The Final Countdown…

Less than a month to go before I launch my new website and services and am able to devote my time fully to the Purple Dog Network.

It will have been a tough 6 months but without doubt one of the most rewarding of my life and it only gets better from here!

So what do we have in store for the future? I have to admit that i have taken my foot off the gas just a little over the past month or so in order to take a step back and focus on the future.

The Vision for Purpledognet is still the same:

To make twitter work as a cost effective marketing tool for hundreds of thousands of businesses across the UK.

Twitter is different from other marketing media out there in a number of very important ways:

1. Immediacy – you can reach thousands of potential customers within a few seconds if you get your message and network right.

2. Interraction and engagement – your customers and potential customers can give you direct and immediate feedback which can help you to develop your products and put right any mistakes

3. Viral nature – Your sphere of influence is not just limited to your customers or friends. They tell their contacts, who tell their contacts and so it goes on and you don’t have to wait for them to meet in the pub or at the coffee machine.

This is why I think twitter is the most exciting marketing tool available to small businesses at the moment and well worth the investment needed to get your network and reputation established.

By a combination of trial and error, luck and intuition, we have developed some very simple strategies for success on twitter which we think would be valuable to other businesses and can’t wait to share these through our new twitter consultancy service.

There are already plenty of companies out there who can “do your social media for you” but we think twitter works best when you represent your company yourself and interract personally with your customers and potential customers.

That’s why we would like to work alongside you, sharing our experience, helping you to develop marketing strategies and helping out a bit to get you started.

We are one of only a handful of specialists on twitter and as such we hope we have something unique to offer you at very affordable prices.

If you are interested in finding out more, you can DM me on twitter or leave a comment below and I will be in touch.

I look forward to some exciting and worthwhile partnerships in the months to come!

Tell us what you think…

We are busily working away at our new website which will be launched along with our new services on 1st December.

Over the months since we launched the Purple Dog Network in June, we have received loads of fantastic comments about what a great service we are offering and how the service has specifically helped businesses to grow on Twitter.

What I would like to be able to do is to capture some of those comments on our website to illustrate the power of the network and the positive benefits it has for members.

I would be very grateful if you could spare the time to put together a few sentences to give your thoughts on the network, how it has helped you and why other businesses should join.

You can do this by adding a comment to this post or by sending me a DM on twitter.

Your support is very much appreciated!

 

How do I get promoted by @purpledognet?

This is the most common question we get asked by new members who have seen our tweets promoting the lucky few and are wondering how they can be one of them.

There are four main ways in which you can get promoted as follows:

1. Enter our #purplebiz competition

Every day, one lucky business is chosen to be featured as our business of the day. The feedback we get is that this is a great way to increase your following, make new contacts and can also result in leads and business.

All you have to do to enter is to retweet our #purplebiz tweets. We have a series of lists which track retweets and gradually promote entrants from one star to three stars. Once you reach three stars, you are in with a chance of winning. If you keep retweeting, your turn will come but you need to be patient as there are over 100 businesses on the waiting list.

2. Sponsor the network for a day

Our #PDNSponsor of the day slots for October are currently on sale for £20 for a day of promotion. For this you get at least 6 tweets mentioning you to our followers plus, if you use the hashtag, we will also retweet you when we can.

Again, the feedback from sponsors has been excellent and we already have sponsors coming back for a second or third slot.

If you retweet our #PDNSponsor, you can also be in with a chance of a shout-out for your business.

3. Just ask!

We already receive 50+ requests each day from our members for Retweets and Mentions for them and their friends and contacts. We try to do this for as many as possible if we think the tweet will be of interest to our followers. We particularly try to support new members, businesses with special offers, or those who are trying to reach a milestone such as 200, 500 or 1,000 followers.

4. Join in with one of our initiatives

Each month, the network has a theme and this month it is #PDNewbies. We set up a list of those participating and choose a selection of these to promote each day. We are always on the look out for new ideas so if you can think of something which will help to promote our members, we would love to hear from you.

There are also a few ways not to get promoted as follows:

1. If you don’t have a profile picture or it is not clear from your bio that you are a UK Business, I will not promote you.

2. Sending me a Direct Message asking for a RT or mention – it is much easier for me to RT a tweet which mentions @purpledognet than having to hunt around for a relevant tweet to retweet!

3. Sending a tweet which just says “please can I have a RT” or is not clear what message you want to send to my followers.

4. Asking for RTs too often or sending the same message several times. I am very clear that I don’t want to spam my followers with too many messages so will ignore repeat messages.

We really hope that as many businesses as possible will get value from the network and that they will follow and promote each other too. We already have a very strong and friendly network of UK businesses and are looking forward to building on this over the coming months and years.

Many thanks for your continued support!

 

 

The Power of Twitter Lists!

Those of you who have been following me for a while will know that I am a great fan of twitter lists but from what I can gather, very few of you really use them or get what all the fuss is about.

One of the things I am hoping to persuade you of during #PDChallenge is how useful lists can be both for finding new people to follow and for managing your own followers.

The first question is what is a twitter list and where do you find them:

Anyone can create a list and it is very simple to do. You may well be on several lists yourself without even realising it. A list is just a collection of twitter accounts gathered together for a variety of different reasons. Some people create lists based on sectors, others based on people they interact with or maybe just people with big followings who are influential.

To find out which lists you (or anyone else) are on, go to your profile page and you will see menus for tweets, following, followers and listed.If you click on “listed” it will show you all the public lists you are on. If you click on a list, you will just see the tweets of the people on that list. You can also click on following to see the accounts in the list or followers to see who is following the list.

But how does that help? Well firstly, it can be useful to find people who are like you. For example, I am on a list called “Business Networking” which could help me to find other networks. It could also help you to find people who are like your best customers or favourite tweeters. Just check which lists they are on and see who else is on the list.

As you would expect, I have created plenty of lists which you might find useful as follows:

SBS Entrants     Shows businesses who recently entered Theo Paphitis SBS competitions

Purple Dog FF  Shows recommendations made by PDN members through FF

PDChallenge     Shows businesses taking part in the PDChallenge

UK Business of the day  Shows previous #Purplebiz winners

And of course the #Purplebiz star ratings lists so you can see how many stars you have!

To find my lists, you need to go to my full profile,  click on lists and choose “lists by Purpledognet”

To create your own lists, you can click on lists from your home page and click on “create a list”. Give it a helpful name and a description and decide whether you want it to be public or private. The question is are you doing it just for your benefit, or could it be useful to other people.

Lists are particularly helpful as you increase the number of people you are following. When you first start out, you may try to read every tweet in your timeline like you would on facebook and when you are following 10 people this is probably fine. Bus as you start following more people, this gets more and more difficult until if you are not careful, you can become a slave to twitter – I certainly did.

There may be times when you have half an hour to scan your timeline but you can’t be on twitter all day and there may be people whose tweets you don’t want to miss. To add someone to your list, just go to their profile, click on the head icon and choose “add to list” You can then choose which of your lists you want to add them to.

You may also want to use lists to divide the people you follow into groups and you may want to only look at the tweets from a particular group, ie by region or sector or even based on how many followers they have.

You can be very creative with lists as I hope I have proved and the more you use them the more you will see the power of them.

I have also found that they can be very time consuming to create so think carefully about how you want to use them and how you are going to keep them up to date.

Finally, I would like to tell you about a very useful app called http://www.formulists.com This allows you to create a wide variety if different types of lists which will update automatically. This can be helpful for example to track your most recent followers so you can get to know them or  to identify people who are not following you back or have not tweeted recently. It can also help you to create lists of potential future followers or of people you interact with regularly.

I really hope that has given you a brief insight into how I use lists and how you could use them too. If you are serious about growing your business on twitter, you really need to get to understand the power of twitter lists!

 

 

 

 

Success story: Little Big Sports

Today we have another success story from one of our members who has benefited hugely from investing time and effort in building their twitter profile.

Many thanks to Katie from Little Big Sports for the following post:

Twitter was something I approached with trepidation. I knew that it had the potential to create important word of mouth but on my first few outings I had no idea how to use it and was bemused and confused by all the acronyms!  Once I plucked up the confidence to properly dip my toe into the Twitter water I quickly began to see the value. It now plays an important part in my life and that of my business, Little Big Sports.

Over the last six months I have interacted with many other mums in business. They have been hugely supportive as at times running a new business and being a Mum can be very challenging. The common cause of being a Mum and an independent retailer brings many of us together. As a result I have benefited from a surge of retweeting, positive feedback and I have been featured on several blogs which has driven traffic to my website as well as gaining me many new Twitter and Facebook followers.

Twitter has enabled me to develop informal relationships with clubs and coaching networks. Over a few months many have gone on to become part of my affliate network. I am not sure many would have agreed to do so if I had approached them by phone out of the blue.

I have found several new suppliers through Twitter and been approached by many. Some of these I would not have found through more conventional means.

All of these factors would have made the hours (to my husband’s irritation!) on Twitter worthwhile.  The icing on the cake, however, has been the endorsement I have received from two very high profile business people.

I was selected by Theo Paphitis as a Small Business Sunday (#SBS) winner on the 8th May 2011.  This is his weekly twitter feature that attracts hundreds of entries and is seen by his 145,000 followers.
It not only gave my business huge credibility but it increased the visitors to www.littlebigsports.co.uk http://www.littlebigsports.co.uk   by 200% over the following week. It also gave me a great PR platform including a two page interview in a very well respected local magazine, So Tunbridge Wells.

Just last week,  I was delighted to be chosen by a Jacqueline Gold on her
“Women on Wednesday” (#WOW) feature. She described it as “the toughest week yet for judging #WOW entries”. She went on to tweet “Great website offering sports equipment aimed at under 12′s. Lots of info about sizes and equipment needed – well done”. Not only a great confidence boost but again this has resulted in a surge of traffic and twitter followers as well as another potential interview but this time in a local newspaper.

Having these ‘business endorsements’ has without doubt driven sales as well as significantly increasing my conversion rate.

So many, many reasons to embrace twitter. Not forgetting that it is great fun!

Many thanks to Katie for sharing her Twitter story with us. If you would like to feature on my blog, please get in touch via DM.

 

Take the PD Challenge

Do you ever feel like no-one is listening to you on twitter or wonder how some people seem to have so many followers?

I’m going to let you into a little twitter secret:  The fastest way to grow your follower count is to find carefully chosen tweeps and follow them. Do you follow back your followers because you think it is polite to do so? Well chances are they will too!

But how do you find the right tweeps to follow and what should you be looking for when you choose tweeps to follow?

Well that is what the PDChallenge is all about. All through August, we will be giving you hints and tips to help you to find new accounts to follow and we will also be recommending some of our members for you to follow.

The challenge is free and to join in, you just have to make a commitment to find and follow 10 new tweeps every day through the month. Make a note of your follower numbers at the beginning of the month and check them again at the end. You will be amazed how much you have grown in just one month.

Even if you are going away, you can always follow a few extra before you go and catch up when you return.

38 business have signed up already and I am hoping that at least 100 will join in once we get started. Even if you all just follow each other, that will give you a pretty good start.

If you drop me a tweet to let me know you are taking part, I will add you to my list so the other participants can follow you once we get started!

Let’s make August a great month for UK Business on twitter. Join in and give your twitter account a boost!

 

 

Twitter success stories

We are on the look out for twitter success stories to publish on our blog. We would really like to hear from you if you are making twitter work for you as a marketing tool.

We are particularly interested in hearing from you if we at purpledognet have played a part in that success either through our business of the day slot or just more generally.

The piece below is from Kirsten at wedding helper UK, explaining how twitter has worked for her and her business

I joined Twitter in October but didn’t have a clue what I was doing and actually didn’t tweet that much at all. It was meeting other tweeters in January that I was encouraged to get on board, try it as it really was the way forward in promoting businesses. In May this year, after hearing about various tweet ups around the country, I thought it would be great to meet other wedding businesses in the South West as I knew there were lots of small businesses out there, often working from home without the chance to meet others & have a drink! So Bristol held it’s first ever wedding tweet up at Goldbrick House who are a beautiful & contemporary venue in the centre of Bristol. The first tweet went out straight away and 5 weeks later over 35 wedding tweeps turned up to enjoy a glass of bubbly, canapes and the company of other wedding tweeps. It was a lovely evening & by popular demand the 2nd tweet up has been organised by myself at Goldbrick House on Weds 7th September. I have a feeling word will have spread & this one will be bigger & better than ever!! I am totally amazed at the power of Twitter & have made some amazing new friends.
The wedding reporter wrote a great report about the evening so have a read!!
http://theweddingreporter.co.uk/2011/05/20/team-weddings-and-tweeters-southwest/

Thanks Kirsten for your contribution!