Twitter Best Practices for Business Owners

New to Twitter? Been around for a while, but need some tips on best practices? Here are thirteen top do's and don'ts for wedding businesses who use Twitter:

DO: Fill out your name, location, website and bio. This helps people know who you are and what you are about at a glance. Including a link to your website or blog also allows people to find out more about you, subscribe to your blog, sign up for your newsletter, and generally become addicted to what you have to offer.  If Twitter shuts its doors or loses popularity (and it will at some point, as these things all do), you will lose that base of fans unless they are engaged with you elsewhere as well (and no, Facebook doesn't count, for the same reasons). 

DON'T: Only tweet or re-tweet (RT) about you or your company. We do want to hear about you, your successes, and what you have to offer. We don't want to hear about it twenty times a day. 

DO: Show some of your personality. The point of social media is to interact with the people behind the company, so show us who you are.  Determine boundaries you are comfortable with of course, but don't set up such strict walls that no one gets to know the real you. If you are only using Twitter to talk strictly business, it is probably not the best medium for you.

DON'T: Lock or make your company's Twitter page private. People are much less likely to follow you if they have to be "approved". You can't change human nature - the fear of rejection is very real, so don't actively let it get in the way of your marketing and building a group of loyal supporters. Plus, when your page is locked, it makes people think your company has something to hide or that you are gossiping about all of your clients.

DO: Use a photo of yourself for your avatar and not one of your logo. We want to see who you are. People will buy from people they like and trust, and studies show that trust levels increase dramatically when people can connect a face with a name. An exception: if you have several people updating for your company or organization and there is not just one person twittering. 

DON'T: Talk about your clients in a negative light, or share anything about them that could be in breach of an NDA or their privacy. You may be excited that it is the largest floral budget you've ever worked with, but your clients may not want how much they are spending broadcast to the entire world.

DO: Respond and engage with the community, even when they are not talking about you or your company. The keyword in social media is social, however many people who are using it are anything but.

DON'T: Use Twitter as a place to vent non-stop. If you are going to vent, be careful that you don't cross the line into libel and defamation. You can be sued for what you say on Twitter and other social media platforms.

DO: Personalize your Twitter background. There are a multitude of options (your brand's colors, your logo, photos of your work, extended contact info, etc), so be sure to make your brand consistent in this area as well. Quick note: if you are uploading wedding photos for the background, please feature only YOUR work.

DON'T: Only tweet with people you think are the influencers or the popular ones.  If some of those people are your friends, that's great, and you should still talk to them, but just as it would be rude to walk into a cocktail party and make a beeline for the most lucrative nametag title, the same is true on twitter.  Twittering only with the perceived influencers is not a good strategy; it's rude.

DO: Consider your audience if you are going to do a series of informational tweets. A Twitter series can be effective, but many people use them ineffectively. If the majority of your followers are wedding professionals, posting wedding planning tips for brides is going to mainly fall on deaf ears.

DON'T: Pretend to be someone you're not, in any form. If your husband or intern is the one twittering, then tell everyone that it is someone else and don't pretend that it is you posting. Gen Xers and Millennials widely view ghost twittering as lying, not as an effective outsourcing strategy.  Do NOT violate the trust you have worked so hard to establish with your audience by not being up front about who is posting. 

DO: Run your company according to your business and marketing plans, and not according to what other people are perceived to be doing. It's great that Sally Wedding Planner is 90% booked for 2012. What she's not telling you in those 140 characters is that it's all day-of coordination for which she charges less than $1000.  The 700 emails that are keeping her sooo busy? 650 are spam, Google Alerts or special offers from trade magazines. Don't fall into the trap of comparing apples to oranges; relax and just do your thing.

What is some of your advice for a company using Twitter?



Originally published October 2009

Interview with Marcy Blum

I originally published this interview with celebrity eventiste Marcy Blum last February and wanted to rerun it as her insights are just as applicable today as they were a year ago. You can follow Marcy on Twitter here.

This weekend I sat down with Marcy to chat more about what she's learned over the years and what she thinks about the wedding industry . . . here is that conversation:

Liene: You've been in business for 22 years and do very high-end events, why did you decide to get involved with social media?
Marcy: There are several people I respect, including you, who were talking about it and once I wrapped my head around it, it made perfect sense to me . . . especially since I'm trained in speaking in sounds bites, so 140 characters on Twitter is perfect. Plus I'm a yenta; I like to know what everyone's doing all the time, so it's perfect. It's like yenta-ism for the new millennium.

Liene: How has the wedding industry changed since you started?
Marcy: Certainly there's a lot more people planning events.

Liene: Do you feel it's too saturated?
Marcy: Well of course I do. Social events in particular are a very intimate experience so there should certainly be a wide variety of people who do this and different aspects for different types of clients. What I am sort of unnerved by though is all the people who are now doing it. It's like the old saying: anybody who planned their own wedding became a planner. Now it's anyone who has walked by a wedding is a wedding planner. It's a joke. It's a nice business and if you're very good at it and work very hard, with luck you can support yourself. But it's certainly not a gold mine, and I don't know why people think it is.

Liene: How do you handle competition?
Marcy: Not well.

Liene: Do you want to elaborate?
Marcy: I try without always succeeding, to take the high road, particularly if a prospective client asks me about a competitor. I won't ever throw someone under the bus. It's not good for anyone and I think it's bad form. I have a lot of competitors that I respect and hang out with and consider them friends. We try to help each other. Most of us have been doing it for a while, and we know that there's not one job that is going to make or break your life. So you have a little bit of perspective on it and it makes it easier to be less hysterical about competition.

Liene: How long did it take you to learn that and get to that place?
Marcy: A long time. And there are still people who I lose a job to that will absolutely piss me off for all sorts of reasons. My colleagues behave so gracefully that they sort of set the standard and shame me into being decent. I became friends with Ann and Nicky because they were so nice to me. Several of us had proposed to do Billy and Katie Joel's wedding and when I got the job they called me and said congratulations and they thought it was the perfect job for me. That's pretty impressive.

Liene: What's the biggest lesson you learned in your first year as a wedding planner?
Marcy: I always knew it was going to be hard work. I came with a restaurant and catering background so I wasn't surprised by the amount of work. I was surprised though by the breadth of knowledge that I had to acquire - that it wasn't enough to know food and style. You really have to have a working knowledge of tents, etiquette and protocol, lighting and sounds and music and it goes on endlessly. You have to really know at least a modicum of so many different disciplines that I was shocked.

You can't just call the best tent company and ask them to do it, otherwise you're just a glorified general contractor. It's really about being good enough to actually collaborate with these vendors, not just calling them up and booking them - everyone is bringing something to the table. Brides are more knowledgeable now, they can make the same phone calls now that you can. You have to bring something to the table, it's definitely not about your database. You really have to have a sense of how to do it, what makes it exciting, interesting, specific and special. Anyone can find out who did anything, especially with the Internet. It's like saying that once you find out who the meat purveyor is for a great restaurant you can replicate the meal. You can't, that's just the beginning.

Liene: In this past year?
Marcy: The power of social media for sure, both in extending one's brand and also learning about other people's businesses, thoughts, feelings, opinions and worldviews. It's the perfect way for someone with extreme ADD to learn stuff on a daily basis without committing to textbook research. And how it's going to phase out all but the most talented, most connected, most insightful publicists. Publicity is not about pitching Millie; it's about creating a plan specific to your client and it's not just hits for hits' sake. Publicity is also not about the publicists and I think social media will help make that field better by only leaving room for the best.

How Your Twittering Is Costing You Sales

If you work in the luxury wedding market, then it is highly probable that your target bride has a post-graduate degree.

As this smart and well-educated bride does her research for her wedding vendors, she comes across your blog and website. It is clean, engaging and the copy well-written. So far, so good. Then she clicks over from your blog to your Twitter page. The majority of your updates are full of text speak: U, R, B, 2, C, ur, thx, gr8, lolz.

You've just lost her business and you will probably never know it because she won't contact you to tell you that she had found your site at all.

Srsly.

The disconnect between the brand you promote on your website and blog and the brand you promote on Twitter conveys a lack of professionalism when it comes to your daily habits. People aren't going to trust you with thousands of dollars of their wedding budget if they can't trust you to act professionally when it comes to the small details. Even if the bride can't put her finger on why she is choosing your competitor over you, her subconscious still knows that something with your brand is not quite right (read Malcolm Gladwell's Blink for more on this).

Everything you put online is a reflection of your brand. Be sure that your social media plan is cohesive and is telling the same story across the board.



Originally published October 2009