The Importance Of Thanksgiving In Social Media

Regardless of whether you are in the United States, celebrate Thanksgiving as a holiday or not, its role in social media marketing is eternally connected. Not the way you might think. The Pilgrims didn’t use twitter and there is no social media turkey destined to be on anyone’s table this year.

Effective social media marketing should come from a spirit of thanksgiving, lower case t. A sense of gratitude and showing thanks makes connections and relationships that cannot be accomplished using any other type of marketing. Conversing with your customers and prospects is a given, but always being grateful for their shares, comments and likes is where many big brands fail miserably.

Our experience as a social media marketing agency, and now a social media software company has shown over and over that consistently responding to your fans and follower connections yields incredible results. The overlooked portion of “engagement” is often the thanksgiving part. Always showing gratitude to your audience for their sharing, involvement and promotion of your social accounts and brand. We are hyper focused on this at Bundle Post. Both our company accounts and my personal accounts always thank those that share, retweet or like our content.

The biggest challenge with doing this at higher volumes is not simply the time required, but doing it with a true grateful heart. For us, this is easy, as we have this true authentic belief from the top down within our company. We truly do care. For other brands or agencies handling a clients’ social media, this is apparently a challenge. The biggest offenders are the major brands with the biggest followings, but small business has a lot to learn here as well.

At this point I suspect some of you reading this are thinking “Respond and thank everyone, every time?” The answer is yes. If you ignore people in your office or retail establishment when they buy something or comment about how great something was, do you think they’ll come back? If someone refers you to a friend for a business connection and you ignore them, do you think they will do that again?

Here is a cycle I have noticed when doing this for ourselves, as well as previously for other brands.

Following this simple cycle will ensure that you do not ignore your audience, while building relationships and reducing the time it takes to do both. Consistency is key here. Make a commitment to do it and be consistent for best results.

By Robert Caruso
@fondalo
http://fondalo.com
Founder/CEO – Bundle Post

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Your Social Media Fake Follower Attack FAILED – What To Do If It Happens To You

Last Sunday morning seemed like any other. I got up, pressed the on button on the coffee maker and awaited my normal rapid and lengthy infusion of coffee bliss as I started up the laptop in the office. I moved to the family room so I could hear if the baby boy woke up and began to open my normal and numerous tabs that are always running when I am in the pilot seat.

As usual I started in Hootsuite, checking follows and mentions, then migrated to counts from overnight. WHAT? I went from 48,176 followers to nearly 75,000 followers. Alarm bells sounded as I stared at it, my mind racing…

Someone has purchased followers for my Twitter account. Clearly this is an attempt to discredit my solid reputation in the industry. Who could have done such a thing, I wondered?

Knowing I have no enemies in this business, there is only one single person that has any motivation to do this to me. Can it be proven? No, so we will not worry about the who and simply move to what YOU need to know if some crazed bully, freak does this to you or your brand, or if a client of yours happens to buy some twitter followers to “help you” in your social media marketing efforts of their brand.

Before we cover how to handle these two scenarios, let me first answer a question I know some of you are thinking…

How is it even possible for someone to purchase followers for another persons Twitter account?

Trust me it is all too simple. Just take a look at the tons of fake followers on the Presidential candidates Twitter accounts using the Status People’s Faker App. Do you think these two campaigns are dumb enough to purchase followers? Of course not, their many emotionally charged supporters are doing it on their behalf, to either discredit the other side or to make their candidate appear more popular.

Regardless, Twitter does NOT allow purchasing of fake followers. So no company selling such followers would ever be allowed access to the twitter API for their product. Therefore, all that is required to purchase followers is your credit card and the Twitter name of the account you wish to buy followers for. No validation of ownership, no required login to the effected Twitter account. Nothing.

In the case of influential social media professionals, they know better than to buy fake followers. Anyone in this business that speaks at events, consults brands or manages other clients social media programs that actually know what they are doing, would never buy or leave purchased followers on their account. That shows a complete incompetence. In fact, I have heard the “I’ve been hacked excuse” by such fraudulent social media experts, in order to cover up their fake follower purchases. But let’s say that occurred (even though it’s hogwash), the question remains, why have you not removed them. Why are you falsely inflating your community size? Are you a liar, a fraud or are you just incompetent? Not too many other choices.

Enough of the rant… Here are the steps you need to take if your account has been falsely pumped up with purchased followers on Twitter:

1) Visit ManageFlitter and login

2) Make sure you’re in the Unfollow menu at the top of the page.

3) Choose “Fake Followers” on the left side.

4) Click on “Fast Select” to be able to select 100 at a time.

5) Drag the cursor across the icons to choose 100.

6) Click on “Force 100 to Unfollow You”

7) Click on the next page # button.

8) Repeat until there are no other fake followers found.

In less than a few hours I was all cleaned up and back to normal. Here’s my faker report I pulled before this occurred, anticipating this might happen.

So my message to the sick individual that wasted their money in an attempt to make me look bad, I say nice try. I am pleased to know you wasted what little money you have. You not only didn’t accomplish what you wanted to, you made my Sunday even better through the support and love shown to me by many. I am a social media professional and would NEVER leave fake followers in my Twitter community to appear influential. Why are you?

My message to the brand or individual social media user, don’t purchase fake followers on Twitter in order to look influential. You will be caught by someone eventually and only ruin your brand and reputation. If you are harassed by someone, or your client has purchased followers that you need to get removed, you now know the process, tool and steps to do so quickly.

Robert M. Caruso
@fondalo
http://fondalo.com
Founder/CEO – Bundle Post