Twitter is coming to speak with members of the Social Media Leadership Forum about brand best practice tips for joining the conversation.

We are naturally all looking forward to hearing from Twitter in person.

If you are not a member of the Social Media Leadership Forum and would like to be, so that you can participate in this session with your peers and others that we are organizing, then please get in touch: justin.hunt@itsopen.co.uk

The Social Media Leadership Forum is based on the principles of ‘cooperative intelligence’. By joining you can tap into the ideas and experiences of your peers, to help enhance your social media strategies internally and externally for the good of your whole business.

We’re bombarded with advice on how to have a successful and effective social media strategy. But sometimes, it’s the simple common sense advice that really hits home.

The below infographic from PRMarketing.com outlines the five basic steps for social media success.

1. Be Active – Engage with your users and start the conversations.
2. Be Interesting – Says it all really!
3. Be Humble – Don’t copy other social media strategies, create your own based on basic concepts.
4. Be Unprofessional – Chat to your fans in a relaxed, friendly manner.
5. Be Honest – Admit it when you make a mistake

via

When in the market for a new car, electrical item, holiday or a meal out, how often do you turn to the internet for advice? With social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, and search engines like Google, a recommendation, review or product comparison is just a type and a click away.

The infographic above is an interesting one for demonstrating the influence the internet now has on our buying behaviours. The following points were particularly interesting:

• 20% of social consumers use Facebook to research products at least once a week.
• Facebook, YouTube and Review Sites have the most influence on shoppers. Interestingly, Twitter, Blog Posts and Facebook Comments feature in the bottom five influences. Considering how often many of us use Twitter to crowdsource, and blog posts to get an honest review of products, I’m surprised to see these rank lower than online ads and news articles.
• After online interaction, 31% of people are promoted to purchase, 20% are prompted to recommend but 26% take no action.

Overall, the general message of this infographic is that a successful online marketing strategy can’t just be about Facebook and Twitter. While these ‘owned’ methods help, search (Google etc.) and earned methods (ratings and review sites and blog posts etc.) are just as important.

Twitter’s Jack Dorsey explains how he organises his busy schedule into themes… Short and useful.