll on the top of your profile while it is running.

Now that you understand what the poll option is and how it works, here are some scripts that you can use for the holiday season. Twitter polls originally allowed just two replies, but play around with it. I used a three reply question at Thanksgiving and have seen one on another account that used four replies. The Next Web also has confirmed that Twitter was testing updates to the poll feature.

Christmas season poll questions

Did you find a Black Friday deal worth bragging about? (Change this up to Small Business Saturday, Cyber Monday or Free Shipping Day as appropriate to your audience)

• Yes.
• No.

The first Christmas cookie you eat from the tray is in shape of:

• Star.
• Tree.
• Santa.

What name do you give the man in the red suit?

• Mr. Claus
• St. Nick.
• Santa

Favorite Christmas color palette? (Pick the options that will get the fastest replies from your followers. Are they interested in Disney characters, do they enjoy the outdoors, what color schemes do you see on their home exteriors?)

• Red and white.
• Red and green.
• Cranberry and evergreen.
• Gold and white.
• Silver and gold.
• Ice blue and white.
• Pink and teal.
• Purple and gold.
• Green and brown.

When does your family open Christmas gifts?

• Christmas Eve.
• Christmas Day.

What goes on the top of your tree?

• Angel
• Star
• Bow.

What colors are your Advent wreath candles? (The wreath tradition has faded out in favor of Advent calendars, but if this custom is known among your audience this is a good question.)

• Blue and pink.
• Purple and pink.

Your Christmas tree is:

• Real.
• Fake.
• Don’t have a tree.

Your Christmas dinner entrée is: (pick the foods known to be favorites among your audience.)

• Turkey.
• Ham.
• Tamales.
• Roast beef.
• Fish.
• Lasagna.
• Other

What is your favorite Christmas candy?

• Chocolate.
• Peppermint.

Does an Elf visit your home before Christmas?

• Yes
• No.
• What are you talking about?

How much snow do you want to see at Christmas?

• None.
• 1 to 2 inches.
• Blizzard conditions. (Use the phrasing your audience is familiar with for extreme weather conditions. For example, “Level 3” is known among Ohio residents as the point when roads are closed to all non-emergency personnel.)

If you like this post, follow me on Twitter or Pinterest where I also discuss and link up social media topics.

Should you follow back that Twitter account?

 

By Paula Wethington

You got a ping that someone followed you on Twitter.

Since you didn’t recognize the screen name, you ignored it.

This happened over and over. Now there is a huge list of people who are following you and the guilt trip whispers begin:

“Follow me.”

Here’s the challenge: You don’t know who those people are. Do you really want to follow them back?

It takes time to sort this out if you have a typical account with about 200 Twitter followers; even more so if you are handling social media accounts on behalf of a company, brand or organization that has built up hundreds or thousands of Twitter fans.

Don’t stress about this challenge! Take time about once a week to look for new people to follow and handling follow backs.

There are numerous tools for finding people on Twitter, and that’s how many of the people you’ve never heard of have found you. But in this discussion, I’ll focus on the decisions you make next.

In other words: “Should I follow that Twitter account?”

Here are some of the criteria I use when making those decisions on the personal and business Twitter accounts I manage:

• Does the person’s cover art, avatar and photos provide clues? One of the best tricks I’ve used for finding local residents for the newspaper accounts I manage is whether the photos used on profile and cover art include photos featuring local high school and college teams.
• What topics are they tweeting and retweeting about? Is this content you are interested in, or would expect your customers or clients to be interested in?
• What’s the proportion of promotional content on their feed? Nearly everyone gives shout outs (or rants) from time to time dealing with a business, campaign or project. But what else are they talking about? Do they have content that is interesting, helpful or fun? Do they retweet other content or get involved in chats?
• Do you see a repeated pattern of spammy or “not safe for work” content? If so, consider whether you wish to block that account rather than simply ignore it.
• How often are they tweeting? Some social media managers recommend focusing your time and effort adding on those who are tweeting on a frequent basis. I’m a bit more generous in following seemingly inactive accounts that are in my target audience, as I  know some people who lurk on Twitter and never really post much.
• What news and sports accounts are they following? Favorite teams and headline interests provide clues as to where they live or whether they have the same interests as your target audience. I use this tactic quite a bit to determine the location in cases where the account doesn’t have a location listed.
• What accounts are they following that you are already following? When I start seeing a lot of similarities in their “following” list, I assume this is someone I probably want to follow or follow back.
• If they have “favorited” tweets, what did they favorite? This might help you sort out spambots in cases where content alone isn’t providing a definitive answer.
• If they have created lists, what titles have they given to their lists? Have they put you on a list? Keep in mind that new Twitter users won’t be familiar with how to set up or use lists. It’s also true that some lists are automatically created with third-party applications. But the fact that there are lists show that the person is a fairly savvy user of Twitter.

By the way, you can follow me at @WethingtonPaula

Case study in social listening: When fans say you’re wrong

By Paula Wethington @WethingtonPaula

If you’re wrong about something, or your fans think you’re wrong, that audience can be quick to tell you on social media.

In a worst case scenario, this can become a public relations nightmare.

But in other cases, a quick answer with a sense of humor will smooth things over.

Apply the concept called “social listening” to your routine, through which you watch what your community says, and you’ll soon realize when and how to step in.

A quick case study: I run the twitter account for The Monroe News, a daily newspaper in southeast Michigan.

Our sports editor picked Whiteford High school over Summerfield High School in a football rivalry game Sept. 18, 2015. That night, I started getting Twitter messages tagging @monroenews that were calling out our sports editor and / or mentioning who won the game.

We don’t usually see social media reactions on the sports predictions, although those previews are hugely popular with our print audience. Because the sports reporters were still on deadline, it was up to me if there would be a response while the conversations were still taking place.

I wrote one Tweet that got this point across: We see you. Thanks for reading.

The response was 13 reweets and 24 favorites on my “Hello Summerfield fans” tweet with an emoji football and an emoji paw print as a salute to the Summerfield Bulldogs.

That’s pretty good engagement for an account that had 12k followers at the time.

This post was written in January 2016, and updated in May 2017.

Step by step: How to pin a tweet

To find the menu, tap on that specific tweet and look for the three dots on the right side below the message. Click on that. To reverse / unpin, do the same. — Paula Wethington.

What is social media listening, and why is that important?

By Paula Wethington @WethingtonPaula

If you treat social media primarily as an opportunity to broadcast your message, you will miss the entire reason to have a social media account.

When you represent a personality, brand or organization on social media; you also are expected to follow and become part of the social media conversations. This includes answering customer service questions and replying to comments that come up, but goes beyond.

The detail that sets the experts apart in social media is joining in the conversations that other people lead or introduce.

You will notice those conversations only IF you lurk or watch what people say on channels that don’t directly involve you. In social media jargon, this is called “social listening.”

If your social media fans and followers show they are interested in something, even if it is not normally part of your content choices, take note. It may be a topic you can chime in on, or one where you can share a link. It may be one of the hashtag games that you can contribute a clever message to. For example, Opening Day of Baseball is a popular time for sports chatter.

But you also need to watch for the times when social media goes into “stand down” mode. This is like a moment of silence but it’s very grass roots. People express sympathies or are quiet on social media. They don’t like off topic chatter crowding out what they think the conversation should be.

The anniversary of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, is one of those you can expect. Memorial Day and Mother’s Day also are among the occasions you can count on for social media conversations to be different than the routine.

Other situations will happen in response to the news of the day. For example, when I was paying attention to Twitter conversations during the school shootings in Newton CT, I saw numerous social media professionals warning each other to cancel “scheduled promotions.” The audience just wasn’t in the mood to hear it that day.

The point is: pay attention and take clues from what you see, read and notice. When the audience notices that you respect their side of the conversation, you’ll be taken more seriously.

I have a huge collection of social media tips and tricks on my Pinterest account.

This post was written in September 2015 and updated in May 2017.

My “do it yourself” education in digital media

It was 2008 when I first decided my career path would move into the digital media side of journalism.

I had already dabbled in digital media by serving on the admin team of the reader forum for The Monroe News. I also had launched a personal finance site that was well on its way to becoming our newspaper’s most successful blog.

But there was no clear career path for this emerging role.

The assumptions were that such a person would already have information technology skills and ideas and bring them to the newsroom.

I had a knack for computer skills and an interest in the Internet, with early adopter “street cred” that included building a couple of hobby websites in the late 1990s. I did not, however, have what would be considered the latest I.T. training. Because of that and unrelated staffing issues, I decided to sit out the job opening and consider that as a next step in the future.

After the person who was initially hired was no longer with our company, we went into a “learn as you go” mode encouraging anyone who was interested to try something and share with the others any ideas or what they found had worked. Text and Skype messages, a Google doc to share links, and ad hoc meetings throughout the week were the building blocks for what became our digital media procedures; while our digital media manager attended conferences and I would follow blogs and Twitter chats on social media and new journalism.

In fall 2014, I was invited to meet with a college student who was considering career options to explain what a digital media producer does for a news organization. We did not refill that position full time at The Monroe News; instead, the duties for that role were split among various people. But I had years of experience handling it on a part-time basis. I looked on JournalismJobs.com for job descriptions to give the college student, told her “Every newsroom needs someone like this,” and we had a good discussion.

That sparked my interest in researching what else I could do to become the ideal candidate for such work full time, should the opportunity come up.

I could not afford either the time or the expense to go to graduate school, but I did learn there are some practical, free and low-cost options for training in this genre. I found this information based on certification programs that I was noticing in job descriptions or on LinkedIn profiles and in recommendations from people I follow in social media.

For all practical purposes, a constant pursuit of knowledge is necessary in this field. Best practices frequently change based on which apps and technology are considered up and coming; paired with whatever tactics are declared by consensus and experience to be “no longer working.”

But any training at all is a good building block for whatever comes next.

As of August 2015, I have completed numerous webinars and modules from:

• Poynter’s News U.
• Hubspot. (This program updates every year).
• Hootsuite.
• Canva.

And I’m currently working on Kate Buck Jr.’s Social Media Manager Pro course.

I also knew from working on various professional and personal projects over the years that digital media is temporary. Links expire, websites go down, authors and journalists change beats. I’d bookmark or pin articles, sometimes download them to my computer, but couldn’t always find exactly what I saved.

That’s why, about that time, I started printing off the best examples, how to resources and checklists to save in a more permanent manner. I have them sorted and saved in a series of pink binders by topic.

Why pink? My home office is pink.

Besides, my other office binders are all white or black depending on their project contents.

These pink binders are my “DIY” manuals for social media.

— Paula Wethington

All you need in social media is Facebook, right?

As I write this post on what will become my new professional blog, it is August 2015. Facebook has long broken away from its origins as a networking site for college students and is now the “go to” social network for anyone in the news media, business or non-profit world who wishes to reach their fans, reachers and potential customers.

Given the reach and the targeting that is possible with Facebook, and how comfortable people have become to using Facebook for everyday communications with friends and family, it’s been tempting for some to take the easy way out and say: “All I need is Facebook. I don’t need traditional advertising. I don’t need to be on other social networks. I don’t need my own website.”

I’ve heard all that.

A word of caution:

You don’t really own your Facebook page or account. It is free to access. You also can post what you want within the network’s rules. But it is always what some people call “rented space” instead of “owned space.”

That means the status quo can change at any time.

To explain:

The Facebook news feed formula – the complicated calculation of what you actually see when logging in among the friends you have connected to, the groups you join and the pages you like –  is meant to keep people on Facebook.

It’s not written to keep people seeing your content.

When those goals overlap, your Facebook campaign efforts will seem incredibly successful.

When those goals don’t mesh, or Facebook changes its formula based on what it thinks people want to see, your marketing and promotion efforts will not work or will no longer work as expected.

I have hosted or co-hosted numerous brand and project pages since 2010 and have seen this happen first-hand.

A page that I thought would do well, given that the demographics of Facebook users meshed well with the content and theme, stalled out. I could never boost the fan numbers above 500 despite access to timely and interesting content, and monitoring what similar pages were doing.

Another page continued to attract fans months after the project itself wrapped up and my last post was made. I finally did delete that page – it seemed silly to keep it open a year later.

And my signature project, the Monroe on a Budget personal finance website, saw both the highs and lows. When my Facebook fans saw content crossing their Facebook news feed, they went to my site for the latest newspaper columns and public service announcements. When the news feed formula changed in late 2013 and organic reach no longer worked for such a niche topic, page referrals from Facebook to my site fell and with it, my site traffic went down. A fan base of 1,500; with geographic and demographic data that fit my target audience; just could not get the same information out that previously worked fairly well with the organic (aka “free”) traffic.

Do I still recommend Facebook as a news and business marketing strategy?

Absolutely! I’ve seen how much traffic it can drive to a news site; and how fast word can get around when there is a post or photo that people want to share with other people they know.

But I do not recommend Facebook as your only communication with your fans or the public. It just doesn’t work that way.

— Paula Wethington