Social Media Scotland Tips, Dissected

Twitter has some really helpful users, people who are more than willing to sacrifice some of their time to offer up tips and advice to others @tourscotland is such a user. Tourscotland, as the name suggests, runs tours of Scotland.

As part of raising awareness for tours of Scotland @tourscotland tweets with photographs and videos of Scotland. I follow the Twitter account and respect the commitment that Sandy Stevenson puts into the account.

Tourscotland’s Social Media Scotland Tips

It is indeed very social of tourscotland to offer tips on social media. Most of his tips are very valid for everyone, others are specific to the @tourscotland account and a couple I disagree with entirely – sorry Sandy :)

Unfortunately the first point I have is a criticism, but it is one of only a few: The tips given make “social media” and “Twitter” analogous, they are not. Social media also encompasses hundreds if not thousands of other sites and services like Facebook, LinkedIn, Delicious, Eventbrite, Posterous, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Digg, Friendfeed, Tumblr, Twitpic, forums and blogs.

With this initial caveat out of the way, lets take a look at (and revise the subheading to):

Tourscotland’s Twitter Tips

Sound advice for all aspects of life, Twitter should be no different albeit we have less space to express ourselves on Twitter than in most other parts of life.

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This is somewhat specific to those who:

• Do not have a personal brand
• Are targeting, or marketing to, a niche

It is good advice if those criteria apply, but otherwise you don’t need to limit yourself to a niche. Consider for example a recruitment consultant, normally they’ll be wanting to reach a wide spectrum of candidates. @NadinePierce for example uses Twitter very effectively for both work and play.

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Very good advice that all should follow. Ultimately talk about yourself / your business all you want, but if you can’t converse nobody is going to give a flying one.

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Ok. So. There are 2 parts to this one, the first part is nonsense I’m afraid. Not all links you tweet should point to your own content, in fact if they do you’re actually being anti-social. If someone else has created something that might be of interest to your followers you are doing them a disservice by not passing it on.

Giving your followers “real” content I wholeheartedly agree with – never pass on anything that you don’t wholeheartedly endorse yourself, as you will be credited with passing it on.

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The only change I’d make to this is to swap “try not to” for “do not” – it is the equivalent of shouting the exact same sentence over and over, in the street at 4am, on a Tuesday morning. It is anti-social, don’t do it.

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Again, this if anything needs tightening, the “very” is superfluous. Tweeting the same link more than a couple of times is purest spam. Also consider that only tweeting links to your own site is anti-social and spammy. If another site has relevant information tweet a link to them, your followers get some variation and you start to build relationships with others in your niche.

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Tweeting about local information, events and charities really depends on whether or not there is any local relevance to your tweets. Helping others is always a good thing, after all twitter is part of the phenomenon known as social media (with the emphasis on social)

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This is half right, the one singular benefit of the “new” (November 2009) RT is that it no longer requires characters to be free. An RT
now is actually the original tweet with the RTer attached to it as metadata.

[Incidentally, if you look carefully at the TechCrunch page linked above you can spot one of Scotland’s greatest socialmedia minds @mikecoulter in the pic]

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This is exactly the spirit of social media and is something we should all aspire to on Twitter.

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Consistency is good, it gives your potential followers an idea of how visible you will be in their tweet stream. Frequency, however, is not a metric that in itself should be aspired to – if you have nothing to contribute, don’t tweet.

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Non-niche tweets actually show your human side and often make it easier to forge relationships with people who are perhaps more tangential to your business. Besides, social media should have a fun side to it too – it’s ultimately about relationships :)

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Absolutely sterling advice.

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Perhaps the wording of this tip is unfortunate, but I think the sentiment behind it is one I share wholeheartedly. The amount of opportunistic charlatans who take money to “teach” people Twitter is nothing short of ridiculous.

There is space for social media consultants and agencies, but they really need to be made of stronger stuff than simply being able to show you how to set up a twitter profile.

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This is the tip I disagree with most strongly, not for the point itself I may add but, because @tourscotland has, in the past, practiced following / unfollowing / following / unfollowing in order to gain more followers. It’s a widespread practice which even users of the magnitude of @GuyKawasaki do. Of course it is personal choice whether or not you want to do it, but I find it somewhat spammy.

While the number of followers that you have yourself doesn’t really matter, the ratio between followers and following is a crude but good indicator of authority. The higher that ratio is the more likely the twitter account is an authoritative one which gains followers through organic growth due to quality and not due to gaming reciprocal followers.

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With any community, what you get out of it depends on what you put into it, Twitter is no different.

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Also good advice, never be afraid to ask. Know what it is that you don’t know and be sure to add Twitter to your arsenal of answer engines – the intelligence of the crowd is immense, query it.

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Again, sterling advice.

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Sorry, but this is bollocks. This is entirely personal preference.

If you check-in on 4square every time you go to the kettle / urinal then you’re going to wear the patience of your followers, but by all means tweet such trivial stuff too. Everything in moderation as my grandmother used to say.

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This is but one way of using Twitter. It is @tourscotland’s way of creating content to tweet, but it is by no means the only way of doing it. Perhaps your account is one which tweeting a lot of photos would help, perhaps it’s not – you need to look at what works for you. Experiment and learn through your experiences, it’s how the best people in social media learnt.

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Sound advice again, but beware that wefollow composes a tweet which gets sent when you submit the form to complete the sign-up. The same happens if you ever decide to edit your interests. [A wee tip though: you can edit the tweet prior to sending it ;)]

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So, Where Are Burnett’s Social Media Tips?

Well, in part they’re here, in part they’re in other blog posts, in part they’re on my twitter feed and, yes, in part they are paid for by clients. Do I feel guilty about taking money for social media consultancy? No. I am bloody good at what I do as plenty of people who have worked with me will testify to.