Keeping us on our toes - Twitter

The best thing about social media is that it keeps us on our toes. Yet the worst thing about social media is that it keeps us on our toes. If you embrace social media, you must be prepared to learn, as well as keeping up to date and in the game.

Companies use platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Flickr, You Tube and Instagram to communicate to their target audience, and these platforms are forever changing. The rules remain the same, yet the boundaries and the means to get the end result, whether that is a sale or to increase brand awareness, are ever moving. So how do companies keep on top of such changing platforms and make sure they are using them to their advantage?

In organisations large enough to have an extensive marketing budget, roles such as Social Media Manager, Editor and Community Manager are appearing as job tiles. However such a luxury is not always the case and therefore the role of managing social media often falls to the marketing department.

At Box PR we manage our own social media pages and we work alongside clients to help to position their pages accordingly and develop their own social media platforms. As the boundaries move we work with our clients to make sure they adapt with it.

We were recently involved in an online seminar led by Twitter. Our philosophy has always been to give a little to receive a little and therefore we use this blog to share some tips so you can get Twitter up and running effectively for you and your organisation.

Here are a few pointers to get you started.

Tone and behaviour:

• Be human
• Be responsive
• Be Flexible

Uses of Twitter:

• Share helpful informative content
• Make it playful, give teasers, jokes and questions to grab your followers attention
• The use of photos and videos will make your tweet more engaging

What is the purpose of being on Twitter? There are over 200 million active users on Twitter, with around 500 million tweets being sent a day (figures according to Twitter CEO Dick Costolo in October 2012). These figures are likely to be higher today as Twitter gains pace and people use it more to interact with friends and their favourite brands.

With such a large number using Twitter your tweets can easily be lost if they are meaningless, so therefore it is important that you have a clear strategy based around your corporate message.

Think about who you connect to and associate yourself with. The whole thought of creating content to keep a constant flow of tweets to your followers can appear quite daunting, but it doesn’t have to. Connect with influencers in your industry and associate yourselves with them. You don’t always have to be a producer you can share news and information others have created that you feel is of interest to your followers.

Things to help you get started:

• Listen and observe. Monitor the conversation around your business and be responsive.
• Find your own voice. Help potential customers relate to your business.
• Plan your content. Just like planning your gifts for Christmas, use resources and assets you already have.
• Create shareable content. Is your content re-tweetable, will it help you reach new audiences?

Don’t be shy, give it a try!

Follow @boxpr_ltd

Looking after your sponsors - Clipper Race Start 13/14

On the 1st September 2013, our client Perkins invited Lou from Box PR to attend the start of the 13-14 Clipper Round the World Yacht Race.

Perkins Marine Power has supplied new engines to the fleet of 12 Clipper 70's who will be taking part in this their first circumnavigation.

On approaching St Katherine's Dock, the place where the fleet have been moored in the week building up to the start, you could sense the atmosphere and apprehension of the crews as they were clearly excited about their adventure, but yet the emotion of leaving loved ones and friends behind was very apparent as the crews were taking to their boats and their homes for the next few weeks and months at sea.

We were welcomed at River Lounge by Clipper for breakfast, tea and coffee with a balcony overlooking the dock area. Here we met fellow sponsors from around the world all cheering on not only their boat but the fleet as a whole. In a very orderly fashion, the first four boats entered the dock ready to embark on their adventure, their they had the opportunity to take in the atmosphere of the 12,000 crowd all clapping, cheering and waving them off, Great Britain, One DLL, Derry-Londonderry-Doire and Qingdao were the first four followed by Invest Africa, Henri LLoyd, Team Garmin, and Mission Performance. Then the final four of Jamaica, PSP Logistics, Old Pulteney and Switzerland to took the dock.

At this point Laura from Perkins Marine and I boarded the sponsors VIP boat where we joined Sir Robin Know-Johnston, a well oil team from Clipper Ventures and other distinguished guests for a trip on board Symphony to watch the fleet sail past under tower bridge and back again before heading out of the Thames for the official start off South End on Monday 2 September.

After the boats had performed for their audience and set off out to sea, we were invited for a sit down meal which was another opportunity to meet other sponsors and learn about how they were looking to get the most for their sponsorship of the race.

This was a fantastic day and a good example of how race organisers can look after their sponsors whilst not letting their presence overshadow the race start.

Good luck to the 12 boats, their skippers and crew, we look forward to following your circumnavigation and welcoming you back into London in July 2014.

Follow the fleets progress on the Clipper website

Is eMail Marketing in decline?

At Box PR we work with our clients on various aspects of their marketing and PR requirements.  When the news is relevant our work includes composing and sending out an eNews to their database. We regularly see readership above 30%, and whilst at first that may not seem much, when you refer to Marketing Week 27th June they suggest 17% is a good readership rate….. 

Without wanting to blow our own trumpet…..we must be doing something right!

Here are the findings below.

E-mail trends

New research suggests that timing, as well as offering an easy way to unsubscribe, are important when maximising the effectiveness of e-mail communications. This study, which was conducted by analytics provider Return Path, is based on the top 50 e-mail senders in the UK by volume. It reveals that the shopping sector accounts for 77.3% of e-mails, with more than 50% of this generated by Amazon and Groupon. In general e-mails sent by brands have a better opening rate (17.3%) than deal aggregators (11.7%). Recommendations are made, including taking into account subject line length and the day of the week. The question of spam is also discussed and top-line findings from the research are included.

Marketing Week, 27 June 2013, pp26-28

Do you send out eNews campaigns? What is your readership rate? We would love to share your views on how to maximise this marketing tool.

If you want to find out more about emailing your database effectively contact us on hello@boxpr.co.uk

To post or not to post

It was pointed out to us the other day that we have not posted on our blog since November 2012…. oops. A year ago, Box PR pledged to do more and “practice what we preach” (see blog post February 2012), and we established Marketing Monday’s when we would share our thoughts, knowledge and (hopefully) expertise.

Whilst we were going great guns to begin with, we started to fizzle out and we got to the point where we were writing things for the sake of writing them……recipe for disaster!

Through effective use of social media and previous connections we discovered the creative and delightfully informative partnership of Sonja Jefferson and Sharon Tanton, who together have written a book Valuable Content. If you haven’t seen this book we highly recommend you track down a copy. This made us review what we were doing with our blog.

We want to earn your attention through creating interesting, useful and therefore ultimately valuable content which will keep you coming back to us. There will be no more empty promises or writing content for the sake up having something on the page, this is just not us. Any content on here we hope you will find useful as a reference now and into the future.

Is there something in particular you want to know more about (Marketing and PR related only please!), then let us know and we can research and provide some feedback to you.

We look forward to blogging more with you in the coming weeks and months. Until then.

Louise & Lou