And we're on Twitter

TTony

@the_FretBoard.

Just registered atm (by member DCHWhite on our behalf).   How do we start to raise its profile and get followers in?  I am pleased to say that I'm blissfully ignorant in the ways of Twitter ...

I can feel the world being pulled into our arms

digitalscream

OK, this is just a rough idea for a plan...

1 - Put a couple of introductory tweets

2 - Post it in OT, ask everybody to follow, and ask their friends to follow

3 - Everybody post it to their Facebook accounts, get people to follow

4 - Everybody post it to their Twitter accounts, get people to follow

5 - Tweet links to a Just Got Up thread, and a Just Got Home From Work thread religiously, every day

6 - Perhaps give an update on the forum's status - how many we've got signed up etc. Stuff that people (appear to) want to know.

Any other ideas?

TTony

Just moved this from the admin category and invited DCHWhite to the conversation.  'Cos he'll be doing a lot of the work!  Thanks Dan.

@DCHWhite

digitalscream

I should say...the above is just supposed to be a starting point. I'm not trying to mandate anything, 'cos I don't want to get dragged in to actually doing it

bigjon

Followed

TTony

I have an idea for an opening Twitter statement ...

Anyone have any idea how many members the MR forums had?

digitalscream

TTony said:

I have an idea for an opening Twitter statement ...

Anyone have any idea how many members the MR forums had?

144,639 as at July 7th 2013, according to Google's cache.

monquixote

digitalscream said:

144,639 as at July 7th 2013, according to Google's cache.

For reals?

That seems like a lot.

TTony

How;s about ....

 

With the musicradar forum closed 144,639 MR forum members have a new home at theFretboard.co.uk.  Guitarists and bassists - theFretBoard.co.uk. theFB.

 

132 characters is the limit, right?

digitalscream

140 is the limit.

I think it's a bit misleading, that. Not overly bothered, though; after all, if you believe everything you read on Twitter then there are bigger problems than how many members we have

Bucket

Just followed - what I would say is the following (if you'll pardon the pun):

- Get thee a picture! Looks a bit amateurish without

- Perhaps write a little bio to let people know what it's about. Character limit - 140 for tweets, 160 for bios.

stickyfiddle

Honestly, I wouldn't worry too much about twitter unless it's going to be someone's job to tweet regularly. People on there only tend to look at their own feed or searches, rather than clicking on individual twitter pages to read tweets, so unless it's really regularly used it'll get lost

dchwhite

@bucket absolutely This was just a registration, to get a handle as near as I could to the forum name whilst I thought about it. I didn't want to badge it up without talking to the people who did lots of hard work setting this lovely place up, as it seemed a bit presumptious tbh. I see there might now be agreement on a logo, so that can be our picture, and yes, there will be a bio

@TTony that sounds good as an opener. The only thing I didn't want to do was annoy anyone over at MR whilst there remains any chance at all of salvaging the forum content, but your suggestion avoids all that nicely.

@stickyfiddle I'm happy to give it a try, and see if we can interest some more people over here. If after a while, it doesn't seem to be serving a/ its purpose, we can always have a rethink

Today's a bit mad, but I should have chance to do something with it in the morning - I'll post again then when there's something a bit more to look at.

ChristophEar

A common approach for building followers:

- Pick a popular and relevant hashtag like #guitar, find the accounts that tweet using that hashtag, follow them. If they follow back, DM to let them know about the site and ask for their help spreading the word.

- If you have the time and inclination, can also try following their followers, many will see you're a guitar-related account and follow you back.

FWIW I'm not sure this kind of effort is worthwhile. It seems like the Twitter and Facebook accounts should be auxiliary to the site, rather than an active PR channel for finding new members. In fact the idea of a forum site having a Twitter account or Facebook page seems pretty odd to me! This is the place for discussion, so what's the purpose outside of advertising.

I guess these days you need it for the sake of appearances, but just having an auto-bot sending out the title of new posts seems the right kind of usage to me. Convenient for forum members to Like/Follow and may lead to some new members via search discovery. And gives you something to @ mention in the Tweet/FB share links on comments here on-site.

TTony

Thanks for the tips - I know absolutely nothing about Twitter, have never used it, and can't envisage why I ever would ...

For the forum I think it'll be useful for a couple of reasons, although both are only to support this forum.

1. Spreading the word.  Telling people that we're here and encouraging more people to sign-up.  The more people we get, the bigger the reservoir of knowledge and opinion that becomes available to the whole community, the strong (and more persistent) the community becomes.  Rather than advertising, or linking from some high-traffic sites linked to the "leading" mags, we can only use the free word-of-mouth channels.
2. It might give us a channel to broadcast content - or announcements about that content - from here to a wider audience, again using a free channel.  I'm thinking a bit further ahead, but if we end up with a "friends of the forum" type support structure, then having a large Twitter following into which we can broadcast "special offers" from our friends, can only make us more attractive to those potential friends.  Also - again further ahead - if we end up managing to create something like a forum album from on-line collaborations, we can announce it.
3. Whatever the reasons, the sooner we start building the profile, the sooner we'll have a following to do something with!

But, I'm a complete Twitter virgin, so I might be talking complete twitterish.

Mick

Remember to follow your followers back, or you'll find them Un- following you after a while. And quite important, add a link to this site in your twitter Bio.

 

Followed https://twitter.com/GuitaristGuild

dchwhite

OK, I've badged it up (with the logo that someone else made) and posted the biography (that someone else wrote) and tweeted about a couple of recent threads (that other people took time to write), so hopefully you'll all believe I've been very, very busy.

I will try to post something daily, at least M-F (I think any more than that risks being a bit spam-y, but do say if you disagree), and build up whom we follow and so on on the same basis; hopefully it will prove useful, but if you have any comments, please let me know.

TTony

Thanks Dan.

How's about something along the lines of ...

After just 4 days of being live, theFretBoard.co.uk has had over 120,000 page hits.  Popular?  Just a bit ... the UK's new #1 site for guitars and bassists - theFB

stickyfiddle

dchwhite said:

OK, I've badged it up (with the logo that someone else made) and posted the biography (that someone else wrote) and tweeted about a couple of recent threads (that other people took time to write), so hopefully you'll all believe I've been very, very busy.

I will try to post something daily, at least M-F (I think any more than that risks being a bit spam-y, but do say if you disagree), and build up whom we follow and so on on the same basis; hopefully it will prove useful, but if you have any comments, please let me know.

You can definitely afford to tweet more than once a day! My feed has 381 people I follow atm, most of those tweet loads of times a day, so one tweet will only be one in a couple of thousand per day. If there are interesting threads posted on the twitter feed they might get retweeted by followers which can drive more traffic here. In any case, peope can always unfollow if they think it's too much, but 5 to 10 tweets a day would be fine once we get a bit busier with new threads. You can always tweet about other guitar-related stuff too, retweet big announcements from shops, bands, guitar companies, that sort of thing.

I wouldn't worry too much about following-back everyone who follows, but I would go and follow all the other big guitar-based accounts; manufacturers, shops, musicradar (lol!) etc. There's nothing wrong with tweeting @ those guys and asking for a retweet. The key to getting and keeping followers is to put interesting content on there, so people think it's a helpful thing to follow. 

I've done a lot of twitter in the past so I'm happy to help out running the twitter if that'd help.

Lixarto

Followed.

monquixote

I think you can get away with tweeting a few times a day. It's when people get into tweeting 30-50 times a day that I unfollow them.